Liberal Forum

Cannonpointer » 11 Jan 2015 9:54 pm » wrote: It's a southern thing. For generations, they lived in a system where pissing the big man off could be your ruin. So they learned to talk sideways, to sugar coat, to say without saying. They reflexively leave themselves room to back up, to change the meaning of their complaint. If he gave specifics, he could be refuted, his idea could be argued in a manner where objective measures apply. And he might lose. And losing could mean one's ruin, in the southern imagination.

Winning is rarely the primary object with your born and bred southerner. They want to win as much as the next guy, but their first attention is always to avoiding defeat - and that means never taking a stance that anyone can hold you to.

White southerners are a race unto themselves - a race of passive-aggressive ankle biters, gully dwellers, dry-gulchers, back shooters, side-of-the-mouth talkers and big-bellied sheriffs who defy satirization. If you hired a maudlin director widely known for going over the top, and gave him an over the top script that made white southerners look like ignorant apes, all that would be required to give the resulting film dignity would be period costumes. Go back 50 years and the thing would read like a documentary. Crimson hails from that milieu. Most of what you take for cowardice, I take for involuntary, conditioned reflex actions.

And gayness.