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Sunday, March 4, 2007
Who thinks the South a wasteland?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A charming story in the Sunday paper asks and answers the question: “Think the South is a wasteland? You’re ignorant.” It’s a story Southerners over the age of 50 will have read a hundred times by now as, one by one, the rest of the country and the world discovers that the stereotypes they held to be true aren’t.
This is not intended as a criticism of the story by the Washington correspondent for The Economist, Robert Guest, which is flattering to the region. A quarter of a century ago, an international acknowledgment that the South is not inhabited entirely by knuckle-dragging rednecks would have been a conversation topic for days at the coffee shop. It strikes me, though, that most folks in this region are well past the point in our history where we sit around the coffee shop taking stock of what the rest of the country or the world thinks of us. Most of us are sufficiently informed by reading, travel, associations or television, to have a far more balanced view of ourselves — and of the problems with which the rest of the country and the world wrestle, often unsuccessfully. For good or bad, we have become ordinary.
Truth is we don’t much focus anymore whether we live up to or disprove the expectations of folks elsewhere, or whether the ignorance about this region can be cured. In the past three decades, four Presidents have been Southerners, during which time the world’s media has flocked to this region to explain its “Southern-fried” this or that. If ignorance persists and if the South continues to get a “bad press,” the problem is elsewhere, not in the South.
