The southwest has some nice stuff. But as for the “south,” there are a lot of things to not like about it, IMO:
Too many religious, racist, and bigoted people
Too many vacationers in certain areas
Most of the year is too hot & humid for me
Bugs everywhere
Nasty, greasy, fat-laden foods
Landscape is boring
No autumn or winter (I like winter!)
I have to go to Robins AFB and Eglin AFB and every now and then on TDY. I hate it.
Having said that, I visited the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama a few years ago. Was one of the best museums I’ve ever been to. So there’s that. The culture is also pro-gun, which I like.
For fuck’s sake, indeed. I live in Virginia, whose capital, Richmond, was once the capital of the Confederacy, and we haven’t voted for a Republican for president since 2004. Both of our U.S. Senators are Democrats. So is our governor. Our state legislature is majority Democratic.
Stop painting the South with such a wide brush. You’re showing just as much hate as MAGA people are, just from the other side.
Not as much. MAGA types believe that Dr. Fauci is a lying killer, Hillary Clinton deserves to be locked up in prison, Mike Pence should be hanged, and Donald Trump is still the President.
So not as much.
And when I think of the south, I think of the gulf states including Texas. I know that’s not complete or correct.
If not for massive gerrymandering and tremendous voter suppression tactics on behalf of the Texas Republican Party, Texas might have very well gone for Biden in 2020. You forget that it was in play. Democrats in Texas are an oppressed majority.
Okay, I live in one of those Deep South states, Georgia. The state with two Democratic senators, one black and one Jewish. The state that came within 55,000 votes of electing the first black female governor in U.S. history. The home of Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lewis, Stacey Abrams, and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter.
Also the home of Lin Wood, Syndey Powell, and the modern Ku Klux Klan. It’s not a monolith.
To be fair, military bases are not usually set in major cities or especially scenic topography. If your sole exposure to the landscape of the south is Warner-Robins, Ga, or the Florida Panhandle, I can certainly see why you’d think there’s nothing interesting about our geography. But we do have somedramatic and lovelylandscapes.
Yes, but the fundamentalist anti-south bigots get free rein here on the SDMB. Any other group shown a collective condemnation gets mod attention, but anti-southern bigotry gets crickets. I’ve noticed it over and over and over here.
I remember once, in a discussion of anti-Semitism, someone on this board posted, “A lot of southerners think they’re prejudiced against Jews, but it’s not true. It’s New York accents that they hate.”
I left politics out of my replies about southern redeeming qualities, focusing on music. Much like your thought here, African Americans are at the core of redeeming southern qualities.
I don’t know squat about southern authors, and the OP asked to keep away from food.
(When Dr. King came to Chicago, he was not impressed!)
The nice thing about the South is that it acts as a lightning rod allowing smug Northerners to point at how progressive they are regarding race relations while ignoring their own problems with segregation and police abuse.
I’m in with @ThelmaLou and other like thinkers. Yes, I’m just as guilty as anyone of using ‘the South’ as shorthand for ‘ignorant, racist, Bible-thumping, Republicans’ but even when I’m doing so, I understand that it’s not monolithic, and to describe any region by it’s worst is at best an extremely misleading overgeneralization.
Trying to make things a simple good/evil liberal/conservative godly/ungodly dichotomy is part of how we got to this polarization. Let’s avoid it (unless we’re in the Pit and just making an old fashioned rant).
This subject has been done to death on the Dope. While the handful of southern apologists that once hung out here has diminished to the point of extinction, the overweening sense of smug moral superiority that animates these threads will apparently never die, .
