February 22, 2007 Issue

Entire generations of Americans are about to go through life thinking that Cracker Barrel Restaurants are representative of Southern cooking. Legions of young people are likely to believe that "Racal Flats" is a country music band. Many people today might think that NASCAR began in California, or Nevada or New Hampshire for that matter. Little League participants could be forgiven for thinking that baseball—our national pastime—was invented in the Dominican Republic. Millions of Americans are now under the impression that Southern humor started with the "Redneck Comedy Tour."

Young people today have a difficult time envisioning a South, only 50 years ago, where black people were denied the right to vote, forbidden to sit at lunch counters, refused admission to public schools, and restricted to restroom facilities and water fountains marked "colored only."

Our culture, Southern culture, is endangered. It has been homogenized and sanitized and watered down in a shockingly short time. Rural towns have disappeared, cities have gobbled up surrounding land, and much of the south has become a strip center of corporate expansion. The difference in the commercial area surrounding an interstate exit in Kansas City and one in Atlanta is minimal.

What is to miss most?

In 50 years the Southern accent, in all of its slow, thick, syrupy forms, will be non-existent. Because of the pervasive onslaught of television everyone will talk like Tom Brokaw or Katie Couric. There will be an American accent and it will sound Midwestern.

The Dixie Chicks are not the only musicians banned from country radio. Radio stations now are owned by several giant corporations. They don't play Merle Haggard or Hank Williams or George Jones. And they aren't going to in the future.

NASCAR, and its television partners, has filtered out what true characters were left in that sport. Today's NASCAR stars look like they walked off the set of a soap opera. Of course it is against the law to drink and drive. Fifty years ago some of the great NASCAR drivers used to drink and race. They also used to cheat.
And they would never have been referred to as athletes. Today there is no room for a pot-bellied NASCAR driver.

Baseball used to be a rural pastime as opposed to basketball or football. Now steroids have replaced chewing tobacco and Spanish has just about replaced English as the official language of the sport. A manager needs to be bi-lingual, and in many cases tri-lingual to be understood by his players. The influx of Japanese players has produced a need for translators on many teams. Dizzy Dean, Pee Wee Reese and Casey Stengel were hard to understand when English was the predominant language of the sport. Now baseball is falling under the biblicalcurse of Babel.

Southern literature and the writings of Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Truman Capote and many others are now known primarily by English graduate students at fine universities. Southern humor actually did pre-date Larry "The Cable Guy." Even recent Southern humorists like Lewis Grizzard have been forgotten.

Couldn't we have made it through the catharsis of the civil rights movement and still maintained some vestiges of our Southern identity? Did we have to lose everything to be assimilated into mainstream America?

Homegrown, vine-ripe tomatoes really did exist. So did vibrant small towns. So did Junior Johnson and the Allison Brothers and the King, Richard Petty. And they existed before Fox TV. Huey Long and Big Jim Folsom were political icons beforepollsters, make-up, sound bites, andBill Clinton.Somehow, country music survived before Shania Twain and Faith Hill. Dizzy Dean was a star pitcher and then a colorful play-by-play announcer. Today he couldn't pronounce half of the names of the relief pitchers in the National League.

Most people who travel by automobile these days do so almost exclusively on Interstate highways. The towns that exist on the blue highways, the state, county and U.S. highway roads have been by-passed for years. As the travelers pass them by, the small towns have lost the commerce those people used to bring. Wal-Marts, Home Depots, convenience stores, and chain restaurants have delivered death blows to local independent operators. Family owned hardware stores and cafes used to be the gathering places where issues of the day were discussed. Those conversations are not encouraged at Lowes or at McDonalds.

Everyone suffers from nostalgia at times. But it's hard to know where you're going if you don't know where you've been. Wherever it is we're going, we're getting there way too quickly. And wherever it is we've been, we're forgetting about it way too fast.

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