See, that's exactly what I was thinking. I spent several years living on the road; I used to see the same faces in airports all the time, except when they were faces who only looked like the same ones. On a particularly fevered evening, I imagined that all the normal people had been transplanted, and the world was occupied only by management consultants and salesmen kept in transit, so that we would never know about the holocaust that had occured 'outside'.

I can't stand either of these two, but the interesting thing to me is not their stupidity but just how fluid and fungible ... and how far off ... is our notion of what 'average Americans' look like. And how useful that fungibility turns out to be.

Pax. Sorry about the threats to you and your family. In light of that, I'm sure it seems like weak tea for me to assert that this isn't really representative.

There's certainly plenty of racist history down here. Denying it would be foolish, just as it would be to deny that some people still hold those views, even if they know they can't say them in public (a phenom I know is not limited to the South). But things have been changing for a long time; where/when I grew up it was still common, but had already tipped the scale in the previous 20 years. Having recently returned to the South, the change in attitudes is phenomenal, and pleasing.

What has been slower to change are the stereotypes about this region, both the good ones and the bad ones. To me, the problem is the gulf that creates between like minded people who could otherwise talk, learn from one another, and cooperate to make things better. Or less grandiosely, just doing things like capturing Eric Rudolph, the abortion-clinic bomber who disappeared in the hills near my home town. The FBI and the media showed up, did their high-handed thing and started cracking wise about the dirt eaters and niggra-lynchers and surprise, the cooperation dried up. This among people who themselves had had abortions, or amenable opinions and no particular use for someone who would blow up a women's clinic.

Not speaking of you here, but oftimes well-meaning liberal folk are either high-handed or outright insulting when they deal with people like me (or the abstraction they take me to fit); Insulting me I can handle, but the lost opportunity for shared goals and actions, especially now when so many things are going to hell in a handbasket, is distressing.

And yeah (speaking to other people out there in the crowd) that includes any of you Obama supporters that call racism or race-baiting or hypocrisy anytime someone is insufficiently breathless and venerating toward your guy, even when the fact is I'll likely be voting for him in November just like you.

the 'depilated' (sic) infrastructure.

I missed that one the first time around. Hilarious! Imagine what the lawn-mower acquisition costs will do to the deficit ...

1. I had a similar experience roughly thirty years ago; it started out a little differently, because I got run out of my home town as a teenager (long story), but once I stopped shaking the next year of wandering was, on most days, a big adventure, not least because of the people I met and esp the ones who helped me out. There were also people who made me interesting ... um, offers ... but no one who couldn't take 'no' for an answer, and also that guy who tried to strangle me for sleeping in his spot under the bridge, but they were, for the most part, just more characters (or so it seems now, anyway).

The other great way I met people I wouldn't have met otherwise was in the army. Aside from the regional variation (all those yankees! city folk! surfers from california! yikes!), the in-your-face lessons about race definitely made an impression. Like, in basic training, having my (black) drill sergeants insist to us fighting trainees that they would not allow any of 'that racial bullshit to ruin my army'. Or having some of the best leaders you've ever seen (still) be people from groups you might not even have known, until you acknowledge your surprise, that you had expected less from.

I hear Noonan and Williams and others make their pale paens to 'normal people' and bounce them off those experiences, and I have to laugh. And then I frown, because I realize how thin is the background of people we accept as 'experts', who 'know a lot' and 'have a lot of information' ...

BTW - I don't mean to say the military is the only way someone can have an experience like this, but we'd be a better people if there were more opportunities, similarly structures. This year is the 75th anniversary of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC); maybe a good time to have that aborted discussion about the merits of national service?

Brilliant! Maybe we could send the revived CCC in to do the 'finish work'?

I might suggest that a ballpark, with your kid screaming that he's thirsty, might not be such a great example of a free market ...