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A Few Observations About the South, Conservatism, and Religious Nutcases

The Dixie Chicks took home no less than five Grammies last night. I was rooting for them for nearly every category. It was nice to see the reality distortion field of millions of rednecks collapsing in plain sight on national TV.

The finer points of hypocrisy are clearly lost on this population of "music lovers" who spend $15 on a CD good enough to listen to, so long as the artists maintain a brainless view of our foreign policy. (Never mind the hypocrisy that this policy is supposedly to protect the freedoms we hold dear such as, say, the freedom of speech)

Perhaps this explains why some people like this genre: it's more about posturing self-identity bolstering rhetoric than it is about the music or substance of the album. You know, "and I'm proud to be an American.... Where at least I know I'm free."

Yes, "at least", indeed.

I think I'm onto something here with this "posturing" bit. A friend of mine (let's call him Dick) was dating a (supposedly) ultra-conservative single mom (let's call her Jane). Dick moved into Jane's house with her and her daughter, and quite unmarried. It was a veritable picture of modern domestic partnership, sans, of course, holy matrimony.

Until, of course, this idyllic picture was shattered every so often when Jane's mom was in town to visit for the weekend. Then, so as to keep up appearances, Dick had to move out and stay with his parents for the weekend because Jane couldn't be so bold as to tell mom that she and Dick were an item and were sharing a bed (gasp!) outside of wedlock.

Now, it's not that she felt guilty for sharing her bed with a man as an unmarried woman (it's all good 51 weeks out of the year). And it's not because such activity would corrupt the morals of her eight year old daughter (who has been instructed to "don't tell gramma").

It's because the illusion of propriety is more important than the propriety itself. One must be "holier than thou", one must be more indignant than the others at the "corruption of moral values", because coming across as being as tolerant as you actually are might make you look like a softie to the other church ladies who are probably putting up the illusion of giving a damn about whether your daughter is having unwed sex, even though, chances are, their daughters are doing the exact same thing.

So it has nothing to do with intrinsic moral values, intrinsic artistic values, or intrinsic political disagreement. So long as the turd has been polished to a sufficient sheen, these people will buy it, just like they buy nutjobs like Falwell, Haggard, and Robertson.

And now for the final exhibit du jour, and I've saved the best for last. It's an astonishing episode of the BBC's "Top Gear". Here's the setup: Take 3 british "lads". Plant them on the Florida/Alabama border. Give them an "impossible mission", and see who comes out alive. Warning: Don't Try This At Home.

Now, you tell me why Alabama is crawling with insecure homophobic nutjobs... I'm convinced these people can't separate their politics from their religion. See, when Borat did the same thing, he was hiding behind the opaque cloud of an ignorance that "he clearly doesn't know what he's saying". Three well-spoken British guys who clearly should know better? Not so much.