Such Is the Duality of the South

Please allow me, just once, to speak for all those people in the South who were born Democrats, raised Democrats by Democrats and remain Democrats to this day. Not just Democrats, but LIBERAL Democrats. (Forgive me, I prefer liberal to Progressive. It's more courageous.)

Anyway, fellow Southern liberal, Matt Osborne, gifted me with this; and although it's about Alabama in particular, as Matt's Alabaman, it does a mighty good job speaking for the majority of politically blue folk South of the Mason-Dixon Line in pushing back against how we, as a people, in general are categorised and castigated by our more sophisticated brethren in the North, specifically those along the self-styled "Left Coast," who still persist in promoting the belief that most of us are not only racists, but bigots as well.

I'll let the Drive By Truckers do the talking, but I'd just like to add as well, that, at the height of his infamy as a segregationalist, George Wallace had a peculiar knack of going into a Northern city or suburb and bringing home the raw truth to the people who criticised him that segregation and racial discrimination also existed in the North.

I would direct anyone who says otherwise to Rick Perlstein's seminal work, Nixonland, which illustrates the Wallace phenomenon perfectly. He was actually garnering larger crowds at his rallies than Saint Ronald Reagan ever did, and that was in the North.

So, for all the Left Coast Limousine Progressives, this history lesson is for you - and that means you, Bill Maher, Joan Walsh Matt Damon etc.



With profuse thanks to Matt Osborne.