Remember that all generalizations are false, including this one. I'm going to make a few generalizations now - everyone stay calm and no one will be hurt.

Feminism, like most political movements, is about mainly about people getting what they want.

Once upon a time, there were women in the South who already knew how to get everything they wanted from life, and often did.

They were called "southern belles."

Southern belles are dying out. To exist, they need a spouse able to support the entire household alone, and those are getting harder to find. But their heyday was still going in the sixties and seventies, when the feminist movement was making huge waves everywhere else in the country ... and the typical northern feminist interpreted its failure to make headway in the South as backwardness on our part.

This was a mistaken conclusion.

The southern belle image had many faults: vanity, a narrow role model, an overemphasis on the material, promotion of certain surface stereotypes, et cetera.

But the traditional southern belle had a core of iron.

She was perfectly willing to look, on the surface, like a blushing flower who deferred to the decision of her husband on all matters. She was willing to make this sacrifice because she knew, and her husband knew also, that their household was actually a matriarchy and that she was firmly in charge.

The cosmetics, the surface image, didn't matter to her. In the South everyone has a public face and a private one. Which, I admit, is a slightly twisted way of doing business.

There were, and are, a lot of real Scarlett O'Hara types in the South. Which is great for empowerment, but not so good for mental health. The feminists, in my mind, frequently object to the wrong issues. Rather than worry about the lack of visible southern women in high places, they should worry about the number who are quietly going Faulkner-psychotic.

Fortunately, as noted, the old-school southern belle is dying out. The new regime is generally less deceptive with men; less likely to be trapped in an unwanted passive-aggressive relationship, and more likely to be in a genuine partnership.

Women are being encouraged to learn other things besides the narrow range that used to be prescribed for them.

On the other hand, women in the South are now having to work harder to get where they want to go. Partially because they're learning to ask for more.

Don't fault southern women for being slow to like feminism. Feminism in this country, even to this day, involves a fight. Southern women had the easy road available to them: marry a successful professional and instantly become the queen of your castle. Their momma did it. Their grandmomma did it. It was a tradition.

You can't blame someone for wanting to take the low road under those circumstances, even if they were hurting themselves and their image in the process. The lure was just too good.

I don't know any southern belles. The sororities on my campus were the closest descendants, and they bothered me. I avoided them. I think now that maybe they were devolved; what had once been a lipsticked front with a core of iron had had its core removed. There was no there there. Only leftovers.

I have, however, seen southern belle behaviors arise at odd times in the most unexpected people. Like a survival instinct.

So though this is a generalization, and all generalizations are false, I pass it along anyway:

Remember in the future, when dealing with a woman from the South, that no matter how politically correct she is and no matter how many rallies she attends, deep inside her there is a southern belle waiting to be let out.

Stay out of the way when it happens.

My particular set of influences sometimes makes it difficult for me to see why the South has trouble shaking this reputation for racism.

Then I stop and think, and I remember why.

I grew up in a one-parent family. My mother would have slapped me silly if I had insinuated black people were inferior.

But my father, who grew up in Memphis, although a very intelligent person, sincerely believes that.

It's one of the reasons I haven't seen him face-to-face in many years.

I worked for several companies in the South where the black people were kept in the stockroom or on the production line while the rest of us worked office jobs.

I've also worked for places in the South where everybody really was working on the same level, but those were all low-paying, abusive service jobs (we were all on the same level because we were all treated like dirt - least common denominator theory).

I think it's gotten better. I don't think kids in the South today are automatically embedded with the wrong message by their parents and grandparents - but I came from a liberal-thinking household and I could be wrong.

It's an easy trap to fall into. You deal with a couple of ignorant people in a row and you think "why are they all so stupid?" ... and you think "maybe there really is a statistical link here" ... but you've forgotten that the circumstances do not match yours; that they may not have been given the opportunity to go to college, that they may not have been encouraged in high school ... that they may not have been offered any prospects to aim for.

What I want to know is why the South takes all the burden, when I work in a very liberal-fronted Northern technology company - poster child for generous human policy - with many hundreds of employees ... and no black ones.

It seems to me sometimes that the only differences between Northern racism and Southern racism are camouflage and reputation.

If you keep insisting that "all southerners are racist," I do hope you'll understand when I suggest that "all northerners are hypocrites."

And the battle will never end.

Sat at lunch today with a co-worker whom I haven't really spoken to at length before.

She was raised here in the New England area, and she told a story about living elsewhere and meeting people who thought she took tea every afternoon.

"No, no," she said, "I said I came from New England."

I find this story a little comforting. I was beginning to think that only the South had this persistent mythology problem.

That's when you no longer do things the old way, and haven't for a long time, but people elsewhere still think you do.

It may be that Boston was very English to begin with ... but I have only met two people with the broad "a," and they were both over the age of sixty. There is a coffeehouse on every block in Cambridge, but only one tearoom, and the best cream scones in town are at an Icelandic bakery.

And French is hardly spoken in Louisiana anymore, and no one knows how to carve a pirogue in a single piece from a cypress log except the demonstrators at the cultural museum.

You will only find the ghost of jazz in the French Quarter. Jazz tends to migrate.

I don't have much else to say on the matter. Only that I'm tired. I'm tired of telling people that things are the way they are, only to have them insist that they're really the way they think they should be.

I'm tired of people giving more attention to the bigots of the past, like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond - men who will ultimately be defeated by their own datedness - while ignoring or cheering the bigots of the present like Pat Buchanan, who get away with more because they have learned the tricks of newspeak that the old dogs will never master.

I'm tired of people arguing the same points of morality that were being argued in the Edwardian era while missing the big stuff: pollution and poverty and the fact that the corporations rule the earth and they're out for your ass.

Does it sound to you like I'm escalating unreasonably? From Bostonians and high tea to the decline of the planet in forty lines?

I suppose that's my point.

Collapse always starts somewhere. Go lose your myths.

It has been a long-standing truism of mine that southerners are more hypocritical than northerners. But northerners are ruder.

That's it. You can go read a different entry now.

Oh, all right. The difference, really, is in public behavior. Northerners are abrupt, they shove and growl and are always in a hurry. Southerners come on all polite and such and never hurry anywhere. But in the long run it doesn't matter - they will either like you or hate you, no matter what you see on their faces.

A southerner who hates your guts will seldom tell you that to your face, but Southern hate and Northern hate work exactly the same way. With northerners, usually what you see is what you get.

Which leads me to wonder. If the northerner's behavior in public - where everyone else is an obstruction to his progress, an impediment to his day - is basically the more honest viewpoint, as I believe it is, then that doesn't speak well as to the regard we have for other humans (that we're not personally friends with).

Can it be that we all really don't like each other much at first sight?

And is the decline of public manners a sign of the larger decline of civilization, as Heinlein thought it was?

I mean, look around. Public behavior has gone to hell. People are just plain outright rude to each other. No one forms an orderly line anymore at a fast-food joint or a grocery or a coffeehouse - there's all manner of skipping and jostling and jockeying for position. People shout obscenities at other people for the slightest transgression. And no one, no one ever admits they were wrong anymore. In Boston, if another driver yells at you for doing something boneheaded, do you fess up? Of course not. You yell back, louder.

I'm not sure what this all means. I don't think the spiral downward will continue indefinitely. Sooner or later, like the stock market (don't get me started), there'll be a big correction and a major public incident or two, and everybody will start being polite again.

But it'll be a different kind of polite, a tenser one. When politeness comes back into society, it won't be due to courtesy - courtesy is already a lost art - it'll be due to fear. Recrimination. Lawsuits. "An armed society is a polite society."

This is known as doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

I just want you to know what a struggle it was to resist the impulse to rewrite some of that prose. Urgh. Wincingly bad. I did clean up a couple of places for readability, but there were many other things I really would have liked to change but felt I couldn't, for historical-artifact reasons (including, for example, that these days I would write "Black" with a capital).

When I wrote these little essays, nigh thirty years ago, I could still reasonably be said to be a "recent arrival" to New England. I mean, it takes a long time to naturalize. Five years or so ain't nothin'. That's important because it definitely affected my outlook and positions in these pieces. What I'm saying is, I felt more defensive at the time than I do now.

I have not, then or now, encountered any hostility here because I was a Southerner -- but one wonders whether that would have been different if I'd been more detectable. I don't have much Southern in my voice unless I'm very tired or very intoxicated -- in both cases I tend to drawl. Also, I was always a very rapid speaker by Southern standards (and being up here for thirty-some years has only made it worse -- on a visit home a few years ago my mother twice told me to slow down, I was talking too fast for her Southern ears to understand me).

What I did see was a fair bit of hostility to Southerners as a concept -- an outdated, cartoon version of a concept, in the minds of people who would not condescend to correct their facts -- and this riled me. This is what's at the bottom of these four essays.

I wrote these pieces before reading Sundown Towns by James Loewen (it didn't exist yet!), which confirmed my basic feeling on the matter: that there were an awful lot of racist white people in the North too, and a lot of horrors related to racism took place in the North as well ... but for some reason that history got overlooked or swept under the rug, and the Southerners got all the bad press.

As I imply above, I would probably have been a little less pissy about it if I hadn't grown up in a Southern family that wasn't racist -- my feeling was very "not all Southerners" on this, because I felt I was a counterexample, and I took it a bit personally.

Except.

My mother is the oldest of six. Three girls, then three boys. I wasn't kidding about a matriarchy. The women have always run things, even when it's been from the back ('topping from the bottom' is the D/S phrase). They are forces of nature.

And one of those forces of nature has been a Trump supporter for many years, to the extent that her sisters can't really talk to her about a whole lot of things anymore, because it's very Southern to want to avoid an argument at all costs. I believe she mostly became a Trump supporter for reasons that do not necessarily involve racism, but the thing is, if you endorse Trump, you also endorse racism; it's a package deal, and she's intelligent enough to realize that, so I have to assume she's OK with that.

And my other aunt, on a visit some years back, said a couple of things so racist that I was worried I'd have to restrain my spouse from either slapping her or walking out of the restaurant or both.

So I guess it was just my mother that was OK.

Or maybe she's not OK on this topic. I don't know. She didn't approve of my aunt's behavior in the restaurant incident, but ... well, we'll come to that in a second when we get to the "southern belles" portion of the program.

We have to draw a distinction here between what people think in their heads and what they actually do ... and this gets more complicated when we consider there's plenty of room for sins of omission -- or as they're called in this context, passive racism. I came away with more of that than I would have been willing to admit in 1997; it's taken me decades to get a handle on that and try to eradicate it.

I don't know that it would have occurred to my grandmother to ever be actively racist. Whatever she may have thought privately, I'm pretty sure she'd have considered racist behavior a waste of time and energy that could be spent on better things. (Also, my grandmother is where I get the "isolate for days working on a project" creative gene, and if you're out being hateful, you're not getting any art done.) And my grandfather had to work hard enough for a living (forty years in a refinery, people) -- and was of working-class French-Italian stock -- that he'd never really shit on anybody else he felt was down in the trenches with him. He did use some words once in a while we don't use anymore. (I remember him telling a mildly racist joke once when I was a kid ... except he changed the butt of the joke from "Negroes" to "Dagoes" because, see, that was OK ... then he was picking on his own people.)

(These are my maternal grandparents I'm talking about, by the way. My father's side of the family basically does not exist for my record-keeping purposes, and basically never has.)

The thing about the southern-belles piece and the rudeness piece is that they're actually the same thing, but you may not be able to tell.

A thing I wasn't prepared to discuss in 1997 is that one of the reasons I abandoned my life and made several back-to-back round trips to move my entire existence up to Boston was because of women.

It turned out to be one of the best things I ever did, of course, but at the time it certainly felt like I was jumping off into the dark. I knew no one up here, I had no job prospects, I only tentatively had an arrangement for a place to live. It was frightening. So you can imagine how disgusted I had to have been with life in Louisiana at that point.

Some of it was work. The industry I was in essentially didn't exist in Louisiana. I had been working for the only software company of any size and it was clearly on its last legs. Academia? I'd taken computer science courses at LSU only a few years before; those courses are why I am the youngest person alive to know how to make and stack and wrangle a punchcard deck -- knowledge I have, needless to say, never needed again. Working with IBM 3033 mainframes, being aware the whole time how useless it was, while at the same time making my rent money doing dBase III work and utility code in C on IBM PCs, caused me cognitive dissonance. It was clear I needed to go somewhere where computing wasn't in the Dark Ages.

But I also had reached a point where I was becoming reasonably clear on my relationship quirks and gender quirks, and had some idea of the kind of relationship I wanted in my life ... and I knew I wasn't going to find it in the South.

Some of that was because, not long before I left, I'd dated a woman briefly who was a Southerner by birth and a Northerner by affirmation. She was stuck in the South just then for a few years, and wasn't particularly happy about it, and was biding her time until she could escape it again. And even though our relationship ultimately didn't work out (and it was my own damned fault), she was a breath of fresh air, because she was straightforward. If she was pissed at you, she said so, and she said why. I knew that was what I needed, and I knew I wasn't going to get it down there.

I said in 1997 that the old-school Southern belle was dying off, but I'm not sure it wasn't just the surface trappings. Mind you, I've barely spent any time down there in the last thirty years, but it strikes me from anecdotal evidence that Southern women haven't shaken off the idea that they have an obligation to conduct themselves with politeness and gentility at all times. Being highly passive-aggressive is baked into that recipe. Most of the time you can't get a Southern woman to tell you what they really think -- not until the day they snap and there's an explosion and you're picking your stray limbs off the ground. I hated passive-aggressive behavior even before I left the state; I have gotten no fonder of it since then. I'm not saying Massachusetts doesn't have issues -- anger-management issues; the term "Massholes" exists for a reason -- but on the whole, I'd rather people just be rude.

There are women in the South who are direct, outspoken bitches (and I mean that entirely as a positive). But they're not white. The Black women in the South gave up politeness years ago. First, they saw it was getting them nowhere. Second, they reached a point where they could and should and did reject anything that felt like obsequiousness to white folks -- fuck that noise. Third, they became a lot more politically activist, and with good reason. No one else was coming to help them.

There are aspects of rudeness I don't welcome. The biggest one is the culture of never, never admitting you're wrong. This one's a killer. I mean it: that's the one that's going to kill us. And unfortunately right now the people who do this are being led by example from the top and there's very little we can do to get them to realize what a bad thing this is. Beating them until their face bleeds sometimes works, but there are a lot of them and it's hard to scale that up to the amount of beating needed.

I also have no tolerance for people who are rude to service staff. Listen: When a person is rude to clerks, waiters, etc that is always a sign of bigger problems. A person who is rude to the staff probably abuses children and animals. A person who is rude to the staff is probably also toxic to work with or be in a relationship. Being rude to staff is sociopathic behavior -- it is a proclamation "I don't think anyone on this earth matters but me" -- and as a coalmine canary it never fails.

And speaking of sociopathy, back to racism one more time before I call it a day.

I think the current trashfire is making it obvious to anyone with working eyes just how much of it there is lurking around in this country, and not just in the Deep South.

Black folks already knew this, of course. Long ago. But some white folks, including me, didn't become fully aware of the extent of it until we had a corrupt political apparatus that decided to exploit racism as a selling point. Not until we had a political party that decided racism was a positive, a way to get and keep voters.

It wasn't much of a surprise when the Republicans cast about in desperation for a constituency. The sole real platform plank of the Republican party since World War II has been "We want rich people to be richer, and screw everyone else," which is not, shall we say, a slogan that will get you a critical mass of voters. So they've had to bring in some strange company. First they hooked up with the zealots. Then they hooked up with the bigots. At that point, the slide to fascism was inevitable. All it took was someone utterly without any sort of moral framework to get his hands on the steering wheel.

Anyway, it wasn't a surprise that the Republican leadership would go there; the nasty shock was just how many bigots down here among the peonry decided to hitch to that wagon, saying "hey, that sounds pretty good to me." Suddenly we realized exactly how many cockroaches we had in the walls.

We've also, some of us, acquired a heightened awareness of just how many people in this country will happily do the wrong thing if it means they end up a little bit better off ... or if it means the other person will be a little bit worse off. America is full of petty, vindictive, grasping people who sincerely admire their corrupt grifter president because he's everything they dream of being.

These are things, I gotta say, that I really didn't want to know. But I suppose it's for the best that I now know them, even if it makes me want to walk into the sea some days.

The only somewhat positive bit in all this is that in 1997 I wrote "Can it be that we all really don't like each other much on first sight?" and I think at the time I'd have probably said the answer was "yes." I would not say that today.

I am convinced that, on the whole, most of us are pretty good people who are just trying to do our thing without hurting anybody else or causing a lot of collateral damage. We're not perfect, and we excuse a lot more than we probably should, but I don't think most of us are evil, or hateful, or malicious.

We just have to figure out what to do about the tangle of perverse incentives that make it more rewarding for people to be hateful and horrible. I mean, even a brief look at the state of media today will tell you that being horrible pays well, while not being horrible doesn't even get airtime.

I have my own suspicions about what will be required to change that, but I'm trying as hard as I can to end this entry on an upbeat note.