A good Southerner is hard to find?

Perhaps it was after watching yet another film depicting the South as irredeemably backwards and bigoted. Or perhaps it was after reading yet another round of commentaries denigrating Robert E. Lee because Lee was a traitor (so were the American revolutionaries, technically), a defender of a slave owning society (as most societies were before the nineteenth century), and ultimately a military failure and “loser” (weren’t Hannibal and Napoleon?). Whatever the cause, I confess I have recently started to grow frustrated with Flannery O’Connor.

What, you might ask, do Hollywood and historical revisionism have to do with one of the most talented and beloved of the South’s writers, who in 1972 won the National Book Award for fiction? Well, perhaps in a time less saturated with woke progressivist attempts to vilify most everything about Southern culture, not much. But in this era of infuriatingly irrational (and hypocritical) prejudice towards Dixie, one yearns for portrayals of her that, if unwilling to praise the South, at least avoid the condescending, unjust caricatures that now serve as conventional perceptions of her in American popular imagination. Dixie, I’m afraid, has been demonized. 

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