These past several years, we Americans have been living in an accelerating anti-cultural vortex. Day by day the Yankee juggernaut gains steam. Once content with carpetbombing Hanoi and Baghdad, the Yankees are now taking their civilizational demolition derby back South, where it all began. Topple the Southern statues, spraypaint the Southern monuments, mock the Southern accents and folkways, and cancel Southern history and culture from Hoppin’ John soup to pine nuts. You may have heard once or twice over the past few years that everyone (except Yankees) is a racist.
Doubly so for Southerners. Even Georgia native Clarence Thomas got cancelled—during Black History Month—for being too Southern for Yankee sensibilities to handle. I have no doubt that the Yankees will cancel Booker T. Washington and sweet tea next. The former was ornery enough to reject perennial victimhood by insisting that someone could rise “up from slavery,” after all, and the latter, alas, contains neither kale nor tofu.
Things may seem bleak, what with the Yankees riding high on their horse and issuing cancel edicts left and right (well, only right) against anyone who dares question their self-righteous caterwauling. It would appear that the Yankee has won the field and the whole tournament, that the United States has been given wholly over to a screeching army of Karens hell-bent on turning all the world into Lincolnville (kind of like Potterville, but with more drive-by shootings). The Yankees have us masked up, afraid to go outside, demoralized from “voting,” ashamed to pronounce “windah” and “tomarrah” properly (as spelled), and resigned to living forever under the boot of ideological overlords who can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman or between a real civilization and a hierarchy of hatred for one’s fellow human beings. A bad time to be from the South, all in all. We are all hemmed in, at the mercy of the godless Yankee. It is Vicksburg all over again, only this time the Yankees are congratulating themselves for their victory on CNN.
But, no. That’s not how I see things. I have been thinking lately that there is no better time than now to be a Southerner. My scrawny chest swells with pride when I see our flag flying high. I call to mind the past and am glad at heart to be who I am. By the Grace of God, I have a culture. I share deep wellsprings of belonging and understanding with my brothers and sisters of the South. Those are the things that make us human, the bonds that lash us to one another whether we like it or not. I have a people, a background. Take it or leave it (and please leave the pecan pie for me), I was born a Southerner and will be happy to die as one someday.
It’s the lack of this human welter of connections and forbearances that makes the Yankee into a screaming devil. The Yankee is a pitiful creature, a sad-sack nobody whose only mode of communication is the propaganda crusade, the drone strike, and the atom bomb. (Lately he has branched out to the media of the thrown brick and the bullhorn.) The Yankee is the loneliest of all human beings, for, unlike everyone else, the Yankee has no culture to call his own, no home to return to. He holds nothing sacred except his own hypocrisy, and is therefore doomed to roam the earth destroying what all other men and women hold dear: kinfolk, tradition, a little plot of ground in which one’s ancestors have been laid to rest.
The Yankee can never have these things, can never know what it is to be raised in an actual culture connecting the individual to the past, the present, and somehow to others yet to be born. The Yankee is raging around the planet like a lovelorn King Kong, insisting in his heartache that everyone pay homage to 72 genders and quit reading Green Eggs and Ham. How sorrowful it must be to hate the world so, to have no humor in one’s heart and no companion but one’s anti-human ideology.
I wince when I see the Yankee rare up and bellow, pulling a train of death and destruction behind him from Yemen to Guatemala. A tear rolls down my cheek (almost) when I witness the anti-cultural monsters streaming out of their Bostons and New Yorks, out of our illegally occupied Washington, DC, pretending to make friends with the world by selling boatloads of missiles to dictators. It tears at the breast to see someone degrade himself so. There is no one more pitiable than the Yankee, holding us all at gunpoint and demanding to be loved.
Now, when we need culture and breeding the most—seeing so plainly that the Yankee has neither—let us give thanks that we were born and raised to live like ladies and gentlemen. I have never been so grateful as I am this very day to be a Louisianan, by way of Alabama and Tennessee. (Full disclosure: I once spent time in Wisconsin and Ohio. Please pray for me.) We are universally loathed by the Yankee as barefoot, illiterate, gap-toothed racists. God bless America! To be disdained by a Yankee is a gift from God. And bless the Yankee heart, because he just doesn’t know what it is to have a place in the world.
Let this little missive be a candlelight in the dark to my fellow Southerners. We are perfectly positioned to survive the collapse of Yankeedom, which we see accelerating day by day right before our eyes. There has never been a better time than right now to be a Southerner.
