I'll say this: If nothing else, the southern/conservative efforts to revise history vis a vis the civil war are pretty tenacious. Almost be admirable if what it was trying to downplay wasn't so odious. Probably be fine if it was just trying to point out there
were other (smaller) reasons, but as we've seen in the last handful of posts that ain't exactly what's trying to be done.
... is it really so surprising the south doesn't have the most amazing reputation regarding history, though? We've kinda' been the usual final bastion of jackass for the last couple hundred years, and that's above and beyond the whole civil war thing. Sure, there's parts of the other regions of the country that've indulged, but it's tended towards a lot less "part" down here. Got some good shit going out, too, but... yeah.
Culture wise, yeah, there's a negative slant. And again, it's one of those "no shit, sherlock" things. If you've paid attention to it for the last few decades it's not exactly surprising -- most of the positive boils down to resourcefulness and hard work, an appreciation of natural stuff, and to a degree a veneer of politeness and helpfulness... maybe a bit of patriotism, too, vis a vis military enlistment (and not much
else). And only that first pair comes without caveats -- that appreciation is alongside a powerful
dislike for anything else, and I use the word veneer for a bloody reason. That politeness is used as much as a social weapon as anything, that helpfulness is tainted with a
vicious xenophobia that shits on a lot of people, sometimes just folks from the next town over. Then the patriotism leans towards bloodthirsty as goddamn as its kind of
starting point of nastiness. We do a pretty good job of trying to piss on whatever good general good points we got
And I guess the food. We know it largely kills the fuck out you, these days, but it's pretty tasty.
Then there's the
rest of it. Beer (and not in a good sense or a celebration of alcohol culture), a monofocus on hunting/fishing, mechanical stuff, and (a specific handful of) sports, the anti-intellectualism (that shits on most common cultural exports, like writing, art, music*, etc., among the rest of the problems it causes), all the mess involved with the sexism, racism, xenophobia, and so on, the notable veneration of violence (even relative to the
rest of the country)... it just kinda' keeps on going.
Southern culture's got a bad rep because southern culture has
given itself a bad rep. A lot of the shit it promotes is just kinda' detestable, and holds on more due to inertia and stubbornness than anything related to merit. Throw in the association with poverty to top it all off, and there's nothing surprising about the regularly negative evaluation of southern culture. Folks ain't shitting on it just because of where it's coming from. Sodding live this stuff, and the general low opinion isn't exactly inexplicable. Even the internal support is half driven more by dislike of the metaphorical foreigner than anything else. We'll be the most odious bastards in the world if some damn <insert xenophobic slur> tells us to not be.
*We actually do okay, here, but the rub is a lot of the neat stuff we've done or are doing is drowned the bloody hell out by pop country and shitty gospel. There's still bastions of mountain music and zydeco and blues and bluegrass and whatnot lingering around but they can be hard to find a lot of the time.
Country music is Southern now?
Here I thought it was Western, and Bluegrass was Southern. That also seems more like a meme than anything else, but that might be because I live in a semi-rural part of my state.
Nah, country is primarily a southern thing, now, or at least the modern pop country (which is what has the heinous reputation, to the extent that there is one) is. Bluegrass is basically approaching dying down here, and hasn't really been a substantial thing for... longer than I've been alive, really. You can find country or gospel (sometimes rap or rock!) playing on just about every street corner, but if you want to find anything
else (outside of more built up areas, anyway, and even for them you're generally talking more stuff that's
not local; classical, touring bands, etc.) you're going to be hunting. That's almost
especially true for the stuff that used to be more or less specialties.