slightly too much given to dark thoughts and bloody recreations; to snickering at out-of-state license plates in the intervals of their offenses against chastity with either domestic animals or (the fact must be faced) with members of their immediate families. An area where all politics is yokel.
Moynihanâs suggestive choice of phrase was to be echoed very quickly, when, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had to defend his tragic and accidental incumbency against Barry Goldwater. Senator Goldwater had been visiting New York, where he tried to cash an Arizona check and to his fury was refused. It might be better for all concerned, he harrumphed, if the northeastern seaboard were sawed off the country and allowed to float away. He was later stomped and whomped by LBJ in the election (the last election in which both nominees were Southerners, unless you count George Bush Sr. as a Texan), but never since has a majority of white males, let alone in the South, voted for a Democrat. In 1956, when Adlai Stevenson was being trounced by Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, Democrats on Election Night could cheer as Alabama and Mississippi and the Carolinas came through for them, as they nearly always had ever since Reconstruction.
So in some ways we are looking at an inversion of an old picture. Not that it lacks contradictions: I interviewed Barry Goldwater for Vanity Fair on the occasion of his retirement from the Senate, and he was at his most vocal when denouncing the arrogant behavior of the Christian right. (âKicking Jerry Falwell in the assâ was, I clearly recall, among his ambitions.) More recently, I was speaking with my friend Philip Bobbitt, the nephew of LBJ and a famous Texas liberal, who teaches law at the University of Texas at Austin, opposes capital punishment, and was a senior director on Clintonâs National Security Council. âIf I am traveling overseas and people ask me where Iâm from,â he said as we looked out onto Austinâs capitol dome, which had been inaugurated by his great-grandfather (and built to be fourteen feet higher than the original, in Washington), âI always say Iâm from Texas.â
â¢Â  â¢Â  â¢
Like Moliereâs M. Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme , who was astonished to find that he had been speaking prose all his life, I was startled to realize when I embarked on this voyage that I have lived in the South for twenty-three years, or for most of my adult life.The Mason-Dixon Line is well to the north of us Washingtonians, dividing the country where Maryland becomes Pennsylvania and just below the stretch of high ground consecrated to Gettysburg. Aspects of the District of Columbia are Dixie-ish enough: it gets very hot and muggy in the summer, and its neighborhoods are very segregated. Its very existence is the result of a dinner-table carve-up between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, whereby Hamilton got his national debtâconsolidation scheme and the Virginian slavers got a huge land deal for a plot of swamp. But our memorials tend to commemorate the Union more than the Confederacy, and we have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and at election times in the District they weigh the votes rather than count them, and the Democrats always win either way.
Opinions differ about how far you have to drive into Virginia before you have entered the South proper. Some say Fredericksburg, hometown of the great Florence King, authoress of Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting? âRedneckâ is only a rude word for Wasp. In any case, I have long believed that the acronym certainly doesnât need its W and barely needs its p . (William F. Buckley Jr. is Waspy despite being Irish and Catholic; George Wallace could never have achieved Waspdom in spite of being aggressively white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Thatâs because âWaspâ is a term of class, not ethnicityâanother trick you can learn in
Moynihanâs suggestive choice of phrase was to be echoed very quickly, when, in 1964, Lyndon Johnson had to defend his tragic and accidental incumbency against Barry Goldwater. Senator Goldwater had been visiting New York, where he tried to cash an Arizona check and to his fury was refused. It might be better for all concerned, he harrumphed, if the northeastern seaboard were sawed off the country and allowed to float away. He was later stomped and whomped by LBJ in the election (the last election in which both nominees were Southerners, unless you count George Bush Sr. as a Texan), but never since has a majority of white males, let alone in the South, voted for a Democrat. In 1956, when Adlai Stevenson was being trounced by Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, Democrats on Election Night could cheer as Alabama and Mississippi and the Carolinas came through for them, as they nearly always had ever since Reconstruction.
So in some ways we are looking at an inversion of an old picture. Not that it lacks contradictions: I interviewed Barry Goldwater for Vanity Fair on the occasion of his retirement from the Senate, and he was at his most vocal when denouncing the arrogant behavior of the Christian right. (âKicking Jerry Falwell in the assâ was, I clearly recall, among his ambitions.) More recently, I was speaking with my friend Philip Bobbitt, the nephew of LBJ and a famous Texas liberal, who teaches law at the University of Texas at Austin, opposes capital punishment, and was a senior director on Clintonâs National Security Council. âIf I am traveling overseas and people ask me where Iâm from,â he said as we looked out onto Austinâs capitol dome, which had been inaugurated by his great-grandfather (and built to be fourteen feet higher than the original, in Washington), âI always say Iâm from Texas.â
â¢Â  â¢Â  â¢
Like Moliereâs M. Jourdain in Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme , who was astonished to find that he had been speaking prose all his life, I was startled to realize when I embarked on this voyage that I have lived in the South for twenty-three years, or for most of my adult life.The Mason-Dixon Line is well to the north of us Washingtonians, dividing the country where Maryland becomes Pennsylvania and just below the stretch of high ground consecrated to Gettysburg. Aspects of the District of Columbia are Dixie-ish enough: it gets very hot and muggy in the summer, and its neighborhoods are very segregated. Its very existence is the result of a dinner-table carve-up between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, whereby Hamilton got his national debtâconsolidation scheme and the Virginian slavers got a huge land deal for a plot of swamp. But our memorials tend to commemorate the Union more than the Confederacy, and we have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and at election times in the District they weigh the votes rather than count them, and the Democrats always win either way.
Opinions differ about how far you have to drive into Virginia before you have entered the South proper. Some say Fredericksburg, hometown of the great Florence King, authoress of Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting? âRedneckâ is only a rude word for Wasp. In any case, I have long believed that the acronym certainly doesnât need its W and barely needs its p . (William F. Buckley Jr. is Waspy despite being Irish and Catholic; George Wallace could never have achieved Waspdom in spite of being aggressively white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Thatâs because âWaspâ is a term of class, not ethnicityâanother trick you can learn in
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