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; 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.
“Everybody knows that as goes Ohio, so goes the nation,” wrote Emily Langer. “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.”
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. 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. Everyone imagines she grew up within striking distance of a herd of cattle, and her boss at the Post gets Ohio confused with Iowa.
I’m sympathetic, of course, but only up to a point. For if Ms. Langer really wants to rub up against toxic regional prejudice, she should tell people she’s from the South.
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. But I have lived in the South, and, most important, my alluring wife hails from Nashville. It was she who first drew my attention to the remarkable things non-southerners seem to believe about the South and trained my ear to listen for the astonishing things people will say when southerners identify themselves.
Like Ms. 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. 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. No one thought she was joking.
A few examples from popular culture are instructive. Readers will recall Newhart, the 1980s sitcom starring Bob Newhart that was set at a Vermont–I repeat, Vermont–inn. 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. This is my brother Darryl and this is my other brother Darryl”–to thunderous studio laughter.
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 fire. The movie was set in Michigan, and the wife was played by Farrah Fawcett, of Charlie’s Angels fame. Farrah’s violent husband and his drunken, gun-crazy 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. 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. A New Englander by way of New York, she had not noticed the incongruity.
My favorite example of this sort of misapprehension occurred during my tenure at the Los Angeles Times. 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. I asked him if he planned to drive from Pennsylvania to Florida, and he literally reared back in horror.
“Are you kidding?” he exclaimed. “With my name?”
Clearly he had seen enough movies and TV dramas–or comedies, for that matter–to know that the minute he slowed down at a traffic 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. I do remember telling him that, all things being equal, he was undoubtedly in greater peril in certain parts of L.A. than in the whole state of Mississippi, but he had the healthy skepticism of anyone who’s watched In the Heat of the Night.
So I say to Ms. Langer, as I’ve said to my wife: Things could be worse. Yes, it’s irritating (as a midwesterner/southerner) to confront bias and condescension, but imagine telling people you’re from New Jersey!
PHILIP TERZIAN
