haven’t looked yet, but let me speak a wee bit on this.

I grew up in western n.c. about 40 miles from where that abortion clinic bomber hid out (cold mountain, a real place, is nearby; last of the mohicans was shot 15 miles from my hometown). beautiful country, but the people are a little wiggy about jaysus. america’s afghanistan, i call it.

this is the part of the country where fundamentalism comes from. i think there’s something fatalistic about mountain people; this life sucks, so got owes us a better one. hate to think this hardscrabble is all there is. to a hillbilly, the mansions of newport and the ivy walls of harvard may as well be on the moon, and moon people are not like us. their moon ways are strange, their ideas of right and wrong all backwards.

i read something about the band brive by truckers to the effect that they started out a regular rock band, but in their touring discovered that nobody understoood the souht unless they were born there. it is so, and it’s hard to explain why, but here’s another angle. south of the mason-dixon is like east of the elbe, okay?

what i mean is that europe has been divided for many centuries by the elbe river. west of there, is western europe. an individualistic, prosperous, mercantile, open-minded bustle. east of there, all the slavic nations and russia, was always a more closed society; feudal, repressed, poor, religious, with pogroms and werewolves and baba yaga and golems. the south is the eastern europe of america, where man was slavemaster to man, where the county was a fiefdom run by a family of landed aristocrats, where the poor were landless sharecroppers (essentially a condition of serfdom where you worked someone else’s land, for a not-too-generous cut; and not every sharecropper was black! my grandfather was one.) look at the upheavals that it took to get rid of the aristocracy in eastern europe. our civil war was but an incomplete version of that.

so if you’re southern and poor, you’re not so terribly different from the too-religious-by-half of pakistan or banda aceh. the outsiders took your land, your money, and now they want to take your religion? that’ll be the day.

me, i’m not religious. too much of it is a lie. but some people need the lie; it’s like nicotine. it’s bad for you, but hell, life’ll kill ya.

thanks you very mach