Of Bears and Penguins

Southern Gothic

I declare it. I declare this to be my favorite speech. Not because I like Huey P. Long though he embodies one of the last courthouse step politicians, nor because I agree with his economic policy which could be described as three sheets to the wind among other things, but because this speech is so deliciously Southern.

It's Faulkner and Flannery and Penn Warren all at once, it is their strangeness and lyricism. It's a speech that belongs to Boo Radley and to Atticus, though in a different way. And it is the utter madness of a people in a mouldering decay.

It's not hiding our demons, not hiding our crazy relatives in the attic, (no Dickinson, no Nathaniel Hawthorne). It's bringing them out on the front porch and saying "Take a look. Here they are - nutty, but bounden to us - and we to them."

Take note of the way Long forces those sacred economics, no more should the poor man say he shall get his reward in heaven, no it is his for the taking now, because (cue favorite Southern argument) God has ordained it, he has called us to the Barbecue.

Every man a king in two months! Hallelujah - the people must have thought it was the second coming. Why not to share wealth - t'aint fitting, just t'aint fitting.

Now each author has a slightly different take on the South. Seems there's hardly any grace in a Faulkner story, and it's difficult to find it in O'Connor despite her protestation that each of her grotesque characters come to a moment of it. But maybe part of that grace (in the liteary, everyday sense) is that we in the South are bound to recognize our triumphs and our successes, our heroes and our madmen. We deny neither for we know that in denying them, we deny ourselves.

Bad old Rockfeller. Bad old Morgan. Terrible FDR and Mr. Astor, didn't they know that the poor were only a part of them all, that denying them was denying their own selves. Why Gov. Long says it - under his plan everyone will be a millionaire, there'll be more than ever. In under two months.

How that must have sounded to a people close to the earth and poor. We'll remember it in ever widening ripples of our collective memory, though we're forgetting most of it. There's little South any more. The New South keeps Boo and Long locked away, but they're a part of us too - there's a little madness and maybe much greatness in each of us.