Saturday, April 30, 2005

I love this...

As I digest The Future and It's Enemies, I am making it a point to read Virginia Postrel more closely. This morning's post has this delicious paragraph:

I've long maintained that many of the cultural characteristics and personal behaviors, good and bad, that Northern commentators (largely white) consider "black" are in fact southern. Being dissed makes the typical good ol' boy just as irrationally mad as it makes an inner-city black guy. And I'd suspect you'd find plenty of Bell Curve-like results if you could break out whites of southern origin, regardless of where they live now, as a separate ethnic group (even more so if you could exclude certain highly educated subgroups, notably the Presbyterians whose attitudes toward education and involvement in commerce have made them the souther[n] equivalent of Jews or Chinese).

She notes that Thomas Sowell seems to agree.
Yeah, me too. But then I can affort to, since I am a product of that sub-group that she so delicately described.

Maybe that's why I tend to track an eclectic mix of blogs that includes The Wandering Jew and Ziboy in Peking.
Jews and Chinese. Hmmm.

2 comments:

Kobayashi Maru said...

I'm not sure if it's still open, but Ginsberg and Wong was a classic Toronto 'fusion' eatery long before the term ever gained currency. One could get eggrolls and lox on the same plate.

Hoots said...

Southern cafeterias have also been eclectic. Whatever else may have been lacking down heah, we have always had good food. From the church suppers to family reunions to those once economical food emporia wwe called cafeterias -- good eating has always been part of the lifestyle.
Where else can you find quiche and asparagus on the same display as collards and chicken fried steak?

The good old boys and their black equivalents had in common a feeling of pity for people outside the South, especially from the Northeast, who grew up eating flavorless, boring, poorly-cooked food.