Southern discomforts: The final feh

The scene: Lunch at a bistro (no, really) in Morgantown, West Virginia, 3 April 2009. The topic: The NCAA Final Four.

"I can't stand Carolina!" the Virginian said. "I hope they lose!"

"I can't stand them either--and I'm *from* North Carolina!" I said.

"'If God isn't a Tarheel, then why is the sky Carolina Blue.' Goodness, I hope I never hear that again!" she said.

"Or those stupid blue heels painted on every surface, whenever they win. And, god, don't get me started on all the hugging that happens after a win, with everyone acting as if it were a validation of their fabulous lifestyle!"

"I can't believe that Pitt lost. I was hoping to see them beat Carolina," she noted. "Now I just hope Villanova brings 'em down," she added.

"Anybody but Carolina!" I said.

"I'd just as soon see the Red Chinese beat Carolina!" she exclaimed.

"Heck, I'd just as soon see the Taliban beat Carolina!" I snapped.

Truth be told, what's even worse, I'd even take a team made up of Osama bin Laden, Ted Bundy, Pol Pot, Simon LeGree, *and* P. W. Botha to beat Carolina. Maybe throw in Mussolini, Lisa Rinna, and Jessica Simpson as substitutions.

However, I would probably draw the line at a team made up of Rush Limbaugh, Eric Cantor, Dick Cheney, Adolf Hitler, and Lindsay Lohan, with Karl Rove, Dane Cook, and whoever is responsible for the Pittsburgh-area highway system as subs. Even they would deserve to lose to the unsavory likes of UNC.

* * *

My hatred for Carolina is intense. It is visceral. It is innate. I cannot fully explain or fathom its depths--at least not without foaming at the mouth and wanting to kick puppies.

Yet, for the love of Mayberry, those Carolina mo'fo's are in the freakin' NCAA Final Four again--led by a guy named Tyler Hansbrough. No, shit. Tyler Hansbrough. That sounds like the name of a guy who has an unnaturally close relationship with his mother. (I am reminded of a guy from high school whose mother still referred to him as "Chrissy," while barely acknowledging that she had two other children, just as capable and competent as The Anointed One with the sissy petname.) Tyler Hansbrough sounds like the name of Barbie's new rebound boyfriend, whom she no doubt took up with after finding Ken in bed with Big Jim. (That Barbie. She'll never learn to avoid the closet cases.) That sounds like the name of a guy . . . who would play basketball at Carolina (even if he is from Missouri--which is almost as bad).

Admittedly, maybe I would feel differently if I had actually gone to school at Carolina, for either undergrad or graduate, instead of to two of the lesser, indifferently funded, lights of the University of North Carolina System. I didn't really consider going to Carolina as an undergrad--a weird combination of NOCD ("not our class, dear," meaning I wasn't of their class, y'all) and the Gobi Desert of guidance counseling that was the working-class kid's experience in North Carolina public education, circa 1979. If you were one of the first families in town--even if your Dad was postmaster general or a furniture salesman, such was the how-low-can-you-go limbo bar of achievement in our little community--you were encouraged. If your grades were on par with the rest and your Dad was enlisted military (i.e., not a townie), well, to the back of the line with you, peasant.

Not that I'm still bitter, 30 years later, or anything . . . but it is still the case that, in the latter part of my 40s, I get judged by others (all North Carolinians, naturally) on whether I went to "Chapel College" and what it says about me that I didn't.

I did apply and was accepted for grad school at Chapel Hill, but chose not to go when I got a better scholarship offer at another North Carolina school, received no real response regarding funding (or even campus jobs) from Carolina, and realized I had very little desire to incur major debt in my early 30s. Maybe it would have helped me in my career path to have gone to a "name" school--or maybe not. I felt more nurtured where I ended up going and haven't done too badly for myself, all things considered. Perhaps it took me longer to get where I was trying to go--but that's assuming that I ever really know where I'm trying to go, more than a couple of years out from the destination.

But my loathing for all that is Carolina runs deeper and is more long-standing than any slight/sleight Southern discomfort over what might have been. I think it's that Carolina and the whole "Chapel Hill attitude" just grates against my sense of what life--and especially North Carolina life--is supposed to be about.

How I remember North Carolina as a child is as a community of small farmers and millworkers, good-hearted folk with simple aspirations, trying to live their lives well and let others do the same. Going along to get along, perhaps, a little boringly pleasant, maybe, but essentially salt o' the earth types.

Just hold the salt. And the pepper.

This is more like the Mayberry Snappy Lunch blue-plate special view of the world. Everything is in black-and-white (well, mostly white). Barney Fife is on the menu, and there are extra helpings of Thelma Lou, if you ask nicely. Andy and the Darlings provide the floorshow. But they are plum out of Helen Crump. And good god, please no sides or entrees of Emmit, Howard, or Goober.

Yes, it is possible to have seen too many episodes of the Andy Griffith Show. My bucolic, harmonious, tender-hearted memory, all sleepy small-town and "lord, it's just like livin' in a poem," doesn't jibe with the cold-water reality of racial discrimination and social inequality, the big sticks of god-fearing religion and law-and-order until death do us part, or the festering divide between malingering, manipulating aristocracy and crazy cracker populism.

If truth be told, North Carolina life is less Frank Capra-meets-Norman Rockwell, and more Franz Kafka-meets-Norman Rockwell. I'm a little bit country, I'm a little bit turning into a cockroach before your very eyes.

Or perhaps it's not Kafka after all; perhaps it's strictly David Lynch-ian in nature--Blue Velvet intertwined with Twin Peaks strangled by Wild at Heart. In this alternate-universe Mayberry, Helen's a hooker. Thelma Lou is an axe-murderess. Andy cross-dresses. Instead of cooking up kerosene pickles in the kitchen, Aunt Bea runs the town meth lab, and Opie's her number one customer. Barney's a deaf mute midget who only speaks in Otis's dreams. And being that Otis is now sober and sane, nobody believes a word he says.

Well, OK, it's not quite like that either--'cause that would make it at least interesting. Besides, that would make it Louisiana.

Instead, North Carolina feels worse in a particularly stingy, mewling, bitter pill way: It is classist, it is mean-spirited, it is jealous, it is condescending, it is judgmental, it is passive-aggressive, it is clannish, it is suspicious, and it is holier-than-thou. It is essentially English in culture, except with better home-cooking and nicer weather.

I feel torn, to say the least--a queasy mix of pride over my culture (the food, the music, the landscape, the literature), yet full of anger over what many of us have had to live through to hold on to it, to make it our own. Despite the guns-and-religion, we're-all-in-lockstep-toward-the-promised-land reputation, Southern culture has its share of queers (sexual or otherwise), working-class types, non-joiners, rebels, independents, loners, crackpots, revolutionaries, and individuals.

And only some of them resorted to firearms. I would imagine quite a few just picked up a pen and shot off their opinions in letters to the editor or in articles and books, both published and unpublished. Still others packed it in, picked up a suitcase, and moved on and moved out. Yet try to get a little respect for that.

* * *

During Friday's visit to Morgantown, a mountain town in an Appalachian state, for a moment I felt a resurgence of pride--of the culture, the accomplishments, the bounty of life created on a shoestring budget. But this was pride for my Dad's Kentucky Appalachian heritage, not for my native North Carolina one.

The story of the creation of West Virginia is that it seceded from Virginia during the Civil War, not feeling well served by mainline Virginia interests and not content to be separated from the rest of the United States due to the handiwork of a few chivalrous, racist hot-heads too much into dressing up to play at being soldiers. Perhaps, too, West Virginians hated that peculiar institution of slavery and the feel of upper-class Virginia elitism chafing against its rough-and-tumble, working-class hide.

Kentucky was and often still is considered a Southern state, but it, too, refused to secede from the Union, despite having a decidedly mixed approach to the planter class and slavery. I wonder if that split personality, that feeling of being part of a culture, yet feeling removed, even alienated from it, is ultimately what I'm about. 'Cause that's what I feel these days, simultaneously very Southern in Pennsylvania and very un-Southern in the South and among my fellow Southerners.

Still, Andy Griffith went to UNC and Mitch McConnell is from Kentucky--and even snippy, whingeing England has good music and quirky-quaint towns. There is just good and bad in everything, I guess, and I would imagine it's best to make peace with it as well as you can.

But hey! In the meantime, tonight I'd still like to see Carolina go down in flames! Big, huge, conflagratory flames! The Great Chapel Hill Fire of 2009! Bring a spit--we're gonna have a barbecue, y'all!

So, Villanova, if you're listening, please barbecue some Carolina (pork) butt for me this evening. And if you can't, then (egad, how far I've fallen!), please let Connecticut or Michigan State do the roasting.