DOWN IN THE BOONDOCKS
TERZIAN, PHILIP
Casual DOWN IN THE BOONDOCKS John McCain of Arizona chose to introduce Sarah Palin of Alaska to the Republican ticket in Dayton, Ohio, of all places. There are good reasons why Ohio’s...
...Casual DOWN IN THE BOONDOCKS John McCain of Arizona chose to introduce Sarah Palin of Alaska to the Republican ticket in Dayton, Ohio, of all places...
...There are good reasons why Ohio’s sixth largest city was chosen for this honor, I am sure...
...I asked him if he planned to drive from Pennsylvania to Florida, and he literally reared back in horror...
...Then there was The Burning Bed (1984), the made-for-TV version of Faith McNulty’s bestseller about a woman who killed her wife-beating husband by setting him on fi re...
...Langer really wants to rub up against toxic regional prejudice, she should tell people she’s from the South...
...No one thought she was joking...
...For if Ms...
...Are you kidding...
...A New Englander by way of New York, she had not noticed the incongruity...
...but the venue seemed to annoy a young editorial aide at the Washington Post who grew up in Dayton and wrote a piece lamenting McCain’s political calculation...
...With my name...
...I’m sympathetic, of course, but only up to a point...
...It was she who fi rst drew my attention to the remarkable things nonsoutherners seem to believe about the South and trained my ear to listen for the astonishing things people will say when southerners identify themselves...
...When my wife was a student at Williams College (Massachusetts), she told her New England prep school-bred classmates that the state of Tennessee had issued her a pair of shoes to avoid embarrassing her home state...
...Strictly speaking, I am not a southerner myself: I was born below the Mason-Dixon line (Maryland), but both my parents were from Philadelphia, my Civil War ancestor fought in the Union army, and I grew up in the Washington area, which, while southern to some degree, would not strike anyone from, say, Alabama as Dixie...
...I once sat next to Faith McNulty at dinner and related my amusement at the spectacle of indigenous bad guys with southern accents in Michigan...
...This is my brother Darryl and this is my other brother Darryl”— to thunderous studio laughter...
...Everybody knows that as goes Ohio, so goes the nation,” wrote Emily Langer...
...I do remember telling him that, all things being equal, he was undoubtedly in greater peril in certain parts of L.A...
...But the buttering up of heartland swing states every fourth year seems a little rich because—let’s be honest— back in Washington, midwesterners aren’t exactly viewed as the cream of the national crop...
...But I have lived in the South, and, most important, my alluring wife hails from Nashville...
...To which she responded with a short personal list of distinguished Ohioans—for example, Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex and the City—and a long list of casual insults she has suffered since arriving in Washington...
...A few examples from popular culture are instructive...
...Farrah’s violent husband and his drunken, guncrazy pals all spoke a thick southern patois—in Michigan—while she and her friends at the shelter sounded as if they had just left the refectory at Bryn Mawr...
...PHILIP TERZIAN...
...Readers will recall Newhart, the 1980s sitcom starring Bob Newhart that was set at a Vermont—I repeat, Vermont—inn...
...Langer, as I’ve said to my wife: Things could be worse...
...Every week three hayseeds would walk into the lobby, and the one who could speak would introduce himself, in a broad southern accent—“Hi, I’m Larry...
...Everyone imagines she grew up within striking distance of a herd of cattle, and her boss at the Post gets Ohio confused with Iowa...
...Langer’s midwesterners, southerners are frequently perceived as dim, especially in high-octane venues like Manhattan or Martha’s Vineyard, but unlike midwesterners, they are also seen as vaguely ma lig nant, products of a sinister social culture...
...One day one of the editorial secretaries, a gay Jewish male, told me he was traveling back East to visit his family in Philadelphia and Miami...
...he exclaimed...
...Her classmates at Georgetown assumed she must have been relieved to “get out” of Ohio, and one was amazed that a midwesterner could do well in Italian...
...My favorite example of this sort of misapprehension occurred during my tenure at the Los Angeles Times...
...than in the whole state of Mississippi, but he had the healthy skepticism of anyone who’s watched In the Heat of the Night...
...Like Ms...
...Clearly he had seen enough movies and TV dramas—or comedies, for that matter—to know that the minute he slowed down at a traffi c light in, say, North Carolina, the local Klan would identify a Jewish Yankee motorist, surround his car, taunt him, drag him from the wheel, and—well, you’ve seen Deliverance...
...The movie was set in Michigan, and the wife was played by Farrah Fawcett, of Charlie’s Angels fame...
...Yes, it’s irritating (as a midwesterner/ southerner) to confront bias and condescension, but imagine telling people you’re from New Jersey...
...So I say to Ms...
Vol. 14 • September 2008 • No. 1
