In 1831, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville came to America. Four years later, he published an outsider’s perspective of the culture that remained the gold standard for exactly 176 years. Time’s up, Alex.
In 1831, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville came to America. Four years later, he published an outsider’s perspective of the culture that remained the gold standard for exactly 176 years. Time’s up, Alex. I’m an Englishman born to Scottish parents and raised in French Canada so I couldn’t know less about the South but after four days in a tiny town called Abbeville, South Carolina, I am ready to update the Frenchman’s dated tome. Here are ten things I learned during my sojourn.
1. THEY’RE NOT RACIST
The outside world’s view of the South is that they’re a bunch of nigger-hating rednecks, but the climate there is more “Let’s agree to disagree” than “You’re wrong.” Blacks have their part of town and their barbershops, and so do the whites. I went to a black nightclub on the outskirts of town called The Peppermint which was an old barn with BBQ out back and was shocked to see blacks rolling joints at the bar like it ain’t no thang. When I asked about cops I was told none had ever been there.
2. OLD GUYS WEAR BELTS AND SUSPENDERS
This seems idiotic at first glance but I tried it and it really works. Suspenders keep your pants up, but they do it by tugging on four parts of your waistline like a pesky puppeteer. The belt acts as a Robin Hood device by equally distributing the suspender’s pull throughout your entire pant top, keeping them comfortably above the waist with no questions asked. If only someone would teach America’s youth this handy trick.
3. THEY HATE SWEARING
Holy fucking shit do these motherfuckers swear up and down that they don’t like swearing. Any time I wanted to get a conversation going I’d bring up the topic and the other person would come to life like I’d put a quarter in them. “I do it,” they’d usually start with, “but I ain’t proud of it. And I tell my kids that it ain’t right. It’s very important the kids know that cussing is wrong.” I once had this conversation at a bar with a NO SWEARING sign so big, it almost gave me Tourette’s.
4. CHEATING IS A HUGE DEAL
In Italy and France, cheating on your spouse is about as serious as farting on a plane. Ask a Frenchman why he did it and he’ll say, “Well, ma wife, she did not want to feck so I feck someone else. Dis is logical, no?” In South Carolina it’s illegal to break up a marriage by fornicating. One mom said to me she was impressed I kept my wedding ring on while traveling. “That’s very noble,” she said. “Most men wouldn’t do that.” I gave up trying to feck her after that.
5. EVERYONE GOES TO CHURCH
When you’re ingratiating yourself with people they seem to have this “Talk is cheap” attitude and refuse to take you seriously until you show up at their church on Sunday. I never went because I’m disingenuous. Turns out their screening process works.
6. THEY’LL GIVE YOU THE SHIRT OFF THEIR BACK
There’s one caveat for their unique generosity: You can’t act like you’re better than them. If you’re here from New York to talk about the racist backwards yokels, you better have a getaway car waiting outside. Once you’ve shown some reverence for their culture and some interest in their lives, they have no problem if you walk over to their fridge and fix yourself a sandwich. In fact, they get pissed if you don’t eat.
7. FOOTBALL IS KING
Jesus, people, it’s only a game! When the high-school football team won the state championships, all of Abbeville shut down and ran to the town square to cheer hysterically. Team members created a makeshift parade and drove around in the back of pickup trucks waving their arms in the air like they’d just won WWIII. Nobody cares who the mayor is, but the high-school football coach is treated like royalty.
8. THEY DON’T OSTRACIZE FREAKS
I met a very eccentric chap named Patrick who didn’t wear shoes and painted elaborate conspiracy theories all over his van. He had a huge beard and drove around the state giving churches a DVD he made about the imminent apocalypse. Everyone knew him and despite his bizarre lifestyle, they all (rich and poor) spoke to him like family. I don’t know if it’s because I’m hung over, but I almost cried writing that.
9. METH IS THEIR COKE
At any given New York bar, you can be sure a good 5% of the patrons are on coke. They grind their jaws, talk a lot about nothing, and go to the bathroom every ten minutes. The South’s 5% have golf balls for eyes and consider 6 a.m. to be “gettin’ kinda late.” I’m not talking about trailer trash, either. These are middle-class thirtysomethings who have decided coke simply doesn’t provide the gusto required for a good night/day/night of partying.
10. IT’S KID HEAVEN
At a fancy-pants family reunion with at least 100 attendees and a matriarch who looked like Yoda, I met some 12-year-olds who were way cooler than me. I asked them what shows they watch and they said they don’t have time for TV. Instead, they get on their Enduro motorbikes and tear through the forest with .22 rifles on their backs. When they see a rabbit, they stop, blow its head off, and continue on their merry way. One kid had a black eye and I asked him if it was from a fight. “Nope,” he said smiling, “I crashed a golf cart and it rolled on top of me.”
“But we do fight,” the first kid interjected, “a lot.” The fights usually involve one kid marring another’s honor, so they meet at an abandoned baseball field to settle it. “I like to do it ’til they say they’re sorry,” he told me with a huge grin.
“You’re not a bully, are you?” I asked. “You don’t pick fights for no reason, do you?”
“Oh, no,” he responded, “I only do it when I have to and I only win about half the time.” It appeared this young lad was familiar with de Tocqueville’s long held belief that, “It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor.” This was the first time I’ve ever been jealous of a little kid.
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In conclusion, I would like to add to the Frenchman’s work by stating they now also really, really like sweet tea. I left my journey more than enamored with the South and if they ever fix the part where it’s like living in a microwave six months of the year, I’m hoppin’ over that Mason-Dixon Line like a frog done sat on a firecracker.
Here’s some more pics from the trip….
100 years ago this hole in the floor had a pedal on it and it stayed under the dining table. When you pushed on it, air came out a whistle in the kitchen, which told the servants to bring more grits or whatever.
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Pretty awesome headline to put next to a picture of Ronald McDonald driving his car around a fundraiser. Oops!
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This was a wind-up toy that drinks beer when you wind him up.
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Thought this would be a good flyer for a show but Killdozer broke up.
First?
Well, where do I start? I’d like to thank my folks, my little brother especially for putting me onto the site. Gavin, for visiting the South, bravo. And Pinky for fronting on Corner Gas. I still contend it was a well written show.
Thank you everyone.
isn’t soho kinda played out?
This article = No Duh
i love the south too – cheap beer and friendly girls. i was just about 30 mins south of myrtle beach in SC just last week and was in a bar with confederate flags all over it and there were black people in there drinking too. williamsburg is way more segregated to be honest
So they are not racist, but they are segregated? Right on!
You’ll see yankee metropolitan towns such as New York and Los Angeles more segregated than any parts of the South believe it or not.
By the way, the belt AND suspenders look is incredibly tacky and even more unsightly than a man wearing a vest with denim jeans. Someone needs to write that into law.
Yeah, the whole “the real racists are the NYU students who want to hang out with people of color because they think it makes them cool” thing has been done to death on here, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
i think everything in this article pertains to everywhere not named new york or l.a.
I’d rather do coke than meth. It’s more glamourous. I’d also rather be in New York than anywhere in the south.
my chink girlfriend is reading the turner diaries and “cant put it down”. We watched thunder road last night and i almost cried when mitchum flips his ride on the parkway…. ive lived in NYC and LA and it aint got shit on the hills of carolina!!!! we aint racist in the south . Poor people hang out with other poor people wether nig or honk…cussin IS wrong
FUCK the South! They killed the White Stripes guy in that movie! And it was filmed in Romania anyway!
Reppin the South here, transplanted from NY. Gavin, I agree about lots of things but there is some shit that goes down here that ain’t so nice. Maybe I should submit ” 10 shitty things about the south that aren’t obvious” to dear SB.
@tinyfrogs: You should.
I’ve found the US to be more racially segregated than the UK.
Also, Southern US accents are the sexiest accents ever.
Rowr!
Dont forget WERE STUPID!
That’s “we’re” stupid, you fucking city-stain.
I love this because it’s so true. Sweet tea, fried pickles and saying “bless your heart” instead of cursing people out. Amazeballs.
Southerners (especially older ones) don’t swear as much because it’s disrespectful. And if you’re going to respect someone else enough not to swear around them, you should respect yourself enough not to swear at all. The last real southern dive I spent time in had a 1 dollar fine for each use of the F-word. The walls were covered in dollar bills.
l like kimchi-bokim-bap!
Not swearing. Hmm. Gonna have to think about that one for a minute. My initial reaction is that it’s the phoniest thing I’ve ever heard.
@luke: to understand the operative psychosis-ology of southerners, you have to always realize foremost the constant hum of cognitive dissonance that was necessary to maintain the chattel slave economy. As Frederick Douglas observed, it was those very slave-owners who made the most florid and voluble public displays of religiousity who treated their slaves with the greatest cruelty and violence.
Similarly, today we see the inheritors of that tradition in those too-numerous-to- recount southern pious evangelical congresspeople who have been discovered consorting with mistresses. Howzabout that nutjob anti-gay protester in New Orleans who was just caught jacking off in his car while looking at the children’s playground? Typical Republican moralist posturer.
Also of a piece with cog-diss grandstanding, cf. red states are net recipients of federal spending. Newt Gingrish’s district was #1 recipient Federal gov’t dollars (largely Dept. of defense pork-barrel mfg) per capita in USA.
Note also that Massachussetts/Northeast has lowest U.S. divorce rates, etc. While southerners wallow in all things normal and foul while proclaiming precisely they are piously opposite. I remember when both R’s and D’s had presidential election-year conventions in the same town (NYC if I recall aright) and the R’s had theirs first: the hookers were disappointed when the hooker-demand from D’s was way way lower than when the R’s were in town.
But in the final analysis, who can begrudge southerners their passionate insanities? Illicit sex is way hotter than okey-doke above-board libertine sex, right? Illicit swearing has more force. Etc.
Ever-seeking a buildup-and-release of the hormonal, self-indulgent frisson of transgression, indulging the brief psychotic fugue: Very feminine, very childish, very anti-rational, very Southern.
You forget to add the women are fucking crazy and everyone’s married by their 23rd birthday, and usually divorced with multiple kids by age 27
fuck the south
So people of a different color being at the same bar means that they’re not racist? That’s the basis for this claim? How absurd. Remind me again, which Carolina is it that flies the confederate flag on the state capital? I’m not saying you can’t be right but I’m going to need some more proof than that. Back in the 90s I remember a man in Texas lynching a black man and dragging him to death behind his truck. I can’t remember that happening in my state… ever. Arizona tried passing a fascist anti-illegal immigrant law that would require people in this country to “carry papers”. Scary stuff.
I would love to discover that the South ins’t racist. I’d feel a bit of hope for the red states. Can anyone shed any light on this? Any other examples and experiences?
Yes, northerners aren’t racist.
@Remedial Dixieology 101
Yes, that is all stuff I agree with.
yet again, a seemingly “controversial” opinion is being treated as though it’s interesting or correct based on its novelty.
He finally admits it!
“I’m an Englishman born to Scottish parents and raised in French Canada.”
So why is he always ragging on Europeans?
I was born and raised in Arkansas and can tell you this: the collective “South” is no more racist than the rest of the country. Unfortunately, racism is alive and well everywhere.
Everything about this article seemed very generalized. Where all in the south did you even go, Gavin? And did you spend any time in any place besides the Courtyard Mariott/various dive bars?
Oh damn, looks like you accidentally posted this on Street Boners instead of American Conservative Magazine.
Uhhh.. chill out guys, it’s ironic to like the south. Geez!
Fun facts: Abbeville is the birthplace of noted… um… historical figure John C. Calhoun. Abbeville was also the site where President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis was staying when he finally threw in the towel.
Yeah, there’s not as nearly as much racism in Abbeville as an outsider might conclude. As race relations in Southern towns go, I suppose it’s somewhere in the middle. This is no doubt a source of much secret disappointment to the Neo-Confederate creeps who visit to fantasize about how things would be if the South had won, (cough, cough, Gavin, cough).
But seriously, did you talk to any of these assholes behind closed doors before posting this? If you want a bigot to open up to you, it helps if there’s not a crew of black dudes twice his size patching potholes within earshot. Or maybe folks were on guard, ’cause who can’t tell a dirty bearded hipster from a dirty bearded hillbilly? Regrettably, my appearance is unremarkable. I have a crew cut. They feel comfortable talking to me, and what they say in private is often nasty, nasty stuff.
Did you expect to see nooses hanging from trees, or sundown town-style warnings at the town limits? Seriously.
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