Fuck The South*; California Über Alles

It used to be said of California, especially the southern part, that the United Snakes had been turned on its edge & everything loose (or all the nuts & flakes) had rolled to Southern Calif., where most of them opened a health food store in Venice or started a sex cult.

This slanderous calumny has at last been taken from the collective SoCal us by Gary Wills in the NYRB & applied where it's always belonged: To the dumb-ass crackers in the Bible Belt:

This is the thing that makes the South the distillation point for all the fugitive extremisms of our time, the heart of Say-No Republicanism, the home of lost causes and nostalgic lunacy. It is as if the whole continent were tipped upward, so that the scattered crazinesses might slide down to the bottom. The South has often been defeated. Now it is defeating itself.

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*A-yup.