south of the Waffle House line

The Mason-Dixon line is dead. Nobody remembers who Mason or Dixon were, if anybody ever knew to begin with.

You know when you've entered the South when you start to see Waffle Houses. They don't exist anywhere in the North, unless you count Missouri or Arizona. Most New Yorkers would never accept either of those states as being Northern. Hell, most New Yorkers have no idea where those states are.

But this isn't about Waffle Houses or their 1700 greasy yellow roadside huts, or New Yorkers' epic ignorance of "flyover" states. I'm in the South. And I've finally had some real Southern moments.

I've been staying in Wilmington, North Carolina for the last couple of weeks. In a way, it feels just like any other smallish (150,000 people, maybe?) American city--strip malls, department stores, Home Depots, coffeehouses, gas stations, check-cashing ripoff joints, etc. Most people have a little twang in their speech, but you would otherwise have no idea that you're not somewhere in suburban Illinois or Oregon or Colorado.

But hang out here for a bit, and you start to hear interesting things.

Right now, I'm in a coffeehouse, trying hard not to listen to a racist old fuck who keeps trying to draw people into a conversation about the Iowa caucuses. He keeps saying (loudly), "Jefferson Davis must be turning over in his grave today"--a reference to the apparently-terrifying fact that we might end up with (gasp!) some colored guy as our next president. The stupid bastard repeated that Jefferson Davis line to me twice. I ignored him, and pretended to be deeply engrossed in my work. If he didn't have a gun rack on his truck, I'd have said something about how I no hablo ingles.

I heard a great story about a Midwesterner who relocated to North Carolina. As soon as he moved into his new home, a neighbor came knocking. Welcome wagon? Not quite. Without saying hello, the neighbor asked, "what's your church, and who's your driver?" The Northerner (an atheist with no interest in NASCAR) wisely anwered, "six car, first Baptist." He was apparently allowed to stay in the neighborhood.

I don't want to rip on the South too hard--most people are incredibly friendly, and I get the impression that people like that Confederate assmunch are fairly rare here. But I can't imagine that too many of you heard anything racist about Obama in coffeehouses above the Waffle House line today.

Last night, we drank a toast to Iowa. Whatever you think of Obama as a candidate, his victory was a serious milestone in American race relations--a lily-white state voted for him, apparently without giving a flying fuck about his race or his funny name. South of the Waffle House line, I'm not sure that white minds are quite so advanced.