[at-l] RE: suthern comfort

[cballs at verizon.net (Curtis Balls)]

You want to tie me up in a tight sack?!  And do what?  Wow, you guys are
great!

I tried what I thought was a fairly nuanced response to what I perceived to
be an indiscriminate display of Southerners poking fun at themselves as they
are wont to do.  I then tried to pull the thread that I had hoped was going
to die a week ago into a new direction - New Jersey.  (I've been trying to
find a way to contribute something useful to the hiking discussions on the
list but there isn't much of that going on.  I'm going to have to go back to
ignoring this stuff.)  It's all a big ruse of course and none of it's to be
believed.  You don't believe what you say about your incestuous southern
roots anymore than I do.  It's all an act.  I'm a Southerner, none of this
is lost on me.  I can do the whole tiresome routine too.  What you guys fail
to perceive, either because you don't care or because you perhaps still live
in the South, is that many who are not Southerners, who have never been in
the South and whose only experience with it is through the media, believe
every word you're saying about everyone in the South.  Come and live in NY
for a while.  Because of the blanket, indiscriminate perpetuation of these
stereotypical images, believe me, in some instances and in some ways,
Southerness can be a liability outside of the South.  I'm always hearing the
most stupid, bigoted comments about the South and Southerners said with
complete impunity by people standing right in front of me.  The sweeping
generalizations, crass assumptions and bigoted attitude are truly awesome
and seldom if ever engaged in talking about other identifiable groups.  The
attitude is so in-grained that the speaker feels perfectly justified and
safe in expressing it, even to the point of expressing the most obnoxious
racist attitudes assuming that because I'm white and from the South that
I'll be in agreement with them.  It's truly weird and I'm offended on both
counts.  If you're from the South, they think they're smarter than you are,
it's just that simple.  BTW, I put up with this "dumb, redneck, hillbilly,
incestuous, Deliverance BS" on my hike all through the South. I didn't loose
it until I got to PA and found an entry that said the hiker was relieved to
be out of "enemy territory" after a recitation of all the same old tired
caricatures I'd been reading all along.  Jeeez!  (James Dickey was a
novelist, which by definition means he was a liar. Novelists have to be.  He
made up all that stuff and then swore it was true because he knew it played
into prejudices and assumptions about who those people are (who was going to
object?) and it allowed him to also write about his own homoerotic impulses
in a kind of distorted way.  And it made him a lot of money.  He was kind of
a closet case you know. (Nothing more dangerous.)  He was also a Southerner
and no dummy.  The movie is not a documentary.) Many of the comments in the
registers were appallingly judgmental, bigoted, some of it just plain silly.
Perception is reality.  

I manage turning the perceptions against those outside the South by allowing
them to assume I'm a redneck hillbilly hayseed.  By the time they figure out
I'm a redneck hillbilly hayseed queer smartass, it's too late for them. But
it makes me have to work harder.  I can play the game but I get tired of it.
Jim, if you write anything back to me about what I just wrote, our love
affair is over.  Don't break my heart.

There are several different "cultures" in the South, knitted together by
common values and shared experience:  love of place (no matter where I've
been in the world or how long I've been away, home is down South and I don't
just mean my family.  I mean the grasses, the trees, the air, the scent, the
way the sun feels, the light in winter, the country night, the way corn and
tomatoes taste.), church, family ties, hardship, defeat and occupation. It's
a region of people who originated some of the most highly evolved aspects of
American culture: government, language, music, literature, food, etc.  This
includes the Southern Highlands.  The South is the most politically
important area of the country and has been since the framing of the
Constitution.  As the South goes, so goes the country (that's an
observation, not an endorsement. It doesn't always make me happy.)
Nevertheless, I'd like to see it more celebrated and less trashed.  (It's
changed a great deal just in my lifetime, not always for the better.  Much
of what always made it appealing is dying out mostly by being "marketed"
until it's become a commodity rather than a way of life and Southerners,
being good free-market Americans, are much, much too eager to
indiscriminately pour concrete all over the place.  They've poured a lot of
concrete down South over the past 30 years.) 

Because I have lived outside the South for a number of years, I experience
the impact of these stereotypes differently than if I were in the South.
Our differences here are mostly a matter of perspective.

There's something else here that wasn't lost on me but Kelly beat me to it.
I meant to but I got excited about my tennis match with Jim and I forgot to
say it.  Straight guys are so charming.  If I were a straight woman I'd
marry every one of you.  You're always courting women, in every single thing
you do, especially when you aren't aware of it.  Hell I'm not a woman and
I'd still marry you.  If that's not an option, I'm still available for being
tied up.

Tied-up Balls


Two Texans invite each other to lunch:

Cha eat jet?
Dew waa?
Cha eat jet?
Naw, jew?
Naw, ount to?
Awwwite.

Now it's on to New Jersey!
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Clark Wright [mailto:icw@esisnet.com] 
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2003 11:54 AM
To: cballs@verizon.net; ATListserv

well, split my britches - I reckon the way i seez it is that I'm 
cumfetable enuf with my incestuous suthern roots to laff at myself and 
my bretheren without gettin my balls too tied up in a tight sack! :)

thru-laffer