Democrats Invade the South!!

Just chatting with Chloe Cockburn, who is working on modern-day usury in the form of payday advance loans, from that bastion of far-sighted liberal causes, the Mississippi delta.

Apparently long-haired seven-foot bright-eyed liberal babes like Chloe can meet friends just like them wherever they go in the world, in this era of globalization, so Chloe has been eating organic blueberries at the local vegan co-op, and talking Democratic politics with other people who agree with her on virtually all angles. In the course of such adventures (one really wonders why she bothered to leave Massachusetts at all), she ran across Rose Aguilar, a Democratic journalist from California who has been traveling across the South recording interviews of local yokels.

At last. Thomas Frank's call to action has paid off. The Democrats are surging upon the South, clipboards in hand, taking careful notes on the rituals and kinship structures of the local tribes, carefully trying to decode the brain genome of the Southern conservative. All along, these open-minded Hipsters have, true to their gospel of diversity, opened the door to the possibility that the native Southron is, despite appearances, *not* necessarily *total* *evil*.

To their shock and awe, both Chloe and Rose seem to find Southerners easy to talk to. They have relatively open opinions about proprietally East-Coast concepts like "diversity" and "tolerance." Southerners even largely seem to acknowledge that Bush lied about the war. It's just, well, that they don't know about the agendas of these foreign populations... foreign populations like gays, and Jews, and other East Coast intellectuals, thinking too hard for their own good, trying to derail every honest debate about values with the silver-tongued rhetoric of "issues" and "human rights."

How will it end?? The conversion of numerous general store owners to Paris-Review-reading, organic-blueberry-eating crypto-Marxists? The seduction and brainwashing of these find young hopes of the Democratic party? Perhaps a hybrid, pidgin-speaking culture will emerge out of these missionary forays, long-haired, trailer-park-living nomad people who read the Bible via Derrida and refer to their daily ration of corn grits as "polenta."

The stakes are high for both sides. The only thing clear is that the two worlds are only just beginning to figure out how different are the languages they speak.