“…a depressingly high rate of self-destruction prevails among thise who ponder about the South and put down their reflections in books.”
– V. O. Key (pray for us), Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949
Good ol’ Valdimer Orlando – patron and father of contemporary Southern studies, whose portrait hung in the study center when I was in grad school. He had it dead right. Suicide is an occupational hazard in Southern studies in much the same way that, say, black lung is for coal miners or blown knee ligaments are in the WNBA. Not hard to see why, either: consider the words of W.J. Cash, whose book is the first wellspring of all study of Southern politics – and who hanged himself in Mexico City in 1941.
In the mind of the South, any sort of deviation from the prescribed norm is suspect at best and to be violently opposed at worst. It’s the sort of thing that leads to preachers railing from the pulpit against Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons. It also leads to things like massive underfunding of special education (especially gifted programs), bulldozers running over Dixie Chicks albums, the school-sanctioned LGB club at Birmingham-Southern College having to meet in undisclosed locations, and a 40% statewide vote against doing away with the laws against mixed-race marriage…in the year 2000.
The old man didn’t care for it – if you came around at the right time, like say election night in 1990*, you could hear him grumbling about the “redneck mentality” that kept Alabama in the basement – the hard kernel deep in the cracker soul saying “ain’t no man living can make me do nothin’.” He knew that at some point, you have to give a little to get along in a civilized society, and that eventually you’ll have to allow for something that isn’t exactly your thing. And that at some level, you have to have a social process and respect for the order that creates – and eventually, you will have to enforce that order.
Which leads to one of my favorite stories. I wouldn’t say the old man was a crusader in the field of civil rights or anything, but he was a Kennedy delegate in his college’s mock convention in 1960. And so, when he was teaching a history class in 1963, and word came over the intercom that the President was shot dead in Dallas, and one student let out a cheer, the old man – almost eight years into severe chronic rheumatoid arthritis – bodily jerked the kid out of his desk with one hand and backhanded the bejesus out of him with the other. Now in 1963, JFK was about as popular as cancer in the state of Alabama, but I can assure you that nobody in 8th grade ever again thought it was appropriate to publicly celebrate the death of a President.
I am – as if there were any doubt – my father’s son. And we were both definitely Lawful Neutral.
* It does bum me out that the last state election he experienced was the return of Fob James. Had the assorted medications and resulting kidney failure not donked him off, I am sure he would have been dancing a Fred-Sanford-esque jig on election night 1998, when the Fob was drummed unceremoniously out of office in favor of a Catholic of Jewish descent.