Why the South Lives On?

I’m constantly amazed at how many Americans are perplexed by the South.

It is the curious specimen that must be viewed under microscope. The curiosity that just doesn’t mesh with American norms.

John C. Calhoun, according to a recent biography, is an “American heretic,” as if the entire South was heretical.

Hillary Clinton certainly let the cat out of the bag when she called Trump supporters–and Trump found his greatest support in the South–a basket of deplorables.

This has led to countless “Southern studies” programs across the United States. Every university has one. It’s mandatory.

They invite some carpetbag scholar from some Northern institution to the South so that these enlightened academics can tell the rest of the world why the South is so strange.

It never occurs to any of these people that they are the oddballs.

Consider that the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, written by New Yorker Washington Irving, was intended to poke fun at New Englanders.

They were always considered to be an odd bunch. This is why for much of early American history everyone hated them. They, of course, could never figure this out. They always considered themselves to be the enlightened representatives of a shining City Upon a Hill, the true Americans.

Southerners were just ostentatious aristocrats who mucked up the system.

Except neither characterization is true.

Which is why a recent piece at The American Thinker contains so many errors. I am not sure why the author found it necessary to write under a pseudonym. He doesn’t say much of anything that mainstream academics don’t spout on a daily basis to their mostly brain dead students.

He does lament the human cost of the War, but he finds it curious that attachments to the South still exist. After all, the War nearly produced a cultural genocide. Nearly is not strong enough. It did.

But a people with such a heroic and substantial past will always find it useful to transmit to the next generation, even if only a few can do it.

The Yankee class understands this. Their shift to “memory studies”, i.e. an effort to “scholarly” show that the South lied and didn’t remember anything properly like a good Yankee, shows that they are worried a real understanding of American history still exists.

Either way, such dopes make for good podcast fodder, so I discuss this “Thinker” piece on episode 622 of The Brion McClanahan Show.