There’s an interesting discussion going on at the FireDogLake book salon about Andrew Gelman’s book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State:
In fact, for all the talk in recent years about working class conservatives and latte liberals, Gelman shows convincingly that rich people remain loyal Republicans while those further down the economic ladder support the Democrats. What is true is that wealthier states such as Connecticut back the Democrats while poor states such as Mississippi prefer the GOP, with middle income states such as Ohio forming the swing constituency. Still, though Mississippi as a whole is poor and Republican, the base of Republican support in the state is wealthy Mississippians not poor ones. The famous red/blue maps are misleading in this regard, prompting people to use a fallacy of composition and assume that Republican voters have the characteristics (low income) of Republican states.
Nor, Gelman shows, is it true that downscale voters are ruled by their religious or moral sentiments rather than economic self-interest. On the contrary, religiosity and opinions about hot-bottom cultural issues have little impact on the voting behavior of poor Americans. It’s among the wealthy where you see cultural issues making a big difference and religiosity highly correlated with voting behavior.
In particular, in rich states voting patterns show little correlation with income. The poor of Connecticut, in other words, vote pretty similarly to the rich of Connecticut. This isn’t the case in poor states, where poor people are dramatically more likely than rich people to vote Democratic. The difference is that the rich people in the rich states are much more culturally liberal than the rich people in the poor states. The result is the famous “culture war” waged not between yuppies and the working class, but between the wealthy residents of wealthy states and the wealthy residents of poor states.
Much media confusion about American politics then stems from what’s essentially a coincidence—political journalists are heavily concentrated in places like Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and California that exhibit the voting behaviors of rich states. It is true in those places that voting behavior features little income polarization and that wealthy people are generally well-disposed toward the Democrats. Political commentary from David Brooks on the right to Tom Frank on the left is often dominated by the assumption that you can extrapolate from political patterns in places like Maryland out to the country as a whole.
The truth hurts.
Quaker in a Basement
I love those.
DougJ
@Quaker in a Basement
Who doesn’t?
The Other Steve
Someone once commented that when you go to a poor nation such as say in Africa, your typical person is far more likely to berate the bus boy then he is the manager. This is the reverse of wealthier countries.
The reason is simple animal instinct. In a situation with low resources(i.e. food), you have to compete to become top dog, and obviously that means making sure those with less than you realize that they have less than you. Whereas when you have abundant resources you are more concerned with more ancillary details such as the quality of what you are buying, etc.
This behavior seems consistent with what you see in red and blue states. The poorer the state, the more likely the attitude of those who have enough to beat down on those who have less.
WyldPirate
Too lazy to go over and read the link, but it seems that the "answer" in the excerpt may be a bit simplistic or incomplete. For example, how does one explain the fact that a belt of states (ie, Ark., TN, KY) went even bigger for McCain in ’08 vs Bush in ’04?
My bet is that educational levels as well as cultural BS is playing a big role in the South. There are loads of poor people in the South, but the plantation/sharecropper mentality isn’t as dead as one might think in there, especially in rural areas. What I’m driving at is that a lot of poor whites in the South vote GOP–against their best interests, BTW—because the Dems are still perceived as the party that does the "giveways" to the "shiftless, lazy, n*****s".
The South is barely 50 years from the sharecropping era across much of its rural areas. Most of schools were not desegregated unit the midto late 60s. I grew up in that time in the South and the idea among poor white people then was that they were better than the poor blacks even though they shared similar hardships. This was an idea nurtured for 300 years there.
Old habits die hard…
Delia
Well, this certainly makes sense of Orange County, CA. And even more, take Santa Ana, which began to go Hispanic and poor some years back and eventually unelected noted gooper nutcase B-1 Bob Dornan from Congress to replace him with Democrat Loretta Sanchez. He didn’t go gracefully, either, if I remember.
Steve Balboni
Pretty sure they just added this category on Craigslist
Library Grape
I think "hot-bottom cultural issues" is one of the best typos I’ve seen in a while.
What might these "hot-bottom" "cultural issues" be? Where it’s appropriate to seek out a hot bottom? What cultural norms apply when you find said hot bottom?
For that matter, are were talking bottoms as in bums or bottoms as in the passive participant in a pitcher-catcher dynamic?
Vaguely sexual typos FTW!
Hyperion
@WyldPirate: i agree. my Tampa high school was integrated in 1967 by 4 black kids. and my redneck cousins (who might be thought of as trailer trash as they grew up in one and then lived adult life in another) can be depended on to rant about black people every time i visit. very sad.
Sirkowski
What is the poor to wealthy ratio in Mississipi?
J Royce
Wait, next you’ll be telling we weren’t founded as a Christian Nation.
I think people don’t understand the Old South culture, or at least don’t recognize it. Slavery was just a manifestation of the Ancient Regime that re-sprouted in the South. Might Makes Right, Masters rule Slaves, Property is Power, hierarchical authoritarian rule by the rich. Really, hell on earth ruled by demons when taken to it’s endpoint.
The Republican Red states like Mississippi and even Texas are bastions of this fallen ideology. It has not been defeated everywhere, and is in fact making a nasty comeback.
The idea that destroyed the slavery of mankind was that men are created equal and possess individual rights: classical liberalism. From that breakthrough idea can be extrapolated practical means to effect the recognition of those rights, like a justice system, a free press, separation of Church and State, a Bill of Rights. Public education. A Middle Class.
But the idea itself is what freed mankind; we can live up to it or fail it. The Conservatives are invested in making it fail. That is why liberalism is reduced to rhetorical cliches and smeared so viciously by Wealth and those it employs. The Ancient Regime has shown that it will always come back in the absence of an informed, empowered, educated electorate. Unfortunately, once Conservatives destroy public school per their agenda, this needed education is often delivered through suffering.
America was shaped from a new idea of human liberty, the liberalism so hated by the CONservatives, and a new cabal of would-be rulers have climbed from the ashes of the dead Old South to take their lofty seats above us.
Walker
@WyldPirate:
There was never any plantation mentality in TN, KY as there were never any plantations there (okay, maybe some in the Memphis area, but that is such a small portion of the state). The racism in coastal south is very different than it is in Appalachian south. You cannot make generalizations about Southern racism without understanding these types of dynamics.
I have been raised in both types of racism and seen their differences. My father’s side is from the mountains of Tennessee and my mother’s side literally have a plantation (well, it is a museum now) in eastern NC.
Comrade Jake
Oh goody, class warfare.
Joshua Norton
There was an even older southern culture up until the time of Jefferson’s death that was based on the principles of the Enlightenment rationalism before the South became increasingly ossified. There was a heritage of revolutionary secularism as exemplified in the Virginia Constitution. It wasn’t until their free labor was really being threatened by abolitionists that the orthodox southern religion became a pillar of slavery (and vice versa).
They used a few verses from the bible to justify owning slaves and thumped the message far and wide, much as their current counterparts use it to bash gays. In fact they constantly made the case that opposing slavery was going against the will of God and therefor a sin. Much like modern day Elmer Gantry’s plead their own personal agenda about abortion and gays with selective bible quotes to keep their ignorant masses all riled up and beating their chests.
BC
I have a friend (white) in Memphis who told me he would vote for Democrats except that he didn’t want to be in the party of the blacks and gays. So, he agrees with Democrats on policy, but votes GOP because that’s what white people do. And how many other white people support GOP because that’s what the wealthy people do, and they want to be associated with the wealthy? Sort of Joe the Plumber syndrome – the bastard didn’t have a pot to pee in, but woe to Obama if he did anything to the "wealthy," Joe the Plumber would mount guard against that. Maybe that’s what this is – Joe the Plumber Syndrome.
Joshua Norton
You’ve described the situation perfectly. Why else would they be worried about estate taxes when their idea of luxury is finding the marked down underwear bin at Walmart?
DougJ
The south is tricky. There’s a lot of stupidity and backwardness but there’s also a lot more real indigenous culture than there is in the north. Barbecue, blues music, country music, Faulkner, soul food — all of those things are uniquely American and there’s not much up here in the north that’s not an imitation of something from the Old World.
demimondian
@DougJ: That’s just not true. Think of the humble bagel — it’s actually a uniquely American dish, even if its progenitor was a crusty roll in the shtetl. In reverse, much of country is just Yorkshire folk music preserved in formaldehyde, then vivisected by a musical Doctor Moreau with an infusion of rhythm and blues. Barbecue is nothing more than braised meat in a spicy sauce, basically warmed-over British cooking.
Faulkner is uniquely American, but so are Thurber and Parker, not to mention Plath or Frost.
Joshua Norton
That’s a hard argument to make, since up until the Revolution, we all were part of the Old World. Is it an imitation, or a bona fide tradition?
DougJ
@demimondian
I’ll go for the low-hanging fruit here: Robert Frost is not uniquely American. He’s just a more ornery Wordsworth. I love the guy, but it’s pretty easy to see similar poetry coming from a cranky Brit.
Karmakin
BC:You got the name right..it’s Joe the Plumber syndrome, you’re just not quite there on what it is.
Take him at his word. He opposed taxing the rich because he believed that soon enough he was going to take over his boss’ business and run it better than he could, and become rich.
Just have to give it some time and then their ship will come in and they’ll be rich. So why make things tougher on the rich when you’re going to be one of them anyway? Of course it really doesn’t work like that in most cases, so then they get all bitter and angry.
Before there was a Joe the Plumber, there was an Amway. I’ve called this Amway syndrome for years now.
Manny J
Without even reading the book, I can tell that either Gelman is wrong, or the quoted review badly misrepresents his thesis.
Half the voters can’t be "rich." "Rich" means the top bracket, not the top 50%. In our modern age of income inequality, more people cluster towards the bottom of the income ladder, and far fewer at the top. When we say "rich," we usually mean the top 10% or fewer. If you are in the 20%-30% range, then people in the top 10% are not just richer than you, they are a lot more richer than you, than you are richer than people in the 40%-50% range. To put it another way, compared to the rich, the "upper middle class" is not very different from the "lower middle class," and most of us are lmc or poor, in any state.
So "the rich" in any state cannot vote anybody in without a lot of help. The rich can only win by persuading others, the not-rich, to vote.
So I assume that the Gelman’s thesis is actually something like, the richer you are in a Red State, the more likely you are to vote Republican and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to vote Democrat, or not vote at all. This still appears to leave an awful lot of people voting against their economic self-interest — just as Franks and others said.
If that is what the numbers show, then it has very interesting implications. The middle class may not be voting entirely against their economic self-interest, because their immediate competition is not the rich, it is those just a little down the ladder from them. The relatively-well-off may feel safer with the status quo. This is almost Obama’s "bitterness" thesis, that people assume neither Party is actually going to help, so they don’t vote their wallet. But actually, they probably are voting their wallet — just pessimistically. They may reasonably figure that allocation of tax dollars is a zero-sum game for the bottom 90%: they can’t get the rich to give money back, the best they can do is keep the tax dollars currently in their own neighborhoods and schools, vote against job-training or union aid that may increase the competition for their own jobs, etc. If that is what the world looks like, then any large state-wide or national program will sound like an excuse to take your money.
This would go some way to explaining so-called "identity politics." Simply put, it almost doesn’t matter what the politician is promising, what matters is whether he looks rich. If he does, he’s going to take your money away. Period. If one of them sounds less educated or shares your mainstream religion, he looks less rich. At worst, he looks like the kind of rich you understand, the one who will take your money away and give it to the rich, not the one who will take it away and give it to the poor. With the first, you have a little better chance of keeping your lifestyle.
This is voting your wallet. And the scary part is, it may be correct. The Democratic Party is not really the champion of the middle class. It has distributed a little more to the middle class then the Republicans, but not enough to matter very much to most people short-term. And in the Red States, where the Democrats run hard to the right, they offer even less to the middle class.
Chuck Butcher
Something I’ve noticed is the realative mobility of the population, something that is of long standing in much of the north and less common in the south. Note that areas of the south that are moving Democratic are also home to mobile populations.
Northern areas like Baker County that don’t experience such mobility seem more conservative in outlook. Baker sends its youth out – lack of opportunities and excitement. Oregon is a peculiar place in the arguement from the quote, median income is 43K, not a rich state. We are, however a federal tax exporter, IIRC 0.93/1.00 return. An odd situation for a state as heavily federal owned – wouldn’t you think? Baker Co. is well below the state median income and more red than much of the state.
There are, of course, not many of us, 14K in 3500 sq mi.
demimondian
@DougJ: You’re trolling me, dude — so I’ll play along. Frost’s ear for the terse language of his neighbors in his better poetry (not _Stopping at the Woods_, but the exotic stuff like _The Death of the Hired Hand_) is New England realism. Wordsworth is English Romanticism, lots of "Eres" and "long did I’s".
DougJ
It’s perfectly reasonable to group voters into "rich" and "poor" where "rich" means above the 50th percentile in income and "poor" means below it.
DougJ
@demi
Frost is a lot closer to Wordsworth than Leadbelly is to any English music.
demimondian
@DougJ: Wanna bet?
Here’s a good counterexample — Leadbelly is usually credited with writing the tune and the harmony the Weavers used in _Kisses Sweeter then Wine_. Problem is, that isn’t true — Pete Seeger gives the history of the number in his contribution to _Leadbelly_, explaining that Leadbelly used an old Scottish folk tune as the basis for his song, playing the original song. Leadbelly hardly changed it at all (but he had permission to do it his way).
DougJ
Demi, I can see I’m over my head here, but, still, I think you’re fundamentally wrong in a way that I can’t describe off the top of my head…
So, okay, how about barbecue. What the hell have they got like that in the Old Country?
Joshua Norton
There are southerners who claim their blue grass music is descended from Irish and Scottish folk music from the original settlers, so that argument could also go either way.
DougJ
Okay, how about Son House?
apocalipstick
demimondian
Barbecue is not braised and the sauce has nothing to do with it. Barbecue is smoking meat (usually a cheap cut, which is one reason poor people invented it) over a low heat for an extended period of time. Barbecue is a method of cooking. Sauce and liquid have nothing to do with it.
As far as culture, it’s worth noting that almost everything you cited as Southern contributions came from black culture. Well, not Faulkner, of course, but he certainly explored black culture.
In the North, they only had Melville, Hawthorne, and Irving as sources of pride. Thoreau. Longfellow. Dickinson. Lovecraft. Irving Berlin. George Gershwin. Atlantic Records. Hip-hop.
Yeah, the North brought nothing to the table.
Brick Oven Bill
Re: "Half the voters can’t be "rich." "Rich" means the top bracket, not the top 50%."
Gross Conceptual Error. 200 million Americans do not have jobs.
Joshua Norton
Barbeque
Apparently it became popular in the South as a social gathering at hog slaughtering time. I think it’s safe to assume that it’s a southern regional tradition.
AhabTRuler
Plus, the word Barbecue is a derivation of barbacoa, a loan-word from Taino indians. Of course, this referred only to grilling, which is, as has been mentioned, different from the low & slow smoking of meaty goodness!
Edit: Norton!
demimondian
@DougJ: Which barbeque?
Seriously — Texas style (which is what I’m most familiar with, given that FDDD is a transplanted Arkansawyer) is really a reinterpretation of French braised ribs with a sauce which goes back to a curry gravy. (On a similar note: did you know that chili power is an American reinterpretation of British curry powder, which is, of course, a reinterpretation of garam masala? I just learned that last year.)
Dry style (that’d be "fake") barbeque from, say, Tennesee or North Carolina? That’s an Indian meat treatment, brought to the Appalachians by way of Britain.
demimondian
@apocalipstick: You’re from the Eastern Slope, aren’t you? That’s not *real* barbecue; that’s an abomination.
John Cole
I have nothing to add to this conversation other than to note that anyone who thinks that that vinegary north carolina bullshit is real bbq needs their damned head examined.
DougJ
Sorry, dude, but try if you don’t think this place is real bbq, then you don’t know what real bbq is. The fact that the morons who left reviews didn’t appreciate only proves that it is genius.
DougJ
Look, I love all that shit, except for Lovecraft, but let’s go through one-by-one:
Thoreau — could have been English.
Longfellow — even more could have been English.
Lovecraft — too dungeons and dragons for me.
Berlin, Gershwin — great but partly great because of jazz covers of their stuff done by southern people.
Atlantic records — all the music is done by people who recently moved to Philly area from the south.
Hip-hop — an outgrowth of southern culture.
Look, I’ll admit that most of the great stuff from the south is from black culture. But there’s more to it than that.
DougJ
That is correct.
apocalipstick
demimondian
Most Texas barbequers will beat you about the head and shoulders should you suggest any form of sauce.
Joshua Norton
Since Bill Monroe pretty much invented bluegrass in the ’30’s, relationship to British Isles folk is tangentially ancestral. That’s why there’s another genre known as string-band or old-timey that’s a more direct descendant of British Isles folk. Of course, even most of that is filtered through an African sensibility.
AhabTRuler
Um, Walt Whitman?
Melville?DougJ
I won’t argue with that one.
demimondian
@apocalipstick: You’re confusing "charcoaled meat" with barbeque. Any fool (read "Texan") can throw a piece of cow over a fire. That’s not barbeque.
demimondian
@DougJ: Barbeque is typically prepared with smoked meat prepared at a low temperature in a water laden environment — that would be "braised" — but the important part is the sauce, which takes the braised meat from an otherwise unappetizing dryness to a moist succulence.
apocalipstick
DougJ
Then most of the cultural contributions you cited can be dismissed with a "Could have been African."
Oh, and Berlin and Gershwin were great because they were great. They were covered by jazzbos because their songs were great and the chord changes lent themselves to extended improvisation.
Atlantic Records is (along with Motown) the template of a northern urban record company. Again, you could just as easily dismiss the blues by saying "All music done by people who recently moved to the South from West Africa."
I guess what this really shows is the extent of synthesis in American culture.
DougJ
Demi, for real, the sauce is secondary with Texas bbq. I went to Kreutz Market and Smitty’s a few months ago. They don’t sauce the meat at all. There’s bottles on the table but it’s just vinegar and hot pepper (which is perfect).
Delia
Mark Twain? Missouri isn’t really the South.
Oh, and Steinbeck.
Woody Guthrie
apocalipstick
No, demimondian, I’m not. You’re confusing suburban grilling with real barbecue. There is no "water-laden environment." You may continue to make this claim, but you will be wrong.
DougJ
Sure. But it’s still different from other western things. It’s unique within western culture.
DougJ
It’s not the north either, is it?
apocalipstick
Delia,
Depends on who you ask and where you are. The state’s a fascinating mix, but always remember that it was a slave state. Since Twain spent a great deal of his adult life in Connecticut, you could make the argument that he was Northern.
DougJ
Would "European" be a better label? Africa is still in the Western Hemisphere and most of the slaves came from West Africa.
Even I am embarrassed by that convoluted justification. :)
DougJ
You *can* use a water smoker, but it’s certainly not necessary. And even when you do, it’s not all that "water laden".
demimondian
@apocalipstick: I did say that DougJ was trolling us, remember.
In fact, the things which make American cuisine and language unique are often derived from non-European sources. The slaves brought West African call-and-response style music, as well as the blues scales. The Acadians (who became the "cajuns") brought post-revolution style French cooking, but applied it to uniquely American ingredients. The New Englanders used British cooking on the things which grow in the short seasons of the north east, while bringing in foods available up there. Maple Syrup and corn pudding (things from my own childhood in Vermont) are uniquely American syntheses. (Yeah, the folks in the fifty-first state might argue with me, but they’re just Americans who spell funny, eh?)
DougJ
There’s more to Cajun cooking than that. The spice level has a definite African influence.
demimondian
@DougJ: Dude, my wife is from Arkansas. For real. I went to college there — that means, you know "lived there"?
Barbeque is very, very regional. I know what some people think it is, but…they’re wrong. The only correct definition is the one you first encountered; all the others are an abomination.
DougJ
Sure.
DougJ
How does that justify your "water laden" definition?
jmbl
All this Red Blue divide and rich/poor class combat pish posh will soon be a thing of the past.
Obama will unite all decent Americans when he uses his magical postpartisan hope and change powers to abolish the evil, depraved, knowingly bad and ill intentioned dastardly plot against humanity known as the BCS.
Then we will all be one nation united while we watch a Hawaiian unicorn parade before the beginning of true red and blue blooded college football championship.
Or drink beer before arguing over the championship polls, like the old days.
Or something else, but better.
Andrew
Missouri is both, given that it sent large numbers of soldiers to both sides of the Civil War.
demimondian
@DougJ: Ummm…yeah. No.
Cajun cooking and creole cooking are clearly intertwined, and I won’t deny the African influences on both (e.g. okra is a west African pod vegetable), but the spicing is actually uniquely American — chiles are indigenous to North America, for instance.
demimondian
@DougJ: How do you think real barbeque is prepared? In a cool, water smoker.
Andrew
And whether all of the other variations of meat and heat are barbecue or not, Carolina pulled pork and vinegar sauce is undoubtedly the best.
DougJ
When I make bbq at home, I don’t use water for my brisket and I only throw the water thing on for ribs if it gets too hot.
demimondian
@DougJ: Heh.
Well, I’m going to lay the whole thing aside — truth is, barbeque is not one thing, but many, and we both know it. There’s only one that’s any good, of course, and it you’re ever out here, I’ll be glad to serve it to you.
DougJ
I agree. And it’s southern.
demimondian
@DougJ: Yup.
And hot buttered rum is northern.
AhabTRuler
Still, the best native food requires no special preparation, and comes from the North.
DougJ
Not a big fan of that. The cocktail is American, but both northern (martini) and southern (sazerac).
DougJ
I agree with that. But I think the best native food is Nantucket Bay scallops.
demimondian
@AhabTRuler: You eat that shit?
Man, do you know what they eat?
Besides, the best native shellfish doesn’t even *live* in the Atlantic Ocean, much less have anything to do with Europe.
demimondian
@DougJ: OK, I’ll grant you that, although I personally prefer Bourbon whiskey (also a uniquely American thing).
AhabTRuler
@DougJ: Never really cottoned to scallops, but I could eat your weight in Lobster.
Doctor Science
First, everyone’s got to read Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer. It’s the briskest 800-page cultural history you’ll ever encounter, trust me.
Briefly, a huge part of *all* American culture reflects the cultures of the different parts of the UK their first wave of immigrants came from.
1. Puritans, who came from East Anglia to New England.
2. Cavaliers, who came from Wessex (south-central England) to Virginia,
3. Quakers, who came from the north Midlands to the Delaware Valley.
4. Borderers, who came from the border regions between England and Scotland to the backcountry of Appalachia.
Once those first culture-areas were established, later waves immigrants tended to self-sort by which American cultures seemed compatible, and tended to absorb the culture of the region where they settled.
So when Walker talks about how The racism in coastal south is very different than it is in Appalachian south he’s talking about the difference between the Cavalier culture and the Borderers, and yes, it’s a real difference that still endures.
Back in the 90s Fischer said he was working on a book called The Ebony Tree, about the African roots of American culture. My guess is that the project foundered for lack of primary African sources. To his surprise, Fischer had to do a lot of the legwork on regional cultures in England, digging up old primary sources — but at least the sources were *there*.
AhabTRuler
@demimondian: Ahem, from the article:
demimondian
@AhabTRuler: It "feeds off of" — not it "feeds on".
There’s a difference.
DougJ
Try the Nantucket Bay ones. They’re hard to find (only in season Oct through January) and expensive. But they’re so good. Only things that come close are dover sole and langoustines.
DougJ
I think you’re forgetting Broderers who come from the border regions between Maryland and Virginia.
AhabTRuler
@DougJ: I’ll have to give them a shot. I tried Laura W’s uncredited Brussels Sprout recipe the other day, and I now consider myself a convert. So why not try another new thing?
demimondian
@DougJ: Nah, Broderer’s come from Mugwump stock in the Fencelands.
demimondian
@DougJ: I agree. Nantucket scallops have a lovely, sweet taste without the odd nitrogen tang of ocean scallops.
AhabTRuler
I mean, c’mon demi, its not like Lobsters eat dead babies, used syringes, and pure evil. They are just another yummy scavenger.
DougJ
Well put.
Josh Hueco
@apocalipstick:
I’m from Iowa, and people there consider Missouri a cracker-ass southern state.
DougJ
You probably know the old joke, if southern Iowa were annexed by Missouri, it would raise the average IQ of both states.
jcricket
When did this blog turn into Powerline? That’s what I want to know.
binzinerator
Politics. Cultural history. Literary criticism. Debates on food. And even a obscure fact or two on Leadbelly and the history of American folk music. All in one thread.
Oh yeah, and the jackassery. Gotta have the jackassery.
This is why I can’t stay away from BJ.
trollhattan
I have to add that the weirdness is amplified almost infinitely by the left margin display ad touting joe the goddamn plumber reporting on Gaza from Israel. Self-parody doesn’t begin to describe the inanity of that idea. Charo reporting from Bulgaria on the U.S. auto industry would probably make more sense. Presumably, she’s driven a car.
p.s. I live in the west and BBQ is any ol damn thing cooked over or around FIRE as far as I’m concerned. Grilling, smoking, whatever, it gets you out of the house. And at least we can do it twelve months a year heah.
DougJ
Ouch! That is the unkindest cut of all.
Seriously, though, the Barbecue Shack is the best barbecue you will ever have. But it’s not such a crowd pleaser.
demimondian
@AhabTRuler: Heh.
OK, I’ll give you this round. Truth is, lobster just doesn’t do anything for me, and I’ve tried it any number of ways. It tastes…bland to me.
Josh Hueco
@DougJ:
LOL. Yes, I’d heard that. Luckily I was born in the NWern part of the state. That reminds me of a coworker I once had here in Texas who was originally from Keokuk. Like she said, you can’t spell Keokuk without KKK. :)
Johnny Pez
Nah, the Dutch, man, the Dutch fucking invented American culture.
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam . . .
Elrod
Umm, a better explanation for voting patterns in Mississippi (and Alabama) is race. Oh, and the poor tend to be black and vice versa in a rural Deep South state like Mississippi. Whites vote Republican because they are rich or because they think blacks are somehow getting over on them. Class and race are intertwined in the Deep South.
But it’s religion that ultimately comes out of the South these days in the GOP. Talk to rich people in CT who vote Democratic and they’ll tell you it’s the Jesus freaks that turned them to the Democrats.
Class still matters, of course. But when you talk about class in the Deep South, you’re also talking about race.
liza005
I have to add that the weirdness is amplified almost infinitely by the left margin display ad touting joe the goddamn plumber reporting on Gaza from Israel. Self-parody doesn’t begin to describe the inanity of that idea. Charo reporting from Bulgaria on the U.S. auto industry would probably make more sense. Presumably, she’s driven a car.
p.s. I live in the west and BBQ is any ol damn thing cooked over or around FIRE as far as I’m concerned. Grilling, smoking, whatever, it gets you out of the house. And at least we can do it twelve months a year heah.
http://rude.com/Romana171817?join&p0aQV&1819
Church Lady
I think that this post should fall under the heading of "Duh".
I live on the Mississippi/Tennessee border and the link states the obvious, to say the very least. My experience with Mississippi points to a demographic consisting of poor blacks that vote Democratic (of which there are many), poor whites (not so many) that vote Republican, middle class blacks (again, not so many and concentrated in northwest Mississippi) that vote Democratic, middle class whites (probably the largest concentration of whites in the state) that vote Republican, and wealthy whites that vote Republican.
While there is a fairly large black population in Mississippi, that population tends to center primarily around the western Delta area of the state (starts in Memphis and continues along the Mississippi River south to a little past Greenville) and many live in extreme poverty. However, even with a fairly large black population, they don’t outnumber whites, who almost always vote Republican. This is why a conservative white Democrat could be voted into Congress in a district in North Central/West Mississippi, but statewide elected offices are almost always won by white Republicans.
In Mississippi, people vote on racial lines (white =Republican, black = Democratic), not on economic lines.
The Daily Mississippian, the daily newspaper of the University of Mississippi, was the only college daily in the United States to endorse John McCain. Although the editors and writers for the paper are considered the "liberals" on campus, even they swung Republican.
Tennessee is a little different. Almost the entire black population of the state is concentrated in a few counties in West Tennessee, which is where the state’s few Democratic congressmen’s districts are located. The rest of the state is predominantly white and tends to vote Republican. West Tennessee has a lot of black poverty, while East Tennessee also has a lot of white poverty. The few Democrats that get elected statewide tend to be white and/or pretty conservative. It’s how Phil Bredesen got the governor’s office (white and conservative Democrat) and why Harold Ford, Jr. (black, but still a fairly conservative Democrat) almost won a Senate seat. Once again, people tend to vote along racial lines, not economic lines.
Church Lady
Demi, you are obviously not from the South. In the South, beef is NOT barbque. Only the finest swine applies.
Blue Raven
@apocalipstick:
Nobody invented bluegrass, not even Bill Monroe. Music forms of that nature aren’t invented so much as recognized after being fully established. It wasn’t a fully formed genre until the mid-40s, either, and any music history teacher worth their degree will tell you that bluegrass is most definitely related to British Isles folk in a direct line of descent through "old-time," one of the parent forms of bluegrass. Yes, there is African influence as well, especially since Monroe and his contemporaries were bringing in jazz influences and old-time has a partially African pedigree as well. But "tangentially ancestral" is hogwash. May as well say the African ancestry is tangential. When you try to contradict the International Bluegrass Music Association, try to do it off the Internet.
tavella
Bah. As someone who has lived in the SF Bay area for a decade, the Dungeness is a fine crab, but not the equal of a Chesapeake Bay blue. Especially one from the Wye River — the quality goes down as a factor of distance from the Wye, is my opinion.
Xenos
The only people who ‘own’ barbecue are the Taino Indians, and they are all dead. And Texans who change the recipe of the spice rub and proceed smoke the meat in the same method used by Germans since Arminius are putting you one when they claim the cooking method is uniquely American.
The whole mindset that interprets the country in terms of what is more authentic or most real is at the root of the American culture’s susceptibility to authoritarian dogma. It gives a patina of legitimacy and respectability to a debased chauvinism that can be marketed to distinct pockets of the masses.
What really puzzles me is the differences between New England elites and those in New Jersey. The wealthy people I know from New Jersey really, really can’t stand Obama – they have a strong, visceral, instinctual mistrust of the man. There is something cultural going on that I can’t identify. Maybe he just reminds them of snotty people from Massachusetts.
Marshall
It’s the rich Republicans who are involved in S&M.
Marshall
Indeed. One of the interesting things about living in the South is how many Northerners move down there because they don’t like the power of blacks in the North, and assume things will be more congenial to them in the South. (This is generally expressed in less printable terms.)
Now, I don’t know them personally, so I don’t know, but many of the Newt Gingrich types came from the North, and I have to wonder if they fit into that category too.