ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 26, 1996 TAG: 9612260088
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KARAL ANN MARLING
Peter Applebome is a journalist who has spent most of his adult years dissecting the South for The New York Times and a couple of journals published in Texas (which may or may not qualify as a Southern state).
He has toured the Elvis-a-Rama in Branson, Mo. He joined in the procession from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., on the 30th anniversary of the famous march for voting rights that helped to shape the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He once sat at George Wallace's bedside as the former segregationist talked about Holy Scripture, repentance and Elvis. And he ate chow mein with Louisiana Klansman David Duke.
None of which makes him authentically Southern, however, despite his patent liking for the place. By his own admission, Applebome has never read ``Gone With the Wind.'' And he doesn't write much about washin' down Moon Pies with slugs of warm RC Cola while sittin' under the kudzu vines in the sorts of picturesque Southern backwaters described in the memoirs of professional Southerners, like humorists and country singers.
Instead, he argues in his new book, ``Dixie Rising,'' that the South is no longer that strange, peculiar, horrifying yet beguiling place that is, or was, a kind of foreign nation inside our borders - the South, the Deep South, as opposed to the United States. When Margaret Mitchell's ``Gone With the Wind'' was published in 1936, the South was, in Franklin Roosevelt's words, ``the nation's No. 1 economic problem.''
The South was also a jumble of wildly contradictory images: white-columned mansions, sullen poverty, segregation enforced by draconian Jim Crow laws, the mighty dams and power lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the go-go business-and-boosterism ethos of Atlanta, exemplifying the New South.
But slowly and surely, while we weren't paying much attention, sometime between then and now - between Scarlett O'Hara's first flouncy appearance on the front porch of Tara and Newt Gingrich's rise to power in Cobb County, Ga. (a 90 percent white, suburban outpost of Atlanta where Scarlett's latter-day cousins aspire to dwell) - America was batter-dipped and Southern-fried. They became us.
Air conditioning made the region south of the Mason-Dixon Line habitable by Yankees: cool artificial breezes have created a viable Sun Belt, where everybody wants to live these days.
That's where the jobs are, too. Factories have moved southward in the last 20 years, lured by the historical absence of labor unions. The unorganized Dixie work force reflects the same Southern independence of mind that gave us Jefferson Davis, states' rights and a festering mistrust of government - now almost universal, from Maine to Florida.
The solid South of the New Deal era is mostly Republican and suburban today, just like the rest of the country. Politicians of all stripes thump Bibles just like old-time Southern preachers. Country music straight from Nashville is the anthem of the middle-aged and the middle class everywhere. The president of the United States is a bubba from Arkansas.
And the racial prejudice once attributed exclusively to white Southerners is a national scandal, seen in its purest form in the California courtrooms where trials related to the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles riots and the O.J. Simpson murder case play themselves out in anger, pain, dashed hopes and mean-spirited recriminations.
Out of the words of virtually any Southern leader of note in the last 40 years, Applebome has marshaled impressive firsthand evidence to prove his point. But beneath the slick political surface of his argument lurks a corrosive cultural crisis that has not been so much analyzed as viewed in passing, from the front seat of a speeding pickup truck.
Like many of his sources, Applebome sees the character of the South ebbing away in the cul de sac suburbs of the 1990s and the gentrified inner cities that all look just alike, whether they're in Nashville, Tenn., or Charlotte, N.C., or Boston.
In Charlotte it's cookie-cutter office towers with atriums (a mark, of course, of a ``world-class'' city). In Nashville it's the venerable old Lower Broadway music dives being nudged into oblivion by the global sophistication of Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe. It's a sense of community that's missing now, or the presweetened nativism evoked in films like ``Fried Green Tomatoes'' and ``Steel Magnolias.''
The underlying issue in all of this is not the South, although the gracious, friendly mint-julep-on-the-front-porch South may be an antidote. In their all but identical tract houses in neighborless suburbs, Americans as a whole feel disconnected and rootless and all alone.
Today we long to live, if not in the old South, then in some other Shangri-La that looks suspiciously like Beaver Cleaver's hometown, circa 1953. Applebome is really describing a troubled nation rummaging through the attic of its own history in search of solace.
Each chapter of ``Dixie Rising'' takes its title and character from a Southern town: Selma, Ala.; Columbia, S.C.; Honea Path, S.C., and so forth.
Chapter 6, on Charlotte, tells the story of an American city caught between the charms of a moonlight-on-the-magnolias yesterday and a bleak tomorrow. It isn't just a matter of style, Southern graciousness vs. the kind of Yankee enterprise that blights the landscape with office parks clad in mirrored glass.
Charlotte is a complicated town where old racial conflicts seemed about to be eradicated in the 1970s. School integration worked so well there that Charlotte schoolchildren were sending letters of encouragement to kids in Boston, urging them to reject the politics of hate.
But like cities in the Midwest and the North, Charlotte sprawled into urban chaos in the 1980s and '90s, busing became impractical, the old fervor burnt itself out and Charlotte now relies on magnet schools to keep the idea of multiracial education alive. When a black minister was installed in a traditionally white church in 1994, his congregation simply melted away.
Charlotte today, in Applebome's telling, sounds less like the fabled South and more like Boston or Minneapolis or Los Angeles, a collection of interest groups in search of a sustaining vision of community. The South is us, and it's a pity.
By KARAL ANN MARLING
By KARAL ANN MARLING
NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE
Peter Applebome is a journalist who has spent most of his adult years dissecting the South for The New York Times and a couple of journals published in Texas (which may or may not qualify as a Southern state).
He has toured the Elvis-a-Rama in Branson, Mo. He joined in the procession from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., on the 30th anniversary of the famous march for voting rights that helped to shape the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He once sat at George Wallace's bedside as the former segregationist talked about Holy Scripture, repentance and Elvis. And he ate chow mein with Louisiana Klansman David Duke.
None of which makes him authentically Southern, however, despite his patent liking for the place. By his own admission, Applebome has never read ``Gone With the Wind.'' And he doesn't write much about washin' down Moon Pies with slugs of warm RC Cola while sittin' under the kudzu vines in the sorts of picturesque Southern backwaters described in the memoirs of professional Southerners, like humorists and country singers.
Instead, he argues in his new book, ``Dixie Rising,'' that the South is no longer that strange, peculiar, horrifying yet beguiling place that is, or was, a kind of foreign nation inside our borders - the South, the Deep South, as opposed to the United States. When Margaret Mitchell's ``Gone With the Wind'' was published in 1936, the South was, in Franklin Roosevelt's words, ``the nation's No. 1 economic problem.''
The South was also a jumble of wildly contradictory images: white-columned mansions, sullen poverty, segregation enforced by draconian Jim Crow laws, the mighty dams and power lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the go-go business-and-boosterism ethos of Atlanta, exemplifying the New South.
But slowly and surely, while we weren't paying much attention, sometime between then and now - between Scarlett O'Hara's first flouncy appearance on the front porch of Tara and Newt Gingrich's rise to power in Cobb County, Ga. (a 90 percent white, suburban outpost of Atlanta where Scarlett's latter-day cousins aspire to dwell) - America was batter-dipped and Southern-fried. They became us.
Air conditioning made the region south of the Mason-Dixon Line habitable by Yankees: cool artificial breezes have created a viable Sun Belt, where everybody wants to live these days.
That's where the jobs are, too. Factories have moved southward in the last 20 years, lured by the historical absence of labor unions. The unorganized Dixie work force reflects the same Southern independence of mind that gave us Jefferson Davis, states' rights and a festering mistrust of government - now almost universal, from Maine to Florida.
The solid South of the New Deal era is mostly Republican and suburban today, just like the rest of the country. Politicians of all stripes thump Bibles just like old-time Southern preachers. Country music straight from Nashville is the anthem of the middle-aged and the middle class everywhere. The president of the United States is a bubba from Arkansas.
And the racial prejudice once attributed exclusively to white Southerners is a national scandal, seen in its purest form in the California courtrooms where trials related to the Rodney King beating, the Los Angeles riots and the O.J. Simpson murder case play themselves out in anger, pain, dashed hopes and mean-spirited recriminations.
Out of the words of virtually any Southern leader of note in the last 40 years, Applebome has marshaled impressive firsthand evidence to prove his point. But beneath the slick political surface of his argument lurks a corrosive cultural crisis that has not been so much analyzed as viewed in passing, from the front seat of a speeding pickup truck.
Like many of his sources, Applebome sees the character of the South ebbing away in the cul de sac suburbs of the 1990s and the gentrified inner cities that all look just alike, whether they're in Nashville, Tenn., or Charlotte, N.C., or Boston.
In Charlotte it's cookie-cutter office towers with atriums (a mark, of course, of a ``world-class'' city). In Nashville it's the venerable old Lower Broadway music dives being nudged into oblivion by the global sophistication of Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe. It's a sense of community that's missing now, or the presweetened nativism evoked in films like ``Fried Green Tomatoes'' and ``Steel Magnolias.''
The underlying issue in all of this is not the South, although the gracious, friendly mint-julep-on-the-front-porch South may be an antidote. In their all but identical tract houses in neighborless suburbs, Americans as a whole feel disconnected and rootless and all alone.
Today we long to live, if not in the old South, then in some other Shangri-La that looks suspiciously like Beaver Cleaver's hometown, circa 1953. Applebome is really describing a troubled nation rummaging through the attic of its own history in search of solace.
Each chapter of ``Dixie Rising'' takes its title and character from a Southern town: Selma, Ala.; Columbia, S.C.; Honea Path, S.C., and so forth.
Chapter 6, on Charlotte, tells the story of an American city caught between the charms of a moonlight-on-the-magnolias yesterday and a bleak tomorrow. It isn't just a matter of style, Southern graciousness vs. the kind of Yankee enterprise that blights the landscape with office parks clad in mirrored glass.
Charlotte is a complicated town where old racial conflicts seemed about to be eradicated in the 1970s. School integration worked so well there that Charlotte schoolchildren were sending letters of encouragement to kids in Boston, urging them to reject the politics of hate.
But like cities in the Midwest and the North, Charlotte sprawled into urban chaos in the 1980s and '90s, busing became impractical, the old fervor burnt itself out and Charlotte now relies on magnet schools to keep the idea of multiracial education alive. When a black minister was installed in a traditionally white church in 1994, his congregation simply melted away.
Charlotte today, in Applebome's telling, sounds less like the fabled South and more like Boston or Minneapolis or Los Angeles, a collection of interest groups in search of a sustaining vision of community. The South is us, and it's a pity.
Karal Ann Marling is the author of ``Graceland: Going Home With Elvis'' and a professor of popular culture at the University of Minnesota.
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