At least as far back as 1830, folks have been predicting that the South would soon be sucked into the mainstream of national culture and emerge from its baptism thoroughly cleansed of its manifold sins and virtually indistinguishable from any other part of this great country of ours. Up until the mid 1960s or so, those of the liberal persuasion thought that this would be an unmitigated blessing. When cities outside the South began to explode in ghetto riots and violent temper tantrums over busing, however, and the deindustrializing Rustbelt began to hemorrhage jobs and people, the prospect of seeing Dixie Americanized became noticeably less appealing. In 1990 when Hodding Carter joined the 160 year-old conga line of southern obituarists by declaring “The End of the South,” he made it clear he wasn’t exactly turning handsprings over the fact that “what is lurching into existence in the South is purely and contemporaneously mainstream American, for better and for worse. “ Eighteen years later, Newsweek’s cover is now also proclaiming “The End of the South,” and offering two excellent discourses on the region by two excellent southern boys, editor Jon Meacham, and Paris Bureau Chief Christopher Dickey.
Dickey is the son of Deliverance author James Dickey, and at one point during his sojourn last month through Tennessee, Georgia and the Carolinas, he sees a T-shirt that admonishes “Paddle Faster, I Hear Banjo Music!” Roughly following the trail of some Yankee pyromaniac named “Sherman,” (Note to self: Google this guy.) Dickey finds a region thoroughly transformed economically, and affected dramatically by in-migration as well as immigration. Viewing the South through the lens of the 2008 presidential race, however, he thinks the campaign’s racial overtones have reopened wounds or at least re-aggravated old raw spots. Among those who will not support Obama because he is black, he finds “the obvious suspects, people like Dent Myers, a relic collector and self-caricaturing bigot in Kennesaw, Ga., north of Atlanta. (His shop, Wildman's, [which he calls “the best little warhouse in Kennesaw”] is full of the crazy literature of the unreconstructed South, as well as guns, swords, Ku Klux Klan hoods and scurrilous bumper stickers.) Dent argues that when Southerners criticize Obama, "They say, 'He's a Muslim, he's a mulatto Muslim, or quadroon Muslim … [only because] they don't want to use the old N word."Dickey knows his homeland well enough to know that out people like Myers are still out there, but he is clearly shaken to discover that “even a third cousin of mine in the mountains of North Carolina, an independent-minded Democrat who voted for Gore in 2000 and Bush in 2004, said he can't bring himself to vote for Obama, either. Why? "Because I believe he is a Muslim," said my cousin. Not so, I said. He was raised a Christian and is a practicing Christian. My cousin shook his head. "I just don't believe him," he said.The most telling and, to me, most troubling example of the lunacy-masquerading-as-fact that has been embraced by those who don’t want to explain their opposition to Obama in racial terms came from a 12 year boy participating in a civil war re-enactment:
"There are too many chances we would take if he became president, you know what I mean?" I said I wasn't sure I did. "I don't know if it's a myth or it's true," said the boy, "but they say that they caught him trying to sneak Iraqi soldiers into the United States."
This example suggests that dumb stuff sounds just as dumb coming “out of the mouths of babes” as it did when it originally came out of the mouths of their parents. However, neither it nor the case of Dickey’s cousin strike me as having any peculiarly southern ring to them. I will concede that the South probably has more than its share of out-front entrepreneurial bigots like the aforementioned Mr. Dent (who sells a bumper sticker asking “Will the U.S. Become an Obama-Nation?”) but his kind are hardly non-existent above the Mason-Dixon line, and, as we saw again and again in the primaries, neither is the frantic search to find reasons not to support Obama.
By the same token, black southerners’ intense emotional investment in Barack Obama’s candidacy and their rekindled mistrust and suspicion that the white political establishment will never countenance his election is to be expected in a place where the war against Jim Crow was actually fought and finally—and at great price--won. However, as polls and turnouts for rallies and levels of enthusiasm at those rallies clearly show, black southerners are not the only African Americans who are “all in” for Obama
In fact, what I believe Dickey has captured is what his editor-man Meacham describes as the South’s oft –observed capacity to “exemplify, if sometimes in an exaggerated way, much of what the nation thinks and feels.” Besides, he insists, the South “ just ain’t that different anymore.”
Meacham seems more sanguine about Obama’s prospects in the old Confederacy than Dickey and believes that at the very least “many whites who have been skeptical of Democrats since the civil-rights era are not going to make a reflexive choice in November but will—like many other Americans—carefully weigh Obama against McCain.”
Meacham also finds potentially good news for Obama in an anecdote passed on by “a friend of mine was buying a plate lunch from the Church of God on Natural Bridge Road in Franklin County, Tenn., in July—you have to get there early, because the fried chicken goes fast—and overheard a couple of white truckers denouncing President Bush and the GOP in virulent terms. If you are a Republican in a nation at war and you have lost the truck drivers at the Church of God on Natural Bridge Road, you cannot be sure of anything.”Dickey reports that he didn’t see a single McCain bumper sticker in ten days of driving through the South. I am quite certain that I haven’t a half dozen bumper stickers and yard signs combined in my wanderings across the South during the last seven months. On the other hand, I haven’t seen as many signs or stickers for the Democratic nominee since Jimmy Carter ran in 1976, and not just in liberal college towns like Athens, either.
Still, anger and disgust with Bush and indifference to McCain in August do not an Obama victory in November assure. Although it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Obama run as well or better with white voters than John Kerry did, when it comes down to it, I expect the great majority of the white southerners who voted for Bush last time to resign themselves ultimately to voting for McCain this time, and as far as I know, unenthusiastic votes count just the same as the other kind. Meanwhile those whose can’t quite manage even a default vote for McCain are a heckuva lot more likely to sit this one out than to go for his opponent. Obama may have a decent shot in Virginia, but whatever slim chance he has in any other state in the lower right-hand quadrant is likely to turn less on how many Democratic voters he gets to the polls than on the number of would-be Republican voters that Johnny Mac manages to keep away.
