Prejudice
Have a look at this. (h/t Instapundit). It’s the story of an ignorant college student who dresses up like a muslim and goes to small-town Amerika sure of finding redneck bigots. But she didn’t.
What gets me about this is the incorrigible ignorance of so many leftists. It really doesn’t matter how many times their stereotypes are shown to be false, they stick with them regardless.
Every time the “redneck” stereotype comes up in conversation I try to remind the fools who believe it that most of the great America literature in the last century came from redneck country, above all from Mississippi. Faulkner, Welty, Morris, Tennessee Williams, Grisham…certainly in terms of the size of the population, there is no state that can match Mississippi for talent. New York doesn’t come close, nor does California or Massachusetts, which the elite think of as the sainted islands reserved for deep thinking.
We sent two children to college in Texas, and for many years we have driven back and forth between Washington DC and Houston. To our enormous benefit we have gotten to known Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. People who don’t get to know the South are, like that girl, culturally deprived.
I’ve been to the South once only but I found the people there so honest, hospitable and kind. It’s amazing!
Don’t forget Harper Lee when talking about southern authors.
“Don’t forget Harper Lee when talking about southern authors.”
And her buddy, Truman Capote.
Don’t leave out Flannery O’Connor.
The most striking thing about American intellectual life is the way it has distanced itself from academia and most of the traditional venues in the market of ideas.
On the other hand, the most striking thing about American academic life has become its narrowness, parochialism and superficiality.
For conversation one is far better off with a relatively unschooled person who’s read a few of the right books.
The academic types generally haven’t read any of the important things, and if they’ve read them have missed the point.
The sterile vocabulary of the academic pod people also grates on the nerves.
One of the few fond memories I retain from my own college days many years ago when the rot was just setting in was the following:
We were discussing the period in France after the revolution when the works of the philosophes (Diderot Voltaire etc…) were first being eclipsed, in the early days of the rise of utopian thinking, (Saint Simon and those guys). The professor who had read EVERYTHING was talking about the atmosphere in the intellectual gatherings of the day.
Some student asked if the people involved were suffering from “cognitive dissonance”.
We were then treated to a long talk on the evils of pseudo-scientific neologisms which I remember to this day.
I particularly remember the prof asking in what way that ugly, clumsy sounding word added any meaning to the conversation.
I expect such people have become rare by now.
Are these academics also going to go to the Middle East disguised as (preferably liberal, feminist and gay) Americans, to complete their study into prejudice?
Greetings;
I have always thought that one of the, perhaps, unintended consequences of the military draft was the opportunity to travel America. Back in the late ’60s, I was stationed in Georgia, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas. Having grown up in the insular Bronx, I was somewhat surprised by how much I felt welcomed and enjoyed myself. I came away think that if I hadn’t been from the Bronx, I wouldn’t have minded being from Texas. They had a similar attitude, but in boots.
I read the link – she walked into a BBQ joint? In Alabama, that spells P-O-R-K. I mean, really – no wonder some lady smiled at her – a muslim in a hijab eating pork BBQ.
Sh emust have known it was a joke.