The Alabama Gubernatorial Race: Winning the Counter-Reformation One Slain Apostasy at a Time

"Southern Person Does Something Silly About Jesus" is probably the easiest go-to outlet for regional commentary and comedy, narrowly beating out "Dilapidated Northern Industrial City Destroys Itself Celebrating Sports Championship That Won't Improve Anyone's Life." I'm pretty sure The Onion is sitting on dozens of stories about people seeing the image of Dale Earnhardt in a Denny's bucket of eggs, cheese and four kinds of pork. Still, after you live in the south for a while, it becomes a sort of fetish to collect these things. They're just so special.

Recently, the Alabama gubernatorial race got slightly nastier, as a group calling themselves the True Republican PAC ran this ad against GOP candidate Bradley Byrne. It's amazing:


Now, just because these things have a tendency to disappear from Youtube and reappear unreliably later, let's go to a transcript and then break it down on its own, because it's just so goddamned stupid:

Bay Area Post #1: The Unbearable Lightness of Being from There

I went back home to the San Francisco Bay Area recently. I hadn't been there in ages. While visiting, when I was driven anywhere, I spent most my time staring out the window and trying to figure out what used to be there, deciphering remodeled facades, re-learning how to get from A to B, the usual you-can't-go-home-again nonsense. That saying is true, but it helps you understand it when people bulldoze things you remember.

One of the consequences of returning to anywhere you used to live is that friends and family who'd rather have you back try to sell the old place to you. It's nice of them, an oblique and emotionally non-confrontational way of saying, "We miss you and wish you'd do something about that." But taken on its own, the gesture oversells. It's hard not to already feel a yearning to go home, so any pitch beyond your own fond live-action reminiscence seems like piling on.

This time, one refrain emerged from dozens of conversations and several people:

"There's no place like the Bay Area."

Now, obviously, this is true, for two reasons.

1. There is no place like any other place. Try your hardest to replicate another town, and you'll fail. Each city or region is helplessly unique despite whatever manufactured effort it might make. This is one of those realities so totally self-evident that naturally it can't be what people actually mean.

Southern College Football Fans Are the Biggest Bandwagoners in American Sports (BCS Game Edition)

A short while ago, I wrote about how southern college football fans are the frontrunning-est fans in the country. Beyond insulting other parts of the country in the name of southern pride and other regionalistic ugliness, beyond silly displays of tribalism, they basically want to root for winners, and rooting for teams from the south tends to provide that for them. Just as I was starting to wonder if I'd been a little too critical, the BCS Championship game happened.

Before, during and immediately following it, most of the people I know on Facebook and many of the people I know on Twitter updated their thoughts about the two teams and who deserved to win, and reading it was like experiencing a live-action commentary on and performance of the earlier college football piece I'd written. Screenshots or copied-and-pasted text from tweets or Facebook updates will get dull fast, so rather than bore you, I'll just summarize:


Let's go, One Part of the South! Because it's the south and the other part of the south isn't really the south, or something.
I know a lot of people from the south, very few of whom are from Texas, and very few of whom root for Alabama. In spite of that, all but one of them interested in the game posted something in support of Alabama, from mere rooting interest to rabid cheering and shit-talking. And almost all of them posted an explanation why: "GO SEC."

Southern College Football Fans Are the Biggest Bandwagoners in American Sports

Is there any entertainment outside of southern college football where spending $20,000-$120,000 poses an insufficient demonstration of loyalty? No other phenomenon involves racking up enough debt to go toward the down-payment on anything from 1-12 small houses yet still getting called "fairweather" for failing to smother the ass-end of your car in logos, slogans and other ugly crap.

I ask myself this question during NCAA football season because I've lived in the south for quite a while and still cannot understand the intensity with which otherwise amiable neighbors will denounce each other one day a week for liking one pair of ugly colors over another. Florida exemplifies this perfectly: "What's that? You don't like royal blue and puke orange? That's a far better pairing than maroon and jaundice or green and also puke orange." The only two groups of people in this world who should care this much about orange are the Dutch and the Northern Irish.

(It's not as if I ask out of ignorance. I love football. One of the finest football weekends I ever spent involved 11 hours of college football with a buddy who decided to serve only food that he cooked in his deep fryer, while everyone there drank enough to make the Budweiser Clydesdales nicker and want to roll our asses to an emergency room. It was amazing. I wish I could kickoff every college football season this way.)

My opening question wasn't rhetorical flourish: I actually know someone who went to undergraduate and law school at the University of Florida — seven straight years in Gainesville, seven straight years of going to home games — who had a beer thrown on him for not having any blue+puke totems on the back of his busted-ass Hyundai. Evidently the tens of thousands of dollars in brand-loyalty tuition debt didn't persuade anybody. Maybe they thought his colors ran. Who knows?