Jack Pendarvis's column in the summer 2011 issue of The Oxford American is mostly about depictions of Southerners in movies. Pendarvis is, as usual, hilarious. Of the persistent redneck stereotype, he writes:
It's not that I'm particularly offended by that stereotype. We white Southerners should happily take all the licks the culture-at-large wants to hand out to us. If we don't like it, well, maybe we should have thought of that before we spent all those years walking around with straws sticking out of our mouths, and saying "shucks" and "shoot fire" and grinning real big and scratching our heads like idiots and mopping our brows constantly and not wearing shoes. And, you know, being racists. Look at the cartoonish, reactionary, mush-mouthed governors we keep electing. I mean, in Mississippi, we literally have Foghorn Leghorn running the show.
No, the peckerwood thing doesn't bother me. I'm more offended by the other stereotype, the sentimental, romanticized one, the demented fantasy from which our most horrible governors spring: the cotillions and magnolia blossoms and Greek columns and cut-glass punchbowls and little white immaculately groomed beards and silver-knobbed walking sticks and fluttering fans and verbena and corsets and lockets with tintypes of dashing soldiers and delicate gloves of the palest lavender and secret laudanum addictions and all that crap, and there are plenty of movies that cater to your particular sickness if that's what you prefer.
I strongly agree.
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