Easy, they are stone cold hypocrites, Garrison. You look like them you get hugs, you don't, you get rousted.

We expect everyone to share our values and honesty. We would no more expect an elected official to take advantage of his position anymore than we'd expect our sainted grandmothers to perform lapdances.

Now the northern half of me is cynical and suspicious. It may be the only reason I'm still alive.

Until recently, I lived in Texas all my life and 14 of those years were spent in Austin. (I live in Oakland now.) If you ask me what I miss the most about home I will tell you, it is the pleasantries. On a bad day, these things will carry you. Southerners know that. They are mindful. What I don't understand is why other people don't. At the post office today, I heard the lady in front of me say, "Can I skip ahead of you? I have to be somewhere at 10." The guy replied, "Hey, we all have to be somewhere." I couldn't decide who I found to be the ruder person; Her for asking in a manner that implied not so much a favor as a command, or him for saying no.

Thanks for writing the column, Mr. Keillor. I enjoyed it. And since I've met a lot of the diehard liberals in Austin, let me offer an answer to your question: Most of them are afraid to rock the boat. They don't want to appear impolite. What we need is a bit more of that fiery determination a la LBJ. Someone who knows when to say please and when to push.

I can't explain the diehard liberals you say you know in Texas.

I CAN explain the sweet little old waitress who calls you "precious" and "dear". All you have to do is to say something in front of her in opposition to regressivity as domestic policy, or warmongering as foreign policy, and I suspect you'll hear something from her that is not so sweet.

People who seem sweet usually do so because they are completely comfortable with the status quo. Make them uncomfortable, and you get to see their other side.

I moved from Texas to Philadelphia 32 years ago, and had to enter our children in the schools, had to establish Pennsylvania credentials to drive cars and use the banks, and had for the first time to use subways and trains to get around. I was daily assaulted by the public habit of gruffness. When I had to ask for directions, the lady at the turnstile would give me a brusque retort, as if I were stupid not to know the answer already. I would come home some days almost in tears. But I got over it.

I had not realized how much I had adjusted until one day I was standing in a butcher shop 'down to shore' (at the New Jersey beaches) and found myself becoming uneasy. The butcher had struck up small talk with me while he prepared my steaks. What was this, a come-on or something? Then it came to me: he was being polite. It was the kind of sociable exchange that was part of the normal course of daily life in Texas; when I brought groceries at the Piggly-Wiggly, the cashier and I would start up a back-and-forth conversation that had as much art as news in it. It was a skill, like ballroom dancing. So I abandoned my paranoia with the New Jersey butcher, and softened into the play of the conversation. The New Jersey shore, I realized, is a slowed-down place, like the Texas of my youth.

I was attending Temple University for a graduate degree. Temple is smack in the middle of a great urban, mostly black population. Some of my white northern friends were wary of taking the subway there. I am white like them, but I actually felt quite at home, more than anywhere else in Philadelphia for a while. I could walk down a neighborhood street there, and when a black person said an easy hello or actually tipped their hat (yes!), it was for me a return to the manners of small town of my childhood. For me, it was the only place up north where people knew how to enjoy the public greeting of strangers.

With a son in Austin, the trips back to Texas have become a way to dip back into this kind of public mellowness. I'd say that friendly manners are no guarantee of political enlightenment. That takes education. But casual warmth among strangers is its own blessing.

Garrison must've been having a bad day, jet lag or something like that. I live in North Carolina and I'm a proud Southern liberal but am getting so weary, yawn, of these sterotypes about the South. For goodness sake, the area of this country called "the South" is currently populated with people who "ain't from around here." We local-yokels are in the minority. So the flawed concept of sweet Southerners electing regressive, warmongering politicians is rather tiresome. Man, sit back, relax, read "All The King's Men" and have a glass of iced tea with a generous amount of lemon added...it will get better soon.

There are a lot of defensive and emotional responses here, which I see as unfortunate.

I'm a mid-western Yankee, but raised by a pretty Southern Belle from Atlanta, which is where I spent my summers, and still go to find refuge in Uncle Tom's cabin....

My Father was a passionate, New England educated poet who loved the way people in the south used language--and the previous poster got it right--it is a form of song. This gets at something we are about to lose as a people--the ability to love language in spoken form, face-to-face, and value that as part of life. The gift of the spoken oratory, the music of the mind, the public debate, is a dying art. This is, of course, deliberate. Media doesn't want people to know how easy it is to recognize and defeat the BS they spew.

Take a week off, in New Orleans, or up in the hills of Cherry Log County. Talk to some folk. But mostly, just have fun. Language is supposed to be fun!

New England and early American language was less like song, but still much improved and witty upon what passes today for "discourse." I think Mark Twain was a master at capturing that...and please Garrison, go back and read Kafka in German.

Part of this also gets at class, which is why New Orleans is so wonderful--color of the skin is much less of a barrier to good polite conversation than in most places.

Folk up north tend to believe that that stoic, quiet, stillness shows respect, and it does--it gives someone the opportunity to open a conversation, and what better way than with "sweeten up for me now sugar?" Norwegian’s, especially, come off as a bit stiff...but they have warm hearts (and I speak from experience there).

Hit me what I'm tellin' ya.

Barnaby