Southern fried and thankful

My, my, oh my. I've read something this morning that truly, truly, truly boggles my mind (insert jokes here about my Southern mind or lack thereof).
This morning I've read a column, an op-ed column (which for my Southern brethren means opinion-editorial) in the local newspaper.

Now, the headline doesn't do the column justice, as many headlines I've read this morning do not. This morning, for example, I've read these standard news headlines on Yahoo news:
A) Kim K. posts racy photo online (seems this is should be in the obvious category, or the "oh, really" category or even the "really, a Kardashian does something stupid category? Really, are you sure it was a Kardashian? Really? Sure?" category).
B) Frustrated Gingrich: No one understands me (If that is true, he should be happy about that.)
C)  Man says Lohan grazed knee with her Porsche (what surprises us most in this headline is not that Lohan grazed a knee -- although this man should feel like the luckiest person on the planet that she only grazed a knee though we all probably wonder how one grazes a ijust knee in the first place -- but that Lohan still can afford a Porsche)

Nah. the column I read this morning was headlined Candidates are cheesy, not grits. The piece was written by Kathleen Parker for the Washington Post. I assumed she would be taking a shot at Republican candidates being as she is writing for the Washington Post and it says candidates and cheesy and grits in the same headline.

Turns out the piece was a well-done defense of Southerndom. Left me with something that looks like tick-fever or somesuch. Lots of grinnin and a bit of pickin, as it were.

She made these points:
When members of the national media come around South Carolina (where she has lived for much of the past 25 years making her an expert), every four years, they must go looking for the stereotyped residents they have memorized from afar. Those characters are dumb, dumber and regular dumbest southern folk. They are the types who drink nothing but sweet tea and eat nothing that doesn't have turnip greens (green, not the ecky root parts) as a side dish. The types who would fry anything including a pickle. The types who begin every sentence with y'all or ya'll (spelling depending upon the region of the South).  The types who would ... you get the picture.

Without stealing her entire piece, let me say that her most wonderful point is that some Southerners have actually ventured outside their state's borders, some have actually had an education, some are actually smarter than a box of rocks and some are just plain OK. She says then, why is it okay to pick on plain ol' white Southerners and yet if that same sentence, opinion, joke were offered about, oh, Jews, Hispanics, African-Americans and/or Democrats, it would be labeled racist?

She actually wrote this. In an opinion piece. For the Washington Post. She did.

After wiping up the grits that had been spat like a good morning chew, I pondered the significance of this. Uh, there is none. Not really. She wrote something that needed to be pointed out, but for the most part those that needed to read this won't and those that don't get it and never will will dismiss it as a Southerner defending Southerners. She isn't. She wasn't.

We, these aforementioned Southeners, don't see it that way at least partially because that despite the fact that South Carolina has South in its own name we don't believe the Carolinas are the South in the first place. They ain't. She isn't.

Nah. We see it simply as someone with the obvious truth handing over that truth to those dastardly varmints who live in other parts of the country, and those varmints won't listen in the first place. They never have, so they never will. They just wait for us to add vowels where they don't need to be added and wait for us to take out words that need to be there so they can call us stupid and talk bout the color of our necks.

Heck, I once saw Neil Young sing Southern Man in a gig in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Now, who's the dumb one there friend?

Anway, for those varmints, everyone speaks -- and acts -- like Andy Griffith in No Room for Sergeants.  Always havenun.

We speak in "themy thar parts" language that everyone who has ever made a movie about the South think we all use in an accent that sounds like a good ol' car cranking and nothing like what we really sound. Ever heard an actor trying to speak Southern? Ever think they sound just like good ol' Aunt Minnie? Didn't think so.

Everyone thinks that everything down here that is served in a restaurant (not to mention homes) is chicken fried.

They think that every country lawyer down here keeps his true brilliant self cloaked until that magic moment when he (or in a very rare bit of Southern turnaround in which only Reese Witherspoon could star) outsmarts all them thar Harvardy types.

And they think that intelligence itself is hidden from all the Northern carpetbaggers until that ....oh, you get the picature. Hollywood thinks everything would believe in the keep intelligence hidden department and that the nation and world would then laugh its head off at the fact Harvardy types would be out-smarted. There's genius in the writing if the obvious smarty pants are out-smarted. No one would ever have any trouble believing the comedy in that. So they use it a multitude of times, particularly in romatic-comedys that, again, must star Reese Witherspoon.

Despite what you've seen, we're not all Christian, we're not all those folks in the Inherit the Wind side of evolution and the Bible, we're not all racists and rednecks and such, though some of us are. We're just folks, plain and simple and sometimes poor and sometimes rich and the twain shall meet nownagin.That's Shania Twain, by the way.

Southern folk love their fried green tomatoes, love their cornbread, love their deer and cow and everything meat but hound dog meat. We're not all Hatfields and McCoys, though you might find some kin among us. We're not all black and white, though there is some of both in everything but our churches. We're working on that, too.

We've always been Republican except when we were Democrat.We've always been union except when we thought unions were from the Devil. We've always hated change, except when we thought change would do us some good.

We've always been different from the North, and from the West. We don't consider anything as being from the East because everything is either North or West.

We're not especially special, especially just because of whoin we're kin to. We are a little bit Country and yet we're some Allmann brothers rock 'n roll thrown in there. We're Elvis and we're Patsy and Loretta. We're Frederick Douglass and we're William Faulkner. We're Margaret Mitchell and we're John Kennedy Poole and his Confederacy of Dunces (which is a whole other column about not being how we're protrayed). We are John Grisham, who in a fit of grace saw fit to go to both Ole Miss and Mississippi State thus becoming the first person to paint and toilet paper only half of himself each year.

We're Archie and Peyton and Eli, and football on (Friday and Saturday) and Sundays, but we're also Pistol Pete and Will Clark and Tennessee Lady Vols and Louisiana Tech Lady Techsters basketball.

We're a little bit of everything rolled in corn meal and plopped in a deep fryer. We always have been. I suspect we always will be. That doesn't make us dumb or backward. For the most part, we, in fact, are not. We are, for lack of a better word or description, simply us.

That's whom we have always been. I just never thought a Washington Post writer would notice. I never thought the Washington Post would run it. Maybe that's a bigger surprise than Watergate, which by the way, didn't happen in the South.