I’ve lived in Central Texas, South Georgia, Southwestern Virginia, and Northern Virginia before the terminal sprawl. I spend extended time with family in North Georgia, Alabama, and Upstate South Carolina. But I also regularly travel throughout the mid-Atlantic and am currently in exile in semi-rural Pennsylvania with the Amish and Mennonite setting the tone.
I have found, without exception, outside of the urban and suburban boundaries and regardless of the place, the people are remarkably the same. The same trucks, the same Carhartt jackets, the same Ariat and Justin work boots, the same agricultural and blue collar economy, the same fondness for BBQ, the same musical preferences, the same hunting and gun culture. These areas vote the same, attend church more than the adjacent urban population and maintain a twang in their voice that is sometimes hard to distinguish from their counterparts a thousand miles away.
I see as many battle flags and license plate frames in Southeastern Pennsylvania and Cecil County Maryland as I did recently in Cullman, Alabama.
This is not to say that regionally there aren’t important differences and sentiments. There are. But country people share affinities and similarities that are welcomingly familiar everywhere.
However, there is something more.
Even in rural western Massachusetts or New Hampshire, while they have a pride of place, I’ve found that the South is looked up to. Consciously or not, there is satisfaction, even comfort, knowing that what is perceived as the Old South, though beleaguered, is still alive. There is a recognition that it is important that it survives.
When VMI removed Jackson’s statue, the outrage in my temporary Pennsylvanian outpost was far more profound than it just being another loss in the “culture wars.” The reactions here were akin to the conversations related to headlines of European countries suffering their various cultural losses; an existential connection exists and we know that these losses matter for us as well.
There really is a sense in other rural regions that the South is a mystical epicenter, a place from the outside that seems larger than life, representing the last best hope for a way of life and being that needs to be preserved…If the sun sets on Dixie and the light goes out, we are doomed, we will all soon be swallowed in darkness. (This curious tension between the South and the rest of America, perhaps even the rest of the world, was an observation and recurring theme in the novels of Covington, Louisiana’s Walker Percy.)
Regardless the reality, we have an obligation to not let this light be extinguished and accept this task not as a burden, but a privilege.
‘Cause down in Alabama, you can run, but you sure can’t hide.
I think it’s important to distinguish between the end of empires and nations from that of a civilization from The End…they are all on different timelines. We run the race until the very end and I believe that while the empire is rapidly crashing, the things that make the West timeless and good are in many ways wrapped up in what makes Dixie as an idea, if not a reality, worth fighting for…until the end. You don’t feel this in rural Utah or Maryland. You still do in the deep south. It may be Quixotic and a doomed effort but making the stand is I believe how we will be judged, certainly judged by the next generation if the timeline is longer than we think. Don’t give up.
hear! hear!
Any fate but submission