Anecdote: I was once having a beer with a couple of nice Southern guys in cafe in Germany when we were joined by another Southerner. Being historian types the conversation drifted to the War, and the newcomer began to send the occasional barbed comment in my direction (being of Northern persuasion as I am). His accent got mysteriously thicker as the conversation went on and the comments kept getting more pointed. I let them pass by blithely, although it was clear the other two in the conversation had also pegged this guy as a jerk. Finally I said, “I’m afraid I have to admit that I don’t know much about the Civil War. Pretty much all I know is: we won.”
The other two broke up at this, and the jerk shut up.
Yeah, I’m part of that chunk :). Some jokes about the South are trivial and should be blown off. But a lot of them are deeply classist, based on a traditional animosity between merchants and farmers, and those ones are ugly.
I’ve also encountered Northerners moving to the South and telling us how much better it is (e.g., a woman that moved from a New England metropolis to an Appalachian rural community and was infuriated by the amount of barking that dogs do in a rural community). I’ve also encountered a woman from France who moved to the US and spent all her time telling us how superior France was. In both cases, it was totally obnoxious, and I wanted both of them to go home.
The other kind of joke about the South that gets up my nose is the joke about racism, the one where Southerners are all portrayed as Klannies. Not helping, folks.
My Father and a guy from the TV station drove across country in the 1960’s to take a course in color video tape machines. Dad recounted how a gas station attendant criticized them for Southern racism, and then said, “But these God damned Mexicans!”
A cousin by marriage from Connecticut was surprised that everyone wore shoes and that I worked on computers. Smoking with me in the bar of a restaurant, she asked, “This is the South, isn’t it?” I responded, “Well, we lost the war.” and she nodded sagely.
Most Northern women I’ve met, including Mrs. Plant v.2.0 become angry at being called Ma’am, but Mamma would come back from the grave and slap me for being disrespectful to a lady if I didn’t.
I’ve noticed a change over the course of my life, and I’ve come to wonder if the internet and 9/11 haven’t played a part in altering the local American “outsider go away” attitudes.
I mean, it’s kinda hard to hold that to heart when you buy a plasma screen made in Taiwan, shipped via a Russian ship to a port in California, then trucked to a warehouse in Indiana, and purchased over the internet from amazon.com.
Internet access and internet shopping have made a lot of people a lot more aware of the greater world “out there”. They tend to notice (I think) that the regional “outsiders” aren’t really much different from them.
I also think the 9/11 attacks unified the people in the United States in a way not seen since WWII. Not all of that unification stayed, of course, but I think some of it did.
So maybe between the two the “outsider go away” attitude moved from being a regional thing to more of a national one. We are less suspicious of people from New Jersey, and more suspicious of people from Pakistan.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
I’m from MD, my ex husband was from PA. His parents weren’t too thrilled about him marrying a southern gal. WTF? They couldn’t understand why I don’t have a southern accent. I didn’t know I was supposed to. That was the first strike against me.
I’ve never considered myself southern, or northern, just right in the middle. I have one parent from each side, so once again right in the middle.
I know we are south of the Mason-Dixon, but the feeling I get is that the other southern states really don’t want to claim us, however they will claim WV.
Is it a Civil War issue, a cultural issue, or Mason-Dixon decides?
Florida is in the south but I never think of it as a ‘southern’ state.
I am a South Westerner, who spent a year living in South Carolina. In my experience, Southerners are very eager to distinguish their culture from the rest of the country. They actively seek out negative reactions from non-Southerners, in the same way that your kids will listen to shitty music and dress like an idiot just to piss you off. They don’t fly rebel flags in support of the Confederacy, they fly rebel flags because you just wouldn’t understand even if I tried to explain it to you.
We’re pretty much Massachusetts-South here in Maryland. We’re very comfortable with our vices being out in the open – drinking, smoking, gambling, fornicating, secularism – in ways that our fellow southernors (using the term loosely) are not. I am a happy sinner and pretty good with all that.
Oddly enough, Northern Florida is in the South, but most of Southern and Central Florida from the I-4 corridor on down is not (with some exceptions for the sparsely populated Okeechobee area.)
Anecdote: Partner and I were driving through Alabama in a car with Texas plates. We managed to drive into a ditch on a rural road. First vehicle that came by stopped, and three big old Southern boys emerged. I heard one say, “What say, boys, shall we help these Yankees out?”
They did help. They were boisterous, but polite and charming. The Yankee thing still puzzles me.
This is where those bumper stickers come from.
If you live in an area of the south with a lot of Yankee immigrants, you’ll understand where this comes from.
There’s also the fact that the Texas of 1980 is considerably different than the Texas of 2012. For one thing the population has more than doubled. Texas is a-changin’.
I encountered some hostility when I first started coming down here decades ago, but nowadays newcomers are hardly even noticed.
The locals can quickly tell the difference between some jerkish couple from the Northeast that just want to buy a gigantic McMansion and a Ford F-1250 and hideaway in their own Little New England suburb, and a pleasant, respectful couple that really want to make a life down here.
The first group will be the first to tell you how much better the place they left was, and it annoys even me. They should be rounded up during the night and sent back to the Northeast in cattle cars.
All I know is that when I went on vacation to SC, my DIL’s sister, who lived there, warned me carefully to keep my liberal views to myself or someone might slug me. She had gone to college there and settled. Doesn’t sound very friendly to me.
Unless this was very long ago, there’s probably an over-abundance of caution here, unless you were going around people who were going to be drunk or high.
There are, in fact, liberals in the south, including some in the rural south.
They don’t generally get punched for expressing their opinions.
Perhaps she was exaggerating in order to avoid awkward social situations while you were visiting.
I live in an area of the south with fucktons of Yankees. Never had a run in with any of 'em, the ones I know personally are nice. They talk funny, I like listening to them
This sums up the lingering North vs South thing in a nutshell.
I grew up in the South but when I went up North for college I was surprised how pathetically little my classmates knew about the Civil War era.
I shocked my classmates by noting most Southerners didn’t own slaves; that the secession vote failed in TN the first time it was brought up; that there was a Union Army recruiting station in Knoxville, TN; that the first publication dedicated to abolition of slavery was printed in the South…
Then I learned that if I wanted to actually pass a college history class I had best understand that the Civil War was all about slavery; every person south of the Mason Dixon Line was wrong; and the South lost so get over it. :rolleyes: Winners write history.
