Stupidizing Southerners

An anti-Southern blogger who shall remain nameless recently posted a link to this book on his blog: Dreaming of Dixie -- How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture by Karen L. Cox. (I'm not linking to the book on Amazon. Find it yourself.)

Now, I know the pitfalls of attempting to review a book I haven't read so I'm not going to attempt that. I simply note that one can draw reasonable conclusions based on a cursory examination -- not only about the book in question, but about larger issues.

Aside from the fact that the cover is truly awful, the theme of this book seems to be that an authentic South doesn't really exist -- it's a figment, created by the imaginations of nonSoutherners motivated to make money off their creation in the popular culture. Until the civil rights movement, the South in popular culture (music, movies, novels) was based on antebellum myth -- pastoral, peopled with happy slaves, cavaliers and belles, living in moonlight and magnolias ... The usual claptrap. Granted, she does give nonSoutherners "credit" (or blame) for this misleading, or at least incomplete, view -- but then she goes on to imply that Southerners themselves bought into this vision of their region.

In other words, those of us who are not inbred scumsucking racist hicks are ig-nernt morons who'll swallow anything that makes our region (and, by extension, us) "look good."

What this illustrates, folks, is a subset of the ongoing mission of evilizing Southerners -- that of stupidizing Southerners.

It's been going on for a while. From a newspaper article in 2000, when Richmond was in a dustup over General Robert E. Lee's inclusion on the Riverwalk flood wall -- just to show you an example of the mission from a decade ago, which illustrates that it hasn't changed much. AP writer Bob Lewis had the byline; his article, Richmond, Va., Struggles With Race, quoted (1) Richmond's mayor, (2) an unidentified "some," and (3) a Mississippi racial reconciliation activist. Maybe some others, but these are the best illustrators:

"Our particular legacy causes us some real problems -- additional difficulties that other communities do not have," said Mayor Timothy Kaine, who is white. "In a lot of ways, the Civil War has been an albatross around our neck."

The problem, some say, is the way many white Southerners romanticize the "Lost Cause," turning it into something out of "Gone With the Wind."

"A lot of people don't want to acknowledge the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause. One reason a lot of people are dishonest about their past is guilt," the mayor said. "Everyone knows slavery was evil, but nobody wants to think that their ancestors weren't noble people."

Susan Glisson, interim director of the Institution for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi, said: "It is so much easier if you're white to imagine some grand plantation home in which you didn't have to work and, when it was attacked, you valiantly defend it on some battlefield far away."

The Civil War has been an albatross around Richmond's neck? Gee, ya think? Let's overlook the obvious likelihood that Ex-mayor Wilder doesn't grasp the intended symbolism of Coleridge's albatross, and consider the words of Pennsylvania journalist Douglas Harper, "...the majority (in the CSA), in spite of internal divisions, put up a herculean effort, won spectacular victories, made shift with what little it had, and held out till the place was literally gutted and blood-drained by its foe."

Does the ex-mayor imagine there would be some reason why its capital would escape the gutted and blood-drained fate the rest of the Confederacy was subjected to?

Everyone knows slavery was evil and we don't acknowledge it out of guilt? I know that slavery must not have been as bad as we're told -- not total evil, as the ex-mayor implies, because, otherwise there would be no need for the campaign to evilize it that's underway today -- the effort to identify its worst components and abuses as the whole of it. This is like saying marriage is spouse abuse, and motherhood is child abuse...

Besides, many of the WPA slave narratives -- words out of the mouths of former slaves -- refute these words out of the former mayor's mouth. Yes, slavery was bad; no, it was not the total evil of the imaginary version being crammed down our throats today for the purpose of evilizing Southerners.

Nobody wants to think that their ancestors weren't noble people? Perhaps this is why yankees have developed such widespead amnesia about their ancestors' responsibility for slavery? For slave trading, slave shipping and for processing the products of slave grown agriculture? How much does the role of "guilt" play in their regional and cultural slavery-amnesia?

But of course, that was not what the ex-mayor had in mind, was it? Like so many others, in his eagerness to evilize Southerners past and present, he is completely oblivious to the complicity of the yanks who not only contributed to and benefitted from slavery, but in the world's most breathtaking act and display of hypocrisy, made war on the South ostensibly because of its evil, slave-holdin' ways.

Besides, slave ownership doesn't automatically confer ignobility -- and what about the 90% or so of Southerners who owned no slaves but who sent their sons to defend against the invading armies of the north? What about them, Ex-mayor Wilder?

As bad as that is, Glisson's comments take the trophy for stupidizing Southerners: "It is so much easier if you're white to imagine some grand plantation home in which you didn't have to work and, when it was attacked, you valiantly defend it on some battlefield far away."

Now, aside from the fact that there were some -- a relative few -- who actually matched that description among the men who fought for the South, how many white Southerners today have such imaginings? I sure don't. Long before I knew much about the war, I knew my ancestors were Cherokee Indians and "Scotch-Irish" Appalachian mountaineers. I didn't know the particulars (I know some of them now) but I did know that any of my ancestors who fought for the Confederacy likely did NOT leave a column mansion, hoop-skirted moms, sisters and sweethearts and happy slaves to go off and shoot yankees. People who have done the genealogy research likely have a far more realistic view of their Confederate ancestors.

Didn't have to work? Just an example from my own family. My gg-grandfather Tilmon P. Chastain is listed as a "miner" on the 1860 census for Fannin County, Georgia. For the uninitiated, what people in those parts mined was copper. That part of north Georgia (McCaysville) and southeastern Tennessee (Ducktown) is called the Copper Basin. Do a little research on it, and you discover that the mining process destroyed vegetation for fifty miles around the area. Not "did a little damage" but totally destroyed it. Photos of the region at the time show a Mars-like landscape. Not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass left alive.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_0AxZHWIQBLI/SSNIk3A8xuI/AAAAAAAABmY/3waHwU3QiD4/s1600-h/copper+basin.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6b/Ducktown_train.jpg

Imagine what the same process did to the lungs and health of the residents.

Didn't have to work? LOL! What a joke, Ms. Glisson, you're funny, a real card, ha-ha.

So now we come to Karen L. Cox and Dreaming of Dixie. I suppose, since it was written by an academic, and published by an academic press, this book falls under the anti-Southern blogger's concept of "scholarship" and may even have something, in his imagination, to do with the war (or at least its "memory").

I admit my prejudice about the book and its author, because of her membership in the academic world. If anything comes to my attention to change my suspicions, I'll change them. But for now, I'm classifying this book as Stupidizing Southerners Lite. This is based on my reading of the cover blurb and product description at Amazon, and a bit of googling about the author. Beyond her membership in academia and her focus on the South, my surface search found nothing to indicate that she's part of the crusade to evilize Southerners; but I didn't find anything to indicate she isn't, either.