Blame Me

I am a white Southern male. It is all my fault.

What caused this epiphany?

An opinion piece by Michael Lind titled "How The South Skews America" in Politco. The subtitle says, "We'd be less violent, more mobile and in general more normal if not for Dixie".

I wish I could say the article gets better, but it doesn't. Think of all of the non-cool things about America and add a quarter cup of ick and you have The American South.

Mr. Lind says, "The United States would be much less exceptional in general, and in particular more like other English-speaking democracies such as Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were it not for the effects on U.S. politics and culture of the American South."  Yup, if it wasn't for Bubba, we would be just like New Zealand. Yay!

In the next paragraph he sniffs, "I don’t mean this in a good way. A lot of the traits that make the United States exceptional these days are undesirable, like higher violence and less social mobility. Many of these differences can be attributed largely to the South." Like the higher violence that can be found in the iconic Southern city of Chicago, Illinois.

He continues, "As we learned after the slaughter last month in Charleston, S.C., some deluded Southerners still pine for secession from the Union."  And some deluded writers seek to tag an entire region of the country for the act of one sociopath.

Oh, that's not all, not by a long shot. Lind says, "Minus the South, the rest of the U.S. probably would be more like Canada or Australia or Britain or New Zealand—more secular, more socially liberal, more moderate in the tone of its politics and somewhat more generous in social policy. And it would not be as centralized as France or as social democratic as Sweden."   Note the word probably. This just a wild guess that we would be like that blessed Canada.  He really does not know but it is just a hunch since nobody in any another region of the country acts as goofy as a Southerner.

But don't think Lind is Bubba-phobic. He adds this sentence to give him objective credibility: "As a fifth-generation Texan, and a descendant of Southerners back to the 1600s, I don’t want to encourage lurid stereotypes of a monolithic South."  Of course not. Why would we ever doubt you?

He says "The states of the former Confederacy include ethnic minorities like Louisiana Cajuns and Texas Germans, along with African Americans. And the dominant conservatives in the South have always been challenged from within the ranks of the white community by populists, liberals and radicals."  Yeah, we got some cool people like Broudreaux and all of them, but nothing like those Texas Germans.

Lind appears to be a self loathing Bubba.

The rest of the article is a hashing out of so-so to so-what statistics with conclusions that really don't necessarily mean what Lind says they mean. For example, he says, "White Southerners are more likely than white northerners to respond to insults with increased testosterone and aggression, according to social scientists" but doesn't bother to quote the "social scientists" or how the "social scientists" would know. His next sentence:  "According to the FBI in 2012, the South as a region, containing only a quarter of the population, accounted for 40.9 percent of U.S. violent crime."  It would be nice to know actually how much of this "violent" crime was due to insults that increased testosterone and aggression in Bubba and not, oh, just to pick something out of the sky, a drug deal gone bad.

His political history is a little spotty in my opinion. He says, "More recently, the country-club Republican supporters of Barry Goldwater and John Connally have been swamped in Southern Republican parties by a wave of working-class white Southerners who are heirs to paranoid and sullen Dixiecrat conservatism, not sunny and optimistic Goldwater-Reagan conservatism."  One: Barry Goldwater was never a country-club Republican. Two: when John Connally actually ran for something as a Republican, he got a grand total of one delegate to the 1980 Republican Convention. Three: it is hard to imagine a similar opinion piece written in 1964 referring to Goldwater as "sunny".

Basically, Lind believes that The South is one gigantic stick in the mud because of white Southerners. We white Southerners didn't support the transformational Barack Obama because we were clinging to our guns and Bibles. Not that we might have some legitimate disagreements. Are you kidding me? It is because all of us crackers are issued Klan cards at birth.

I wish Lewis Grizzard was around and could have read this article. I wonder what he would say?  "Sumbitch" is my guess.