Southern discomfort

Jewish World Review ^ | Dec. 29, 2003 | Zev Chafets

[SJackson]

A few weeks ago at a ritzy fund-raiser for the Committee to Protect Journalists, my wife, Lisa, was introduced to a man named Steven Isenberg.

Isenberg was once Mayor John Lindsay's chief of staff. Later, he was the publisher of Newsday. Now he teaches literature at the University of Texas in Austin.

That gave them something in common: Lisa is a graduate of the University of Texas.

"Are you from Texas?" he asked.

"No. I'm a Louisianan."

And he said: "Well, you're the cleanest one I've ever met."

Reading Howard Dean's Christmas Eve interview in The Boston Globe reminded me of Isenberg. Both are New York liberals who now live among people they regard as their inferiors.

Isenberg thinks these people are too primitive to bathe. Dean imagines that they're too stupid to think.

The Dean we have come to know is the very model of the modern metro-secularist, a Christian so tepid that in the 1980s he quit his Episcopal church in a dispute over a bicycle path.

But on the eve of primary season in the Bible Belt, Dean has found religion. And not just any religion. That old-time religion.

He confided to The Globe that he prays every day, is a committed believer in Jesus Christ and plans to include his relationship with his Savior in his hitherto godless campaign speeches.

[Louisiana]

I would comment but I am trying to muster up the strength for my yearly bath. You know the 31st is just around the corner.

[ImpBill]

John Dean is a charlatan of the first magnitude and it is quite interesting that those that follow him are so desperate in their hatred of Bush and conservatives that they buy all he has to say.

[TedsGarage]

What does this guy know about the South? He's from Pontiac, Michigan. I'm from Michigan, too, but I don't pretend to know jack about life below the Mason-Dixon line. (I suspect, though, that the professor's comment had more to do with an interstate rivalry between Texas and Louisiana than with Yankee condescension. I live in Chicago now, and we say the same stuff about Indiana and Wisconsin.)

[Ciexyz]

I'd imagine that Jesus is surprised to find himself the co-pilot of Dean's campaign.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Howard Dean in the pulpit is like Michael Dukakis in a tank - at once ridiculous and insulting.

Second best.

[thulldud]

"the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." These people don't believe in much, but they are fervent on the subject of their own superiority. To them, America's red states (as identified in TV maps on Election Night 2000) are populated by ignorant cowboys, unwashed swampies, hellfire preachers, beauty parlor bimbos, redneck sheriffs, Confederate flag wavers and retarded hillbilly kids sitting in trees playing the banjo.

Beautiful! Now I'm trying to pick the group where I should claim to belong. Maybe I'm one of the hillbilly kids, though I don't play banjo or sit in trees (anymore!)

Does sitting on the beach playing a harp count?

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Can't gainsay your choice though.

[ctonious]

"It's all about the bicycle paths, man."

[gcruse]

I'd imagine that Jesus is surprised to find himself the co-pilot of Dean's campaign.

"God is my co-pirate...."