Southern Hospitality: Chopped & Screwed

The future will inevitably—and unfortunately—make many an addendum upon this post, but I wanted to round up a few related items for those of you who may have skimped a little on yr newspaper reading lately.

I want to talk about South Carolina—the state in which I spent my formative years, and one that I have a very high regard for and miss very much. Too frequently overshadowed by its less reactionary and more carpetbaggin’ northern neighbor, South Carolina holds a distinct place in my heart for its heart & belly-warming cuisine, uniquely serene natural landscapes, and genuine qualities of its inhabitants. I understand it is a particularly Southern—and with regard to race, particularly problematic—tendency to be paternalistic, but along with some of the sharpest minds, South Carolina boasts some of the most base. I’d actually be remiss if I didn’t confess that I didn’t cherish them all. In other words, they may be idiots, but they’re our idiots.

Now, I grew up in Charleston, often regarded as a sort of New Orleans of the southeastern seaboard—romantic, cosmopolitan, home to dandies and quaintrelles of loose morals, and, with regard to its neighbors, racially relatively easy-going—admittedly, a city not terribly representative of the state in which it resides. (Many folks “upstate” speak of the port as one they simply tolerate, and hope their sons and daughters don’t desire to go to college there.) Still, Charleston is undoubtedly Southern, where one can partake of all that implies (food, architecture, weather), while remaining a city that breathes a more worldly air which provides it with a concrete otherness from the rest of the state and its people.

And it is this dichotomy between Charleston and the rest of South Carolina which, more or less, brings us to the brunt of this lil’ essay: namely, the agonizing fact that the vast majority of South Carolinians, as sweet as they often are, continue to persist in electing the most willfully ignorant, two-faced, coarse, racist, and corrupt Politicians-With-a-Capital-P to their state and national governments. And if that weren’t bad enough, the Daily Show is there to remind us that we bang horses.

The facts speak for themselves, and the stories are all too true. So, as a Charlestonian, I increasingly ask myself Why? Or rather, how? And the answer, more often then not—and not terribly secret—boils down to ignorance. It is a trait that is unfortunately self-perpetuating in a state consistently ranked near the bottom of national public education rankings, and near the top in unemployment. Southern politicians (nearly always Republican) self-servingly harness the uncertainty that such ignorance and poverty breeds, and channel it directly into fear—of bogeymen. Big government. Illegal immigration. Socialism. Fugitive slaves. And no matter what the actual political/economic priorities of the Republican party are (chiefly, promoting the interests of the wealthy), they are able to manipulate poor, naive Southerners into voting them into office. Every single time.

Will this change? Unfortunately, I doubt it. The recent electoral inroads made by Barack Obama in Virginia and North Carolina have more to do with the migration of liberal-leaning Northerners to Southern cities, not a paradigm shift in the thinking of Republican Southerners. And as a previous post attempted to explain, the Internet will only facilitate the entrenchment of those beliefs, rather that expose them to a world without bogeymen.

But still I’ll go on loving South Carolina and Southerners in general. I could love the region and despise its people (an opinion I’ve heard bandied around quite a bit outside the South), but as far as I’m concerned, you can’t separate one from the other. They are part of each other’s landscape—Columbia’s mouthwatering barbeque as no distinct from the unreformed yokel who makes it. Sometimes this dichotomy is funny; other times, only laughingly sad. There is an obvious existential tension to this quality of Southerness, but like the day-to-day tensions of city living, it is an anxiety which ultimately makes you understand and appreciate all the more where you grew up.