On the South

This article on The Oxford American in Flagpole is one of the better reads I've come across in a while. I particularly enjoyed, and felt a deep connection with, this particular passage by John Nettles ...

The South, in whole and in parts, has found itself on the wrong side of so many issues, from desegregation to evolution, from the Confederate flag to the Confederacy, that it’s sometimes hard to defend one’s regionalism as anything other than knee-jerk bigotry, but we still do it because for every boneheaded thing to come out of our corner of the Republic, there’s something noble and righteous that couldn’t have come from anywhere else. The same Mississippi that gave us Trent Lott and Byron de la Beckwith gave us William Faulkner and Robert Johnson. Bull Conner’s Alabama is also Hank Williams’ and Booker T. Washington’s. Lester Maddox’s Georgia is Martin Luther King’s Georgia.

The best thing we Southerners can do is to internalize it all under the mantle of character. Sure, Paula Deen’s syrupy gentility makes me want to take a melon baller to my frontal lobe, but Savannah wouldn’t be the same without her, and I doubt I’ll run into her on the street anyway. And Athens will always be my twisted, artsy home, no matter how the state legislature tries to gerrymander the life out of us. Yeah, I may live in the reddest of the red states, but I’ve got Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews and Ray Charles and Chet Atkins and R.E. by God M. to save my soul.