WHERE’S THE SOUTH? RIGHT WHERE YOU LEFT IT…: I got back last night from an exhausting gust of traveling, and didn’t have the energy to read any of the big fat articles in the new First Things. But I was able to get through James Nuechterlein’s quick and easy “Dixie, USA.” (Sorry, not online yet.) Nuechterlein offers a brief description of his journey through the Deep South, in which he tried to find the South of his imagination and discovered that it had vanished.

Sort of. Because you see, Nuechterlein doesn’t give any evidence that he looked particularly hard for “the South of the Lost Cause.” I mean, I could find more Tara-nostalgia in Takoma Park, Maryland than he seems to have found in Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, the Florida panhandle, and Georgia all put together. He says that the highways looked just like all the other highways of our vast country; he says the cities of the South are much like cities elsewhere, only friendlier and more likely to contain grits and okra.

This is a newsflash? Nuechterlein writes, “Except for one overnight stay in Evergreen, Ala., and a few minor excursions, we spent our non-driving time in cities: Nashville, Memphis, Jackson, New Orleans, Mobile, Atlanta. (My wife, raised as a country girl, has had her fill of what she wryly calls ‘rural enchantment.’) As a friend who knows the region reminded me, the Deep South I was looking for is not to be found in metropolitan centers.” So why did he look for it there?

I take Nuechterlein’s basic point (the South is basically over that whole Civil War thing; one can admire the various virtues of Robert E. Lee without signing on to the cause for which he fought [although Nuechterlein is weirdly soft on Lee’s very typical “I’m against slavery in a personal sense” attitude–would he be as admiring of someone who was “personally opposed” to abortion but wouldn’t actually, you know, do anything about it?]). But the FT article feels phoned-in. It’s anthropological and distanced–c’mon, guy, Southerners are your fellow Americans! Get out of the car and talk to some people, I promise they won’t bite! It gives off a distasteful air of, “I secretly wanted the South to stay the way it is in Faulkner novels–let them sink themselves in guilt and nostalgia, that makes it so romantic for visitors!” Sorry–white Southerners are not the bearers of American white guilt; they are not players in a racial kabuki drama; they are not exotic insects to be scrutinized with a magnifying glass. And you can’t tell that much about them from inside an air-conditioned car.

The larger point I’m trying to make, I think, is that any reporting–or any personal interactions–in which one side takes an “anthropological” attitude toward another will cause resentment and alienation on the part of the person or culture being examined. That’s something that I have to keep in mind as much as anyone else does.

[Doh, edited to add that there are some intriguing things in the article, like his visit to New Orleans’s decaying Confederate Museum.]