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Degringolade in Dixie
| Article
# : |
10980 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
7,699 Words |
| Author
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
James J. Thompson, Jr., is the book review editor for The New
Oxford Review. He has written three books: Tried as by Fire:
Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Mercer University Press, 1982); Christian Classics Revisited
(Ignatius Press, 1983); and Fleeing the Whore of Babylon: A
Modern Conversion Story (Christian Classics, Inc., 1986). He
has coedited (with George M. Curtis III) The Southern Essays
of Richard M. Weaver (Liberty Press, 1987). |
It has happened countless times. A Southerner, homesick and lonely, sits in a bar in Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, nursing a glass of Jack Daniels and musing upon the asperities of Yankee hospitality. A stranger approaches and orders a straight bourbon on the rocks. The forlorn Southerner's eyes light with merriment: he has caught the unmistakable intonations of a Southern accent. A kinsman! Far into the night the two men trade rounds of whiskey and swap yarns about coonhounds, catfish, tent revivals, Ole Miss beauty queens, Bear Bryant, and half-witted filling-station attendants. Having affirmed a bond of mutual understanding, they stagger off to their rooms, engulfed in the happy haze induced by well-aged whiskey.
To Northerners this scene appears quaint, curious, droll, or even downright repellent. What is it with these Southerners? What makes them so clannish and resistant to national homogeneity? My God, don't they realize that life offers more than flea-ridden dogs, feminine pulchritude, fleet halfbacks, and devotion to Dixie? With knowing winks the Northerners in the bar dismiss the two men as simple-minded good ol'boys, samples of the South's contribution to regional local color. But are they?
In this case, one is a successful businessman from Atlanta who has an MBA from the University of Virginia, serves on the mayor's advisory council, and ushers at the First Presbyterian Church. The other holds a PhD from Yale, has written two books on Kierkegaard, and teaches philosophy at Vanderbilt. Both have left the farms and folkways of their ancestors far behind, and their lives are governed by the same necessities and demands that order the existence of similar people in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Denver, and Seattle.
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