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Also ironic that the "dim-witted" South is the only region of the USA with a distinctive contribution to the arts, i.e. music (jazz, blues, bluegrass, country, rock and roll - all born in the South), literature (Welty, Faulkner) etc., folk art, and so on.

Also ironic that the "dim-witted" South is the only region of the USA with a distinctive contribution to the arts, i.e. music (jazz, blues, bluegrass, country, rock and roll - all born in the South), literature (Welty, Faulkner) etc., folk art, and so on......I only took issue because of your statement "the....South is only region of the USA with a distinctive contribution to the arts" That statement was just too sweeping and, upon reflection, I trust you will agree. I am not one to knock the South, whose contributions to American culture are manifest. But giving short shrift to the rest of country does not prove the South's contributions. Negro jazz did originate in the South; however, there were other contributors outside the South, not all being black. Rock and Roll, too, had early practitioners outside the South; Bill Haley and the Comets come to mind. As for literature, while the South is well represented (you didn't even mention the greatest American author in the opinion of many, Mark Twain, from the border state of Missouri); finally, the multitude of fine authors outside the South is too numerous to mention.

...southern literature literature (Welty, Faulkner) etc...

My, my, my. All those famous sothron authors. How can we compete? I guess we'll just have to be content with northern authors like Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. James Fennemore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Washington Irving, and Henry David Throreau. Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane. Julia Ward Howe, Louisa Mae Alcott, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. And then there's Horatio Alger, Henry James, L. Frank Baum, Edith Wharton, and Upton Sinclair, and don't forget Sinclair Lewis. Jack London and O. Henry. Then there's Eugene O'Neil and Henry Miller and e.e. cummings, and, well you get the idea.