Top 5 Ways To Fall Back In Love With The South

Ah, springtime in Crackerstan! As we recover from the flood of goober politicians and their moronic policies polluting our state legislatures, while ignoring the pending tsunami of awful political media designed to make Gomer Pyle’s chest swell, there really is no better place than the Deep South for springtime frolics. We’re prettier than the rest, so let’s get on with our fun, sun, and glory. Here are my suggestions to help remind the world of our beauty and our elegance. And yes, we do have a little bit left.

1.) The Spoleto USA Festival in Charleston, SC. May 23 – June 8. You’ve stumbled into as much Old Euro elegance, grace and glamour as you’re going to get within our mostly Moon Pie walls with this one. Gorgeous people, gorgeous events, beautiful city, beaches, fabulous weather created just to show-off your best sundresses and sandals, even with its notoriously haughty and dull Charlestonians. And heck, even those people are on their best behavior during Spoleto. Just go.

 

2.) The Carolina Cup. A steeplechase race. Camden, SC. March 29. This one’s just genuine Old South. The ponies and understated 100% cotton finery give it away. And where else can you see adorable little college students hurling their cookies into the grass whilst wearing their Sunday best? (Other than on every southern college campus, of course.) Forget the SC colleges mass-partying on the infield though, and take in the horses and the serious equestrian scene around the paddock area. Southerners do horse stuff almost as well as rich Saudis. (You’ll even spot a few of those there too, but they’ll be wearing their Aiken-inspired southernwear as camouflage, and their womenfolk won’t be all covered up.) If you want a true Garden and Gun culture-feel of the South, you’ll find it at the Carolina Cup. Drink when you see an aspic on a tailgate eaten by a startlingly handsome young buck in a seersucker suit. You will, if you can stay sober for just a minute or so. Some of the gents are so comely they could give even Ralph Lauren’s male model, Nacho, a run for his horse-people money. Besides, it’s no secret now, not since that Appalachian Trail business, that South Carolinians and Argentinians have been mingling for generations. It’s a polo thing. Don’t forget your Croakies, menfolk. Even if rain is predicted this year.

 

3.) Intown neighborhoods – Atlanta. Now until late May. If the traffic and the freeways and the Braves moving to bland, kinda ugly Cobb County have just worn you down, a calming Sunday afternoon drive through Atlanta’s oldest intown neighborhoods such as Ansley Park, Peachtree Battle, Brookwood Hills, even the more gaudy nouveau riche Buckhead enclaves like Blackland Road, will perk your spirits right up with their display of floral riches and lush, leafy tree canopies. Picture pretty lawns galore, and until some piece of shit ’95 Toyota Corolla wrapped together with Bungee cords and fishing line lunges into you, you can close your eyes and think you’re on the prettiest boulevard in France. Tom Wolfe describes it well in A Man In Full. Springtime as tonic.

4.) Lakes, rivers, and water-skiing. Anywhere South. Friends-with-boats are a good thing. Make some. Borrow some if you have to.

5.) The fields and valleys of Western North Carolina. Just go driving up there until you find them. You will. Take someone you’ve been hoping for with you, if you need to fall in love somewhere special. You will.

Mapping Our Beloved South. We’re Left-Behinds Now.

Here’s a map of how the NYTimes perceived the South as being out of touch, and presumably left behind, from the rest of the nation… in terms of how we voted (markedly differently) on Nov. 4th. And here is the rather condescending analysis from the Damn Yankees too!

The map I want to see is the one displaying broadband access across the United States… overlayed with the how-we-Crackers-voted map. Then we might get a better picture of just how seriously left-behind we really are, in terms of politics now married with technology… and all the implications there.

From the NYTimes today:

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter, a statistical analysis by The New York Times shows. Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

Could Merle Black of Emory get together with some computation and journalism geeks at Georgia Tech please!

The Political South: My How We’re Changing!

Tom Baxter of Southern Political Report post-morts the post-election southern landscape today. Most  interesting analysis:

Adding further complexity to the picture is the ribbon of blue counties which begin in Charleston, S.C., and thread through the heart of last week’s red states all the way to Chickasaw County, Miss. These counties, which encompass most of the Black Belt, gave Obama some of his biggest majorities anywhere: He garnered 87 percent, the highest county total I could find for either candidate, in Macon County, Ala., and Jefferson County, Miss. They’ve voted solidly Democratic in the past, but never simultaneously with Democratic majorities the size of those in Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Charlotte and other big cities across the South.

All this suggests a South with some familiar landmarks, but also one primed to change very dramatically over the coming decade. It’s easy to imagine, given the herculean challenges facing him, Obama losing the states he won last week in 2012. Given the age of McCain’s core supporters, it’s not inconceivable either that Obama could win states he lost this year.

But the South has shown that in one of the cricitical elections of our history, it was not all of one mind. And it’s unlikely ever to be again.

Full SPR article here. Heck, give a Cracker a laptop, some free broadband out in the scrub pines, and Lordy knows what might happen! From Bloomberg.com:

Obama has also made broader Internet access a goal and insisted that broadcasters focus more on public service. In a statement to the FCC last year, he called for `new rules promoting greater coverage of local issues and greater responsiveness of broadcasters to the communities they operate in.’

The above article in-full here.

Text Message Georgia Into The Blue?

It could happen. Now that Obama and Biden have our cell phone numbers, and they know how best to use ’em, could texting people into the voting booth come November be just the thing to turn states like Georgia from red to blue? Could be. Heck, texting could make a difference even in S.C. if you ask me, which of course no one did. From another Off The Bus driver, Sara Granger:

Assuming the goal of the (texting Obama’s VP choice) exercise was not just to inform supporters, but to mobilize them, the database of SMS contacts is the newest member of the Obama – no, excuse me – Obama/Biden arsenal. GOTV efforts begin in earnest after the convention and text messaging has been shown to be quite an effective tool for that purpose. In the 2002 South Korean presidential election, Lee Hoi Chan held the lead until Roh Moo Hyun supporters sent out text messages and email to 800,000 voters on election day, turning the tides and winning the election by a 2% margin. A survey based on the 2006 election found that voting reminders via SMS produced an increase turnout by 4%. Besides, it’s cheaper and people don’t mind that it’s automated.

Full story here. I’ll be curious to hear what Mr. T has to say about all this catching up with the Koreans stuff. We are slow down here, but come on folks, even 8-year olds have cell phones and text capability of their own now. Like I’d know anything about that trend…

Chris Dickey – Phony Southerner

Chris Dickey, son of the famous Southern poet James Dickey, cons Yankee editors at Newsweek into believing he’s still a son of the South so he can write-up a load of overwrought, overwritten, stereotyping copy about our behavior during this time of “change.”

Now this part of the country, where I have my deepest roots, feels raw again, its political emotions more exposed than they’ve been in decades. George W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama have unsettled the South: the first with a reckless war and a weakened economy, the second with the color of his skin, the foreignness of his name, the lofty liberalism of his language. Suddenly the palliative prosperity that salved old, deep wounds no longer seems adequate to the task.

Seems to Dickey Daddy’s Boy that none of us are all that crazy about “change.” Could be most of us Southerners aren’t all that crazy about pretentious wankers from Paris trying to pass themselves off as natives. Full story here. And Matt Towery’s take on all this backwater bs is here, y’all.