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Monday, November 16, 2020

We Are All Southerners Now

When I was growing up in Ohio, the South began at the banks of the Ohio river. Below that muddy line, everyone knew, there lived a different breed of backward and uneducated people with lazy minds and even lazier language skills. You could have contempt for them, a privilege I indulged from time to time. I personally learned this contempt from two main sources. 

The first was from the television. Any discerning youngster could see that denigrating Southerners was the daily fare of the national news. Nothing very good was ever said about that corner of America. TV reporters were more polite then than they are now, but even back in the day, there was something both explicitly and implicitly New York–ish about the evening news. New York was where the networks lived. The South was a place reporters visited after they had prepared themselves by reporting from a war zone or a third-world country for a while. It was a land where police dogs were set loose on black children and liberal activists as a matter of course. Where obese and narrow-minded sheriffs refought the Civil War from their beat-up cruisers. Where nothing was ever produced to the country's general account but brutish oppression and inbred misery. This was the South I saw on television in the late sixties and early seventies. This was the South that television invented. 
-Rurik

26 comments:

  1. Ohio??? Anything north of the Louisiana/Arkansas border is yankees

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    1. I'm right on US 90 and the Intercoastal Waterway so I guess I'm good 👍
      JD

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  2. An entertaining read is Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

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    1. Vance's book is a great read, as autobiography and cultural perspective. For the history, well documented, try Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by Jim Webb. It was fascinating to learn where my redneck roots came from. And it gave me a view of the Civil War that I've heard nowhere else.

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    2. Yep, I’m from East Tennessee, and I had a lot of lightbulbs go off while reading Webb’s book. “Oh, so that’s why we do the things we do.”

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  3. It is amazing how reality differs from what we know. We've been lied to our entire lives.

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  4. Even this Michigan born Damn Yankee learned to love the South and lived in Alabama for 14 years and now, living in Idaho wants to go back and am in the spring, miss me some ol' fat catfish and pulled pork and grits!

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    1. I am a lifelong Michigan resident. Never did figure out if it is a Michigander or a Michiganian. But the state is just not the same. I live half way up the mitten,right on Lake Michigan,and the wildlife and the plain beauty of our area are just about unbeatable.
      But the Detroit metro area and the rest of that south east part of the state, with it's shall we say, minority population, tend to vote Democrat, and since there are so many there, it is hard to overcome the numbers. We have done well, and I think that this time Trump actually did win, and so did John James, who was running to beat Gary Peters for Senator. James is a veteran,a businessman, and seems to be destined for some big things, if he can get some real help from the POS Republican party.

      pigpen51

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  5. American by birth, Southerner by Grace of God.

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  6. Ohio, weren't thet populated by the shit what run off the mountains of West Virginny?

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    1. Dunno, but I saw quite a few booger eatin' West Virginians invading Gahanna in the 60's!

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  7. And for the Californians moving into Texas, remember this: All Texans fought at the Alamo.

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  8. Due to the reality of possibly needing to move to find gainful employment several locations have come up. Among them are Philadelphia, Huston, Tuskaloosa, and Tampa. Having lived in the South several times due to a Military career, and being painfully aware of the current news, I would gladly take less money and live in the South. Philadelphia would be my last choice.

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    1. Hey, the South has a Philadelphia, too. Used to live there as a kid. Probably nicer than the Yankee version has been for decades; definitely nicer nowadays.

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    2. And it’s close to the farm that sells Sweetwater Valley Cheese.

      https://sweetwatervalley.com/product-category/cheese/

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  9. Philly, send the Antifa there and they would busy for months tearing down statues.

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  10. I started to write a dissertation about being a West Virginian transplanted to Ohio when I was five and the level of shit I had to put up with growing up around those self righteous yankee pricks, but I’m over that now. Maybe. Eod1sg Ret

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    1. The northern panhandle of WV is only four counties away from Canada.

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  11. "a different breed of backward and uneducated people with lazy minds "-perfect timing: I see Big Mike is shitting out of her mouth again about the election.

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  12. Born and Raised in the South, Florida and the Keys. Been all over a good part of the world too. Florida now is 23 million plus peeps from everywhere. Its crowded now. Even places most have never heard of are seeing a surge of people from all the states that they cant stand to live in.
    Still....there are places I know of that I can still enjoy the OLD Florida.

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  13. Born, bred, and raised in the South.

    The fact that a majority of Americans have an unconscious disdain for southerners is not news; one need only look to entertainment for that confirmation. Anytime Hollywood wants to portray a stupid person, the character is given a Southern accent and if they want to make the character really stupid they make him a police officer.

    Racial discord has been deliberately exaggerated; race relations in the south were no where near the enmity in the pre-Obama South. Travel outside the South - especially to asian-filled California - and you have to overcome the built-in prejudice of locals who presume your family were slave owners and klansmen.

    Southern women must constantly prove they are not all beauty contestants looking for Bubba to support them while they raise a “passel” of kids and Southern men aren’t looking to rape and kill innocent Yankees paddling the Cahulawassee River while playing banjos (although, truth be told the phrase “paddle faster, I hear banjos” never fails to make me chuckle.)

    We like fast cars, pretty women, buttermilk and cornbread. Our religion is college football and we tailgate while debating which team is best, our BBQ engenders serious discussion, we respect our elders, and love our crazy relations. We worship God, we like guns, and are fixing to go to Wal*Mart.

    So welcome to my world - get yourself down here and enjoy life ... just leave any liberal politics back where y’all came from.

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  14. Drive anywhere in the Northeast or in California with a Georgia license plate on your vehicle and people look at you funny, like they expect you to have pigs and chickens riding with you.

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  15. As a kid growing up in Southern Indiana, I experienced the bias against "Cane-tucks" from my parents. Although we did move to Louisville for a few years, and my dad was employed in one of the plants in West Louisville, we still maintained our connections with Sou Indiana; doctor, banking, etc. And you could throw a rock from the hospital I was born in to the Ohio river.
    I never understood it. Maybe it was the percentage of blacks in big Lou compared with Sou Indiana.

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