Vulnerable Southerner

When I was a young girl, I wanted nothing more than to have a cute nice husband and live in a cute nice house. And maybe eventually have some cute nice kids. We would all love each other in that perfectly blissful static way you imagine love to be when you’re young, a love that existed outside time and its influences. Of course this is not what I really wanted; it was just the only seeming option available at the time because in the South in the late nineteen eighties if you were a girl, being pretty was the ultimate goal nothing else mattered. Pretty girls could get away with virtually anything and to my young mind all roads pointed to marriage and family a sort of cloying overwhelming feminine security. A funny thing happened though in the mid-nineteen nineties, well a funny thing for me at least, I discovered a little show, Canadian in origin titled (rather unspectacularly), Fashion Television, hosted by an articulate brunette Fashion Television opened the door to a world I had only formerly glimpsed during trips to the museum, a sort of rarefied art world. In this world I learned that the rules were different, pretty wasn’t always obvious and women could do things outside the confines of family. They could wear giant sunglasses and be difficult; they could be artists, live in places like Vienna and be of an indeterminate age and consistently immaculately turned out. I suppose that fashion is an odd way to have a sort of feminist awaking, but aesthetics are important and clothes can be subversive, fashion can shock, and shock me it did. Right out of my Lisa Frank inspired sweat shirts and scrunchies. Now I’ve followed the call of aesthetics to a sort of personal end and I see that I have in fact paid a price for this. Some part of me successfully emulated those impossible women I found in fashion and I for me the process of becoming this ‘other’ person was both alienating and enlightening. So what’s the point? Aesthetics do mean something but they don’t mean everything. Like the ‘living saint’ from The Great Beauty says, ‘Why do I only eat roots? Because roots are important.’  I keep this in mind as I retrace some of my own roots/routes.

Southerner here an irreligious, liberal, well-educated Southerner. Oh and I am a lady which adds that extra bit of ‘special’ when living in the South...but what I really want to know is-is it like okay to be from the South these days? I ask because since returning to the United States from planet Europe I’ve noticed quite the odd bit of anti-Southern prejudice in the mainstream media. Now, I acknowledge that the South has played a hand in this between its own complicated (and DARK) history and its confused present. I get it our politicians sometimes say and do ridiculous things and I often wonder is this a sort of rebellion against mainstream media and thought. So where does that leave us liberal Southerners? Many would say that leaves us not in the American South, that it leaves us with one option, to move away. This is a pretty crap choice for a number of reasons, one it feels like the cowards way out and secondly the amount of sheer prejudice you encounter outside the South from just being born there starts to make the anti-liberal crapolla you put up with while living in said Southern portion of the United States pretty minor by comparison. So to answer the question, no it’s not okay to be from the American South and not want to be either seen as part of the cast of Honey Boo Boo, a Duggar, a card carrying NRA member or a Tea Party supporter. The real enemy here, the fly in the ointment in liberal thought in the United States is that it has absorbed a sort of elitist class structure that if I had to put money on it I bet came from academia. Lately, this elitism has manifested itself in a nasty sort of regional prejudice.  Borrowing tenants from an area that exists within a rigid hierarchy (lots of genuflexion in academia) has hurt liberal thought because it has become divorced from populism. This has created a vacuum that the Republican Party has taken full advantage of and however you feel about their politics they have been brilliant at responding rising popular anxiety. The rising division between conservative and liberal thought in the US coupled with increased inequality in access to resources and income is I think a real threat to the stability of the United States. I wish we were working with each other because as it stands now these feels like a great pull between ideologies. So maybe the more important question for the US to ask as it heads into another election is;  what kind of country do we want to be?