Book Review: ‘Better Off Without ’Em,’ by Chuck Thompson - A ... Cheer for the South's Independence

[Scuba]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/22/books/better-off-without-em-by-chuck-thompson.html?_r=1


A Northern (or Maybe Bronx?) Cheer for the South’s Independence

‘Better Off Without ’Em,’ by Chuck Thompson

But for his new book, Mr. Thompson decided to use wishful thinking as his guide. So he took a tour of the Confederate States of America, the country that might be created if the American South seceded from the American North. He imagines a robust tourist industry attracted to the region’s “indigenous society teeming with underappreciated folk wisdom, ancient values and fascinating dialects.” He suggests that “with time, Americans would start thinking of the South as another Mexico, only with an even more corrupt government.”

...

Off he went, roaming Southern states looking to shoot fish in barrels. Indeed, a measure of this book’s malevolence is the haste with which its author hustles his way to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky. (where he watched a little girl staring at a dinosaur “in silent, imbecilic awe”), to “the honky-tonk badonkiest bar in South Carolina” and to the Redneck Shop in Laurens, S.C., where he could buy a Ku Klux Klan outfit and walk out into the quaint town square “dressed to lynch.”

...

He argues that although outright segregation was outlawed, it has been replaced by a de facto system involving charter schools, private schools and home schooling, leaving public schools at a great disadvantage. An inadequately educated underclass will diminish future tax revenues and hurt Southerners of every stripe. Mr. Thompson points out that most of his (assuredly non-Southern) readers are probably members of the last American generation with a white majority.

When it comes to economics, he considers the long-term consequences of luring foreign business to the South because the labor is cheap. When Mr. Thompson can phrase such thoughts in the ugliest possible terms, he does, writing that Southerners treat outside business interests as a “master caste before whom they kneel like Bourbon street whores on Navy payday.”

[tularetom]

1. Well, they've given us some pretty good music

So there is that...

[Flashmann]

2. Well, they've given us some pretty good music

As well as some real shit.......

[eppur_se_muova]

3. I grew up in the South. The only reason to stay is for the food.

If you want to associate with educated, progressive people, you will find yourself truly "underground" compared to the rest of the society.

BTW, I'm still living here, in one of the reddest of the red states. Trying to change anything for the better is a real exercise in futility; politics (and courts) in the state is controlled by Repugs.