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.

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.

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.

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

And I, for one, will not sit by idly while a group of white people (Salon readers) bash the good black people of the South. Most people in this country don't have the luxury of being able to overanalyze everything the way that your average Salon reader does, sitting at his or her desk, earning his or her $42,350 per year, just dying to be thought of as the wittiest letter writer of the day. The people you're bashing are too busy washing your cars, serving your food, bussing your tables and picking up your trash to worry about sociological differences between Northerners and Southerners. For christ's sake, many of you people need to get over yourselves. Including Garrison Keillor.

As a Birmingham native in my late 30's, it is my experience that those Southerners who Honey and Sweetie everyone are in two general camps. The first is made up of older people, those who came to age a couple of generations ago. My Grandmother and her siblings who were educated and middle to upper-middle class could "Dahlin'" with the best of them (the last of her siblings died at 93 a few years back). The second camp would be people of any age who happen to come from more blue-collar, working class backgrounds AND/OR who work in the service industry. Hence GK's (or gohst intern's) experience with the waitress and the airport worker. My exterminator calls me Youngin', Sweet Thing, Darlin', Sugar, etc. and he is in both camps, and, interestingly, I have often been subject to many endearments in the doctor's and dentist's office by both the staff and the doctor, where their intention is to put me at ease. I cannot think of anyone I know (bartender, teacher, CEO) in my generation who "Sweetens Up" anyone in this way.

Stereotying, in any form, is a fool's game. Whether you're stereotyping "blacks" or "women" or "southerners", you're going to be very wrong a great portion of the time.

I used to self-stereotype. Growing up just north of Austin--it's true, Texas isn't a part of The True South, the heavily Mexican-influenced culture makes it very different from, say, Mississippi--I listened to and believed the stereotypes others applied to us. Never mind that I didn't encounter racism in my daily life or see it perpetrated against my black and latino friends. Why should I? I figured that since I was white, racism just wasn't a part of my experience; I knew that was not evidence that it didn't happen. But I must say that I never heard anyone call the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression". I was raised (in classrooms and at home) to believe that We were wrong and They were right, and that Abraham Lincoln was an American hero.

So, I believed it wholeheartedly when my Northern, Eastern, Western and Mid-Western brothers and sisters said the South (and Texas) were America's toilet, and I got out as soon as I could, believing that, at last, I was going to experience what an unbiased society could really be. Imagine my shock, upon moving to Iowa, to hear overt racism and especially anti-Semitism spoken to me as though it was the most natural thing in the world. I was shocked to see cities with predominantly black neighborhoods where the quality of housing was clearly inferior to where most of the white people lived. I could not believe the general and loud hostility toward Mexican immigrants, who are making welcome (to my mind) inroads into Middle America. They, too, had their slums, and moved about quietly, as though afraid of attracting attention. I'll never forget one white woman's loud claim that she was sure they didn't bathe. I had never, ever heard anything like that back home, not even in hateful whispers.

I spent a month in Paris where I encountered virulent racial hatred, demonstrations in the streets, then I moved to New York City, Liberal Mecca, where I found the brusqueness refreshing. It was nice to be able to ignore everyone around me, to pretend other people didn't exist . . . for a while. But then, after the dazzle wore off, even that great society's dark cracks began to show. We all know about the slums; Brooklyn, the Bronx, they're legendary. What troubled me most, though, was the condition of public schools, like predominantly black and hispanic H.S. 460 Washington Irving High School where overcrowding, truancy and low graduation rates were the norm. I read about low literacy rates in NYC schools, and I witnessed terrible grammar firsthand every day on the subway. It wasn't the white kids who couldn't speak properly. Why was there such an enormous discrepancy between how white people and black people lived in New York? Why were the white children getting a better education (obviously money)? While I did see some overt racism in New York, the covert racism was much more palpable and manifest, but everyone denies that it exists, simply pointing their fingers at the Southern states.

So, I moved back to Austin and now reside here a little wiser, knowing that things are bad in Texas, but the sad fact is that they're bad everywhere. I wouldn't like to be an African-American in the South, but I don't have much faith that African-Americans have ANYWHERE to go where they won't encounter racism. We Texans have plenty of problems and, outside of Austin, a true knack for electing dirtbags and liars. I don't know why. I would have to guess it's poor education, tradition, maybe fear or a lack of creative thinking. I'm not dismissing it as unimportant, but acknowledging that I don't have a good answer.

On topic: There are some older Texans who have this over-friendly attitude, though I don't know many of them personally, and the stereotype certainly doesn't apply to all of us. The unwelcome intimacy makes many of us uncomfortable, so we just ignore it. It does seem like a passive-aggressive form of hostility. Usually I offer as pleasant a smile as I can muster, avoid answering questions, and move quickly along.