Dear Mr. Keillor,

It doesn't sound to me like the kind folks you met on your trip to Austin were those who helped create our current administration.

The Dixie Chicks aren't alone in their shame.

Unfortunately, many progressives in the South find themselves growing cold in their quotidian manners because they don't want to be mistaken for the "honey"-toting automatons who talk like Donna Reed in public and Pat Buchanan in the bedroom.

There was a time when sweet words and good humor were indicative of Democrats in the South. But in the same way that Democrats all over have surrendered the concept of moral high ground to the so-called Religious Right, some relinquish politeness to coal-burning machistas.

I can tell you without question that in my years of living among movers and shakers in Texas, liberal and straight-talking Ann Richards was one of the most sincerely hospitable people I've had the pleasure of meeting. We must keep her memory alive so no one will forget "what a real Texas accent sounds like." More than that, of course, we must make certain no one like Bush defeats the likes of her again.

Please help us, if you can, sir. We've an election coming up soon.

Chris Bell can't boast Richards' lapidary wit, but he's a worthy foe for Rick Perry and his minions.

Thank you and best wishes.

I guess I'm one of those Northern, urban liberals (from Chicago), but when I lived in Virginia for three years, I absolutely loved it and made lifelong friends. I found the people truly warm and extremely friendly.

One Northern-Southern thing that relates tangentially--the South is known for its deep racism, right? Yet in my experience, black and white people were much more likely to be friends, to shop and eat in the same places, and to live in the same neighborhoods down there than up here. One friend born and raised in Charleston, SC once discussed this with me after moving to Chicago. She thought it was really odd that people up here talked a good game about equality, yet we wholeheartedly embraced segregation (schools, communities, social outlets). She went on to say that in practice, her community was much more meaningfully integrated--yet she acknowledged that people in the South were more openly racist (displaying the Confederate flag, using the n-word, playing "the War of Northern Agression" instead of cops and robbers). I find it fascinating and sad all at once. I guess it just proves we all have a long way to go.

Why do the people of the south elect neanderthals to public office when they are so friendly?

Easy - they don't mean it. In my experience, the famous 'southern hospitality' is the essence of superficial insincerity.

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

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.

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.