The "Fuck You" Century

Cash Salutes Nashville

Societal comity may fall an early victim to the stresses of the 21st century.   The cohesion that marked and underpinned a good many of the achievements of the past century seems have become eroded by deliberately devisive politics (the type favoured by miscreants like our own Harper), economic uncertainty and the emergence of the "precariat"; rapidly widening inequality of wealth, income and opportunity, the arrest of social mobility; and the very costly and destabilizing impacts of climate change.   Fringe groups and radicalism turn mainstream.   Moderation, compassion and cooperation are discounted to abject insignificance.  At times, everyone can seem to be on his guard, bracing for whatever unknown is coming next.   It breeds insecurity, suspicion, anger and frustration.   We seem to be coming undone.

Something like this appears to be flourishing in the United States where the Mason-Dixon line of the 19th century is being reborn and the first signs of an all-American Berlin Wall are manifesting.   Chuck Thompson, author of Better Off Without'em; a Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, describes a growing split between the American South and the north.

Wherever I went in the South I was called a socialist.  I was branded anti-American.

For supporting the administration of a sitting U.S. president, I was told that I was in league with the Muslim vanguard of a secret plot to destroy the United States.

Although otherwise respectable reviewers, bloggers and emailers have accused me of seeking out only the opinions of slack-jawed hayfoots slurping moonshine from ceramic jugs during my travels, the truth is that in the South this sort of ugly invective is mainstream orthodoxy.

It’s the same mainframe groupthink that’s going to allow a millionaire corporate flunky with a track record of destroying jobs to carry and very possibly sweep the South in November.

I dealt with the same reactionary slander everywhere I went.   I heard it from small business owners in South Carolina. From working professionals in Alabama. From college-educated football fans in Tennessee.

Southerners love trashing the rest of the country (when did you last hear a kind Rebel word for New York, Detroit or San Francisco?), but when their blood is really up the go-to move down South is to dismiss their fellow citizens as un-American.

“If we secede, the U.S.A. would become Canada South,” an otherwise likable history major at the University of Georgia told me. “We are the real U.S.A.” By “we,” of course, he meant the South.

In no other region of the country is the need to define one’s moral and patriotic superiority such a fixation. Spend 30 minutes in a Southern church or listening to country radio and the self-congratulatory “we’re the salt of the earth” pathos is impossible to miss.

...The Dixie blowtorch that greeted publication of my book was immediate and intense, a collective meltdown of Limbaughnian proportions.

With few exceptions, from mainstream reviews to blogs posts to personal emails, Southerners were ready to hit the “fuck you” button as soon as they so much as caught wind of a Northern critique of the South.

“I’m not going to read your piece of shit, worthless book that is full of lies and false stereotypes,” wrote one of hundreds of knee-jerk non-readers in a typical email. “Go rot in the heat of the South.”

“I haven’t read the book, nor do I plan to,” wrote a chip-on-the-shoulder blogger before going on to lambaste the book anyway, roughly following the script set forth in published reviews by Southerners that misrepresented my argument and then summarily excoriated the presumed wickedness.

The bully smokescreen in the face of criticism is a traditional Southern defense mechanism. The counterblast of moral reprobation from the South that followed the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, produced the publication of no fewer than 14 pro-slavery novels in three years in an effort to debunk the unflattering portrait of slavery presented by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

...Among the more intriguing passages in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers is the section that recounts an experiment conducted at the University of Michigan by researchers measuring anger and loss of temper.

The study tested the short-fuse reactions of young males encountering a pushy stranger in a narrow hallway. The key to the study was a trigger word—“asshole”—used by the stranger to insult test subjects after he’d “accidentally” bumped into them.

Psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett recorded facial expressions and measured levels of testosterone and cortisol (the hormones connected to arousal and aggression) to determine how quickly tempers flared following minor offense. The results were striking.

Wrote Gladwell: “Most of the young men from the northern part of the United States treated the incident with amusement. They laughed it off. Their levels of cortisol actually went down, as if they were unconsciously trying to defuse their own anger. But the Southerners? Oh, my. They were angry. Their cortisol and testosterone jumped.”

In Canada we have been spared America's legacy of civil war but we seem to be pushing each other's buttons well enough to drive our own disharmony.   Our own Prince of Darkness is a grand master at the politics of division.   He has no interest in repairing the rents in the fabric of our nation.

I think America is going to have a much tougher time remaining the United States during the course of this century.   The existing cultural, political and economic divides that mark the red/blue state dichotomy will only increase absent some sort of progressive reformation of the type seen in America at the turn of the last century.   And the ravages of climate change have set in, primarily in the contrarian South.   That will test the generosity and patience of the blue North for their Southern cousins.

We can learn much from the transformation underway in our southern neighbour - the rise of oligarchy and corporatism at the direct expense of democracy; the evolution of the warfare state; the culture wars inflamed by America's powerful demographic shifts particularly in the southwest where Hispanics are poised to reclaim territories forcibly seized from their ancestors.   We ignore those object lessons at our peril for it is Canada's ability to restore a cohesive, robust and united society that will determine how we weather the remainder of this century.