Arts & Ammo

Who’s a Yokel?

Michael Hirsh at Newsweek argues that the South has risen again, and he’s not happy about it. Barbarians are running roughshod over the sophisticated Northerners and changing everything for the worse.

What sent Hirsh into this tizzy? He leads his article complaining that Carly Smithson was voted off of “American Idol” by Southerners because she sang “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Yes, according to Hirsch, the ignorant unwashed in the South applied their knowledge of Christian doctrine to determine that the song is blasphemous and outvoted enlightened Northerners like Hirsch who find great artistic merit in the song. Who’s the yokel in this equation?

Tell me what you think
About your friends at the top
Now who d’you think besides yourself
Was the pick of the crop?
Buddah was he where it’s at?
Is he where you are?
Could Muhammmed move a mountain
Or was that just PR?
Did you mean to die like that?
Was that a mistake or
Did you know your messy death
Would be a record breaker?

In contrast to aficionados of Andrew Lloyd Weber, argues Hirsh, Southerners can’t help being coarse and stupid. It’s in their blood. The South was settled by Scots-Irish, a warlike breed, who had to fight Indians to survive, and therefore learned to loath the genteel folks on the East Coast. Southerners naturally adopted Andrew Jackson as their hero. Hirsch says,

The outcome was that a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores. Traditionally, it has been balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. But that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers–and cultural weight.

Hirsh snarls that he now has to endure lapel pin politics and “the shallowest sort of faux jingoism.” (Would he prefer real jingoism?)

It has gotten so bad that “Hillary Clinton panders shamelessly to Roman Catholics.” Huh? Hillary is from the Chicago suburbs, and Roman Catholicism is hardly the dominant religious force in the South. And didn’t Hirsh just tell us that the Scots-Irish were famous for booting the Catholics out of Northern Ireland? But that’s beside the point, you see, because the Catholics agree with Southern Evangelicals on abortion, and that makes Catholics part of the Southern conspiracy to “transform the sensibility” of the country.

What evidence does Hirsh cite for this transformation and its Southern origin? None. In fact, he trots out a professor to say that Hirsh has it all wrong.

“I’m suspicious of that argument,” says Gaines M. Foster of Louisiana State University, author of “Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913.” “The Civil War was essentially about preserving slavery and acquiring independence. And the South lost both of those things. And gave them up.” Beyond that, the Old South is gone with the wind in other ways, having suffered a hybridization from Northern and Midwestern influences. “At least one of four people in the South were not born here. Even ‘Southern’ is now a fuzzy term,” Foster told me.

Undeterred by this rebuke (Foster is from a southern university, so we can ignore him) Hirsh smugly plugs on because he just knows things have changed and that Southerners are at fault. Why, just the other day he was watching HBO and saw John Adams and Thomas Jefferson having intelligent discourse.

What does seem foreign to us today is the dedication to free thought and, even more, free moral choice that so dominated the correspondence between those two great minds.

Apparently, Hirsh sees the history of our nation as one in which peace-loving secularists arrived in Massachusetts and made fast friends with the Indians. They set up universities, wrote eloquent letters to each other about free thought, and sang kitschy blasphemous songs that they regarded as high art. They wore sophisticated awareness ribbons instead of crass lapel pins. Their harmonious lifestyle was shattered one day when Robert E. Lee marched his marauding hordes north of the Mason-Dixon line. The South got what it deserved, and things were okay while Southerners were content to sit on the veranda sippin’ mint julips and swattin’ flies, but they’ve been getting entirely too uppity lately.

I guess this is what they teach at colleges outside Looziana.

Now Southerners want to transform the nation from its original vision: give the populace guns, take away the time-honored practice of unrestricted abortion, change the definition of marriage to exclude same-sex couples, inject religious values into political debates, deprive the United Nations of its sovereignty, and force us all to wear lapel pins. Yeah, those Southerners have sure inflicted some radical changes. All that might be tolerated, but skewing the results of “American Idol” is really beyond the pale.

Don’t you get me wrong. Don’t you get me wrong.
Don’t you get me wrong, now Don’t you get me wrong.
Don’t you get me wrong. Don’t you get me wrong.
Don’t you get me wrong, now Don’t you get me wrong.

- “Jesus Christ Superstar”

Hirsch’s rant is a great example of free thought: thought free of evidence or rational argument. Maybe he needs to spend less time watching TV and more time listening to Southern composers. His parochialism (or is it Northern jingoism?) is astonishing. All of which just goes to prove there’s no redneck like a Yankee redneck.

April 26th, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Music, Politics | one comment