old south, new south

Rolled out of Clarksville under muggy blue skies, following the cumberland river for a while before turning past fort campbell. puffy white clouds are a good sign for the ride, of course, but with the open sky overhead so much of the charm of riding, the streaked colorful dramatic skies around rain are compelling. not much chance of that the farther west I get...but coming back across the northern plains should change that. signs littering the country side showed that it's election season in tennessee, and tennesseeans love their politics. congressmen, state senators, county 'mayors,' clerks, sheriffs -- 'your sheriff,' 'the best choice,' and so on. the most opaque -- 'let's plow congress' in grain processing facility. lots and lots of 'conservative' tossed around. party affiliation doesn't count for much in a midterm election, but conservative colors in shades of red or blue do, apparently. that said, though, there's more than stereotype to the real south...this is the state that produced a vintage southern democrat who morphed into a climate change crusader even as his wife continued to struggle mightily against 'cussing' in music lyrics. I caught a political ad from a candidate for governor in which the candidate proudly trumpeted his support for clean energy and challenged the billions spent on the conflict in Afghanistan. remarkable, that, given that it's hard to imagine those positions in a supposedly more purple ohio right now. but then again, not so remarkable given the 'new south' and 'old south' rhetoric that's also very much on display. the 'new south' from economic development types ('gateway to the new south'), and 'old south motors' on a rundown used car lot and a 'your south' boyscout campground sign festooned with stars and bars. given that the new south is hardly a 'socialist' project -- shiny new research centers and sprawling exurbs full of yankee immigrants -- and the old south is crowded with farmers and unionized textile workers, the divide doesn't align with what we're conditioned to expect.

at the serious serious risk of stabbing at broad explanation for a phenomenon I barely know, the old south is a trenchant defense of a past for the sake of little more than...the past. it's hard to argue against the economic prosperity of the new south model (not that its benefits have trickled out of the metropoleis nor brought any sort of equitable distribution of wealth) and even harder to argue that big cotton and textiles and farming will bring the south 'back.' most notably because that model never really worked out all that well, not recently and not even in the antebellum south. from slavery that benefited only a restricted aristocracy...to sharecroppers and underdeveloped cities and thousands fleeing for northern industrial jobs from 1865 forward, and still wealth tightly controlled by a few. many of the towns I've driven through were never broadly prosperous...unlike what I know of many towns in the rust belt with their grand old neighborhoods and once thriving manufacturing districts. yet a quarter of a million soldiers died for a confederacy that didn't represent (many of) their economic interests, and millions more now defend an old south that has never and never will serve their economic interests. this comes from more than greed and has nothing to do with thinktank ideology/propaganda. for example, it's true that tariffs on foreign imports were a flashpoint in the runup to the civil war, but that was less an ideological point than a visceral reaction to national policy that differently impacted the less industrialized south more than a north that consumed fewer foreign commodities.

the suggestion: that the old south impulse certainly has more than a twinge of dogged resistance to any change, some xenophobia, some racism...but what it's really about is an ingrained discomfort with the social realities of yankee capitalism. I think it's more about southern culture that is (still) based on barter and reciprocal generosity. the southern hospitality thing is not just superficially polite gestures...it's a stronger cultural current that's rooted in a commitment to kin and home(land) and christian charity. not valorizing any of this, but the yankee get-ahead-at-all-costs attitude is incompatible with some fundamental (and apolitical) southern values. this isn't to overdraw some communitarian impulse. instead, in the context of endemic and persistent economic struggles in the south, perhaps yankee-style prosperity looks dangerous illusory. so...what can look like a commitment to failure -- the iconic lazy southerner -- just might represent a sense of lost tradition that is far more compelling than the prosperity northern-style capitalism promises. and I'm seeing more of this in batesville right now...