Save Your Confederate Bills

Part 1 of  2

My good friend Bart, aka Dromedary Hump, aka The Atheist Camel recently posed a question on Facebook about the southern mentality.  The southern United States is often known as the Bible Belt.  We're a - pardon the expression - hot bed of hyper religiosity, ignorance, and outright stupidity.  Throw in low incomes, substandard schools, racism, a lack of intellectual curiosity and just plain stubbornness, and you have yourself a typical redneck.  Bart was curious as to why this is so prevalent in the southern United States.  I can sum it up in two words:  It's complicated.  In fact, it's way too complicated to explain on a Facebook thread, so I must bark about it.

First, let's talk about that Bible Belt business.  If the southern US is the Bible Belt, Arkansas is not the buckle.  It's the name tooled on the back of the belt.  That's another bark altogether, but a true southern redneck is not complete if his/her name is not tooled on the back of his/her belt.  It helps rednecks know who they shacked up with the night before when they got too drunk to see at the honky tonk.  It's also used as a form of identification when cashing checks and when getting pulled over by the cops.  Suffice it to say that the name on the back of the belt is every bit as important as having a buckle bigger than one's head.   

In some areas, there is literally a church on every corner.  Often, it's a Southern Baptist church.  Southern Baptists are not known for tolerance.  Not only do they not tolerate people who are different from them or dare to question their beliefs/directives, they do not tolerate each other.  That is the reason there are so many Southern Baptist churches in the south.  Each individual church claims to be the one that truly adheres to the bible and the other churches' members are all going to hell.  Oh, and they preach hellfire and damnation like nobody's business.  It's all they preach.  Everything is a sin.  Breathing is a sin.  Certainly, anything enjoyable is a sin. 

If Southern Baptists don't trust each other, they sure don't trust other religions.  They'll halfway tolerate almost all other practitioners of other christian beliefs.  It's the "well, at least they're a christian" thing.  That might be a foreign phrase to anyone north of the Mason Dixon line, but we hear it all the time in the south.  Anyone other than a christian might as well be a serial killer as far as the fine, upstanding christians are concerned.  It's always both infuriated and amused me that most christians, and Southern Baptists in particular, are convinced that the Jews are skydaddy's "chosen people"; and yet, they tend to hate Jews.  Except those in Israel, and probably even them.  They support the NATION of Israel because the bible tells them something about woe unto the nation who doesn't support Israel or something like that.  The people of Israel, on the other hand, can take a flying leap as far as most Southern Baptists are concerned.  I'm wandering off topic just  bit, but the gist of what I'm saying is that southerners tend to be leery of anyone whose religious belief differ from their own. 

Our schools leave a lot to be desired.  Many teachers are qualified on paper, meaning that they've obtained the requisite degree and passed the tests to obtain certification, but they don't know a hell of a whole lot themselves.  I know from first-hand experience that some teachers will either avoid a topic entirely or will teach against the text book if the materials deviate from the teachers' own beliefs.  My freshman year of high school, back when the Earth was thawing from the first Ice Age, one of the English teachers refused to teach mythology because it went against her christian beliefs.  Bear in mind that the mythology unit did not include proselytizing on behalf of the ancient deities.  It only introduced us to the ancient deities as characters in classic literature. 

Teachers don't have all of the blame for our substandard schools.  Parents and the students themselves shoulder some of the blame.  In the south, ignorance is a way of life.  Getting away from ignorance is frowned upon greatly.  Intellectual curiosity is not considered an attribute in the south.  Those who try to learn are often discouraged and even browbeaten into falling in line and marching with the rest of the herd.  My own experiences are a prime example.  I am and always was intellectually curious.  I love to learn.  While sitting in a classroom bores me to tears, I love to learn.  Knowledge is a tasty beverage and I want to drink it all up.  A certain relative whose own daughter was neither smart nor pretty (see more on the pretty vs. smart below) wanted to make sure that none of her pretty and/or smart kin succeeded.  She would wait until there were no adult witnesses and then make hateful remarks to the girls of the family who were either pretty or smart or both.  I specifically remember her talking about someone going to engineering school, and when I commented that it sounded interesting, her response was "well, you're not smart enough to do it."  I was nine years old.  Southerners are ate up with that brand of jealousy.  If someone succeeds, you hear a lot of "well, they think they're better than everyone else."  Kids in school will ostracize the kids who do well academically.  Make As and nobody wants to be your friend.  Make Cs and be popular.  The parents of the kids who aren't so bright encourage this behavior from their children.  Chances are the parents themselves aren't too smart and treated their more intelligent peers the same way.  

It's even worse for the female of our species.  Girls can either be pretty or they can be smart.  They cannot be both, and pretty is valued far more than smart in southern society.  Look at Sarah Palin's crowds for proof.  If you can stomach it, go to her Facebook page.  Look at post after post of commentary about how qualified she is because she's pretty.  Her most rabid followers are southerners.  Sadly, there are a lot of southern women out there who have college degrees and are dumber than rocks.  It was all about the sororities and being pretty and popular instead of actually learning. 

Because learning is discouraged, good paying jobs are few and far between.  Once upon a time, a high-school dropout could make a decent living in a factory.  Thanks to NAFTA, those days are gone.  All of the good factory jobs pulled up stakes and headed south of the Rio Grande.  This left a lot of folks with no educations and no aptitude to learn looking for work that is not to be found.  This in turn perpetuates the "you think you're better than me" attitude, which in turn perpetuates people intentionally keeping themselves down.  Then they show up to church on Sunday morning and the preacher tells them that skydaddy is the answer.  Believe in skydaddy and he will bless you.  For every dollar you put in the collection plate, skydaddy will bless you with 10, 100, 1000.  It's those elitists fault you can't get a job.  They want to turn away from traditional American values.  They've turned away from gawd and that's why gawd has turned away from American.  The un/undereducated sitting in the pews eat it up like ice cream.  The educated and employed in the pews tend to have a Calvinistic view of their wealth - they have it because skydaddy blessed them with it. 

Southern people have, well, different ideas about things.  They love skydaddy because they fear skydaddy.  To me, that makes as much sense as a woman who loves her abusive husband because she fears he will beat her.  To the average southerner, the abusive husband scenario makes perfect sense.  You cannot have a reasonable discussion with someone who has that mindset.  The fear of skydaddy's hell is so ingrained in these people that it would take several generations of removal from any exposure to skydaddy at all to be rid of it.  I believe that this contributes to the willful ignorance that is often seen here.  Even allegedly educated people are polluted with willful ignorance when it comes to science versus skydaddy.  They will come down on skydaddy's side every time - not because of proof and hard-core evidence, but because they fear skydaddy will scorch them forever if they don't.  Skydaddy loves them, after all. 

Next week, we'll discuss old times, small times and king cotton.