Slipperylane,

Even though you'll never read this because I'm posting it too late, I have a response to your response.

One, my post is better than yours in every way. It is a well-written, engaging polemic.

Two, your criticisms of my opinion are nothing but stock responses. "Faux-moral outrage"...there is nothing moral or faux-moral about my outrage. Nor am I outraged. I am amusing myself at the expense of a pantywaist and his pretentious discourse. The real reason I continue to read Salon.com, of which I coyly pretended to be unaware in my last post, is because I don't like President Bush or Republicans and I like reading articles insulting him. You also suggested I "get over myself". I think this is one of those things that people say on forums that's supposed to deflate the adversary's posturing. You are like one of those famous Jerry Springer Strong Black Ladies who hollers from the audience, bringing the debate back down to earth by injecting some Down Home Straight Talk...after she says her thing, people start affirmative action cheering...and don't tell me I'm a racist...I admit it freely. I am one of those famous Southern Racists. I am also smarter and better than you...whoever you are...and more authentic too, why not. Your world is more advanced than ours...and I am not really welcome in the South because I evidently have more in common with you, a Northeastern Liberal Type, then I do with my Southern brothers and sisters, who are indeed mostly stupid and backwards...but somehow when you make fun of them on Salon it doesn't work. I think it's the position from which you're making fun...or maybe it's the fact that you can never seem to get it right. Those Red State videos, for example...these videos would probably be more convincing if you put them on some sort of right-wing website as examples of Northeast Bien-Pensant Liberals trying and failing badly to caricature the South and succeeding only in looking weak. They are petty and badly-done...the accents aren't good...and the people acting are obviously castrated New England wimps.

"Given what you just said about Southern food coming out of the black experience, do you think there's a correlation between the grueling lives of people in America under slavery and the development of rich, fatty Southern food traditions?

I think you're right. One generation or two generations ago they needed hardy food. That was true for African-Americans and it was also true for working-class Southerners. Food was fuel. And your palate in successive generations is hard-wired for that taste, that pork fat bobbing in that pot of greens."

I'm sorry - but I have to disagree that fatty Southern food was born of the need for fuel. It was born out of slaves getting what was left of livestock once the slave owners had taken the best of the meat. Slaves were given the discards - the fat, the chitterlings, the pigs' feet, the snout, the ears. They weren't given the hams or the loin or the chops. So they cooked what they had. They made it work. That's why they ate neckbones and ham hocks. The whites didn't want them. But it was the black cook in the white kitchen, having discovered the flavor to be had in these discarded scraps, introduced them into the diet of the whites.

These scraps were toss out or given away out the back doors of butchers for decades, until they figured out that black people LIKED these foods and would pay for them. Race, privilege, and power are always factors in every aspect of our culture - business may be the brain, but race is the blood pressure - even in the food.

"And sometimes I think, you know, if we had just not bothered to respond when they seceded, then there would be another third world country out there between us and Mexico."

Yeah, I like to daydream too, but remember, if we did let them secede, we'd now have a nuclear-armed theocracy on our border -- kind of like a Christian Pakistan.

Anyway, traditional Southern cuisine seems to be almost identical, in means if not in ends, to traditional soul food from around the world, by which I mean anyplace where poor people had to make do with what they had on hand. For example, my impoverished Russian ancestors turned offal into sweetmeats. Comfort food? Yes. Healthy? Maybe. Hell for their vegetarian descendants? Definitely.

"I don't know why I keep reading Salon."

Ummm, because it stokes your faux-moral outrage?

"We hate you and your delicate analyses of our culture. We hate the lyrical way in which you celebrate our tragically corrupted authenticity, leavened only by the presence of the black angels whose innocent suffering will ultimately redeem our benighted region."

Oh get over yourself, Blanche. Or should I say, Scarlet?

"Stay up North, we don't like you."

Doh!

I don't know why I keep reading Salon. I'm a Southerner and I have yet to read a single article by one of you New York pencilnecks about my region that doesn't get everything wrong. I'm a pencilneck myself. But that isn't the point. The point is that you Earnest New York Ivy League Right Thinkers are incapable of writing about the South without fucking it up. We hate you and your delicate analyses of our culture. We hate the lyrical way in which you celebrate our tragically corrupted authenticity, leavened only by the presence of the black angels whose innocent suffering will ultimately redeem our benighted region. We hate your fake gourmet versions of our food even though they are obviously better. We hate your bien-pensance. Salon.com should be called articlesthatappealtobienpensantdouchebags.com. I am sort of a leftist. I hate all that Republican crap as much as you New York pencilnecks do. But I can't stand it when you write about the South. Stay up North, we don't like you.

They're pretty whiney,too, aren't they?

He/She is a whiner. A southern whiner, still a whiner. Sometimes it seems to us who aren't southerners, that you are looking to take offense at something, anything. And sometimes I think, you know, if we had just not bothered to respond when they seceded, then there would be another third world country out there between us and Mexico. And GWB could be the preznit of THAT country!