The Cranky Yankee Returns

A Minnesota Yankee in King Trump’s Court

Listen up, you dour Minnesotans.  If you ever got out of the state to head south – except to Disney World in Florida – you’d have an idea how different the U.S. South is from the North, and especially from the cold North in Minnesota. A North which is not the 'Midwest,' in spite of our geographically-challenged media.  You can’t discover the world just by looking at documentaries or movies.

Some reflections while driving:

Stone Mountain, GA.  On one side a nice walk up a hill.  On the other...

One thing you start to notice is all the junk on southern freeways – plastic bags, shredded tires, dead animals, dead cars.  It’s no wonder Lady Bird had that “Keep America Beautiful’ program.  She was from Texas.  Those mournful cars, stickered or not, forlorn, left behind in some kind of poverty rapture. There must be stats on broken car to road ratios which closely correlate with low wages and poverty.  In Kentucky they don’t pick up the dead animals, which are shredded beyond recognition over time.  In the North we have groups that volunteer to pick up the garbage – adopt a highway.  Not so much in the South.  I guess they figure their jail gangs will do all the cleaning up for them. If you’ve read Bowling Alone you know the South has fewer social groups beyond family and church.  And it shows.  I did see one courageous young man blue bagging piles of garbage along a Tennessee freeway about every 100 yards.   Lots of bags and that was it.

The majority of the South was built yesterday.  Before the 1960s and the advent of air conditioning, most people didn’t want to boil to death and so the “Sun Belt” stayed sunny and empty except for the people that hadn’t escaped.  Then it changed and they had to build mini-malls, one story chain stores, fast-food joints, parking lots and roads everywhere.  The ranch houses in the woods followed.  They brag about all the northern ‘snow birds’ who come south for the winter.  Well, there are also ‘heat birds’ who go North for the summer.  They don’t talk about them.  It’s not hot in the summer, it’s not!.  (This year was one of the hottest and wettest years in Southern history for Southern cities.)

Subject to hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, killing heat and heavy rains, the South is like a punch drunk Christian Hero if you watch enough of the Weather Channel.  Especially that Dixie alley sky river coming out of the boiling Gulf, stretching across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky.  You can only tell the Weather Channel reporter that “The only important thing is that we're alive” and “Thank God!” once while looking at your decimated home and crushed or flooded pickup.  But twice?!  After that you have to start to wonder.  Granular change … very granular…

Then there is ‘revenge’ driving, a little cousin of road rage.  This usually involves people playing games on freeways by getting in front of you and then driving really slowly.  Repeatedly.  Usually in beat-up cars, because taking your anger out on other people on the freeway beats standing up to the local capitalist.  Did I say that?  I did.  Not to mention the clowns in their jacked-up Silverado’s with airplane light packages on the front of their pickups, blinding everyone, their version of a Monster Truck rodeo.  I suspect the beds of those trucks have never seen a scratch.

You might know of all the factories that have moved or have located in the South.  I’ll just mention auto plants.  In one drive through Alabama I counted 3 plants just off the freeways – Mercedes-Benz, Honda and Hyundai.  VW is in Chattanooga, Tennessee ("We Sign Off..." ad).  Toyota has ones in Kentucky, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama, Nissan has them in Tennessee and Mississippi, Kia has one in Georgia, Mazda in Alabama, Volvo and BMW in South Carolina and BMW in Alabama. The foreign capitalists know where the cheap labor can be found! But they are not alone. GM has them in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas.  Ford has them in Missouri and Kentucky.  Fiat-Chrysler is the only one that does not have plants in the South. If you want to know where Detroit went, it mostly went south.

There are no unions in these plants.  2 large recent votes also ‘went south’ for the UAW.  It was not just the opposition of the full range of southern Republican politicians – the modern neo-Confederate factory plantation aristocracy – it was also a split between the more passive and servile workers and the less passive and servile workers.  And I suspect this split is based on gender and color lines.  If you’ve been around middle-aged 'white' male southern workers, they are more servile than in the North, in Minnesota.  A Minnesota worker has some tradition, some dignity, some knowledge that he’s not just a clown or a ‘hand’ or a brown-nose.  Not in the South. Looking up to your betters is big stuff here.  That is because the class and color-caste systems are stronger.

However proletarianization brings forth … proletarians.  Atlanta is home to many large corporations and so attracts labor from the North too. At a bar on North Avenue, the Northside Tavern attracts northern transplants to listen to party blues.  A beautiful blonde in a short dress came down and sat next to me at the bar and we got to talking.  Naturally.  I was wearing a dress jacket and jeans, as I’d come to pick up some friends.  I was not dressed in a NASCAR T-shirt.  At one point she leaned over and said, “Ahm’ pretta sic o’ rednecks…” I had to leave but that little comment tells the tale.  There are granular changes going on, even here.

Spelling Problems.  Jesus is an American Patriot!

This is an area where a Georgia politician can compare Trump to Jesus and the Democrats to Pontius Pilot.  Which tells you that reading more than the Bible might be necessary.  I listened to an hour-long broadcast of Richard Wolff on his Alternative Radio show in southern Illinois around Champagne-Urbana talking about Marxism.  Then I got into Kentucky and the Jesus and anti-abortion billboards, Trump love and monuments to Jefferson Davis accumulated.  An official state park in Fairview, KY celebrates Davis’ birth.  So a note to Joe Biden:  Winning Democratic primaries in most of these states will not help in a general election.  Democrats at their convention might as well ignore them.

Military bases are all over the place.  Most of the bases in the U.S. are located in the South.  I drove by Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Arnold AFB in Tennessee and Dobbins Air Base in Georgia.  Georgia alone has 13 bases. The most notorious is the “School of the Americas” in Fort Benning, Georgia, home to torture training for Latin American thugs. These federal bases provide a large economic stimulus to the communities they are in, dominated by politicians who want to ‘shrink’ federal dollars to anyone but themselves.  And we wonder why the South provides such political support (and personnel) to endless wars.

I go into a Burger King in Tennessee looking for the vegetarian “Impossible Whopper.”  Sorry, but road food is pretty awful and you have to get your breaks when you can.  The store is run by young people spilling food on the floor, not paying attention to anyone waiting to order, basically horsing around.  In Minnesota you do not see that level of chaos in fast food joints.  It is the little things… I left.
P.S. - Another fun southern statistic - Mostly Southern cities lead the country in eviction rates.  Memphis, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas, Richmond, Charleston - we're looking at you.

Other acerbic takes on the South below, use blog search box upper left:  “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “The Neo-Confederate States,” “Florida Will Sink,” “Why the South Lost the Civil War,” “May Day in the Southern U.S.,” “The North is Not ‘The Midwest,’” “Monroe, Alabama & To Kill a Mockingjay,” “Go Set a Watchman,” “Selma,” “Meridian.”

The Cranky Yankee

Athens, Georgia

December 31, 2019