by J.C. White – 2025

The great author from Georgia, Flannery O’Connor, once said in response to a question about why Southerners write about freaks so well, “because we in the South are still able to recognize one.” She wasn’t being cruel; she was being honest. The South has always known how to call a thing what it is, whether that thing’s a mule gone lame or a preacher gone crooked. And maybe that’s why, in 2025, the rest of America seems to move further and further away from figuring us out.

See, we don’t just recognize the grotesque, distorted, and deformed, we live amongst it, laugh at it, and sometimes elect it to public office. But we also know when somebody’s playing us for fools. We ain’t near as dumb as you-un’s think we is.

The Cartoon South

If you were to believe Hollywood or Tweets on X, the South is nothing but a collection of porch swings and rusted pickups, peculiar cousin-uncles named Bubba, and First Baptist Churches where the men handle serpents and the choir sings Trump tweets in four-part harmony. That cartoon is useful, yes, it serves the people in all the other regions by propping up their own self-sophistication and giving them someone else to laugh at.

But caricature is a lazy man’s truth and self-realization is a lost art. The real South is not a stage set. It is a grandmother canning beans in her kitchen, a cemetery on the hill where six generations lie, a bean field that still feeds a family. It’s farmers who quote Cormac McCarthy, welders who read David Foster Wallace, lawyers who can still sing “Amazing Grace” straight through without looking at the hymnal. We are educated and uneducated, devout and doubting, conservative and liberal. Complexity confuses city folk, so they paint us as one-note freaks and call the picture finished.

The Real South

The South was never the idyllic its courtesies suggested. Even as a child I felt the unease beneath its gentility, the truths never discussed, got buried deep as bones in clay. That war, THE war, had torn it open, left wounds that would not close. But Southerners are a different breed of American. Different stock. Are our own kind, set apart from the Yankee altogether.

I don’t use the term Yankee in a negative way, just to keep the conversation framed by the historical period when the South WAS the West. The country was not fully developed. The divide was the Mason-Dixon and the vernacular of the day was Yank’s and Reb’s. The divisions occurred way before the civil war.

The North drew its people from hunger and flight: Irish, Scots, Germans; seeking work, food, land, industry. They came through crowded ports in New York and Philly and Boston, moving west with iron in their blood, all escaping something. The South was seeded different: we were spawned from the younger sons of haughty English gentry, the malignant sons without an inheritance. We came leisurely into ports like Charleston and Savannah. America offered these new cavaliers fields and farms soon to be sewed in cotton and indigo. These men intended to claim their own fortunes without concerns over right or wrong. These weren’t the hungry sort, no, these were loan worthy immigrants.

The division occurred with the clashes of culture. The northerners had their principles and histories of hardship, they just wanted stability. The southerners didn’t care about any of that. They didn’t need stability. They had their families. They had fortunes to make at any expense, so long as the expense was paid on the backs of others.

Beneath all the South’s charm lay paradox, beauty and brutality, romance and cruelty. It clung tight to cavalier ideals, chevalier’s reimagined on new soil with its foundation in denial, its wealth mortgaged to inhumanity. When the reckoning came, rich and poor alike collapsed beneath the weight. Reconstruction followed, and another half a century of ruin reigned.

The scars ran deep. The South could not forgive because it was not allowed to forget. It turned inward, nursed old wounds, clothed itself in myth. Out of that myth rose its gothic heart. And whatever you think about us, you’re both painfully right and decidedly wrong.

The Trump Irony

And then there’s Trump. To the Left, he is Hitler in a red tie, Mussolini with worse hair, the Antichrist with a golf handicap. Every week, a new scandal, a new apocalypse, a new chance to declare the end of the Republic. How is that working out so far? Just warnings of monsters that never spawn. We’ve stopped running to hide under our school desk when the alarm sounds when the iron curtain fell.

Nope, he’s just another president hated by the opposite party… there will be another very soon… end of story.

But here’s what makes it grotesque: to many in the South, Trump isn’t conservative at all. The real hard-shell fundamentalists, the ones who’d happily etch the Ten Commandments on the Constitution, think Trump is a liberal. Too friendly with Wall Street, too soft on guns, too loud, too New York by at least a half.

So, you’ve got the far Left hating him for what they believe he is, and the far Right hating him for what he actually is. The result? A screaming match where one man is cast as either Devil or Messiah, when in truth he’s just another politician trying to ride the waves of a democracy gone grotesque that he didn’t create and sure can’t control.

What happened folks, was that you’d been told your whole life that the middle is where most people vote and they were exactly right, you just didn’t believe it. And Trump captured the middle, both left of center and right of center, and he won. He’s not even close to being a right-wing president. If he were, you’d see him wearing camo on opening day of dove season and he’d have a deer rack and rifle in the back window of his secret service limo… just in case a big buck walks near.

Holding Our Breath

Life in the South has taught us how to hold our breath. Southern Conservatives do it waiting for the Rapture or the stock market report. Southern Liberals do it waiting for utopia, and whatever it is that socialists, anti-Zionists, and non-believers think is coming. And while all that’s going on, nobody breathes long enough to realize the world keeps turning round either way.

Every election is billed as the end of the world, but the corn still tassels, the cows still bawl at the gate, the hay still needs cutting, and the same old bills still arrive on Monday. We’ve been through Reconstruction, Depression, civil rights upheaval, and the hollowing out of our small towns by vertically integrated retail like Walmart and industrialized farming like Tyson’s Chicken. We hold our breath, then we exhale, sometimes in shame-sometimes in pride, then we just keep on living. Whatever the South is, wherever it goes, it’s always dressed up in the clothes of endurance.

The Futility of Outrage

It’s a strange kind of arrogance to think a tweet, a blog, or a cable-news sermon is going to flip somebody’s compass. Out here, nobody’s changing their vote over hashtags. Outrage burns hot and bright, but it leaves the ground too scorched to plant anything real. I don’t know if it’s the Russian’s, the Chinese, or if Soros’ is the one planting all those social media land mines, laying-in-wait, telling us how bad things are in America, but lets be real folks, we’re the most fortunate folks on the planet. Not perfect, but as close as humans can make it. And if we’re dumb enough to change what people flock to become, into systems that people flee to leave, we deserve all of the pain and starvation and dysfunction we will most certainly get. Where then would we escape to?

Meanwhile, what endures here in the south and in all rural corners of the world, is quieter. Front porches where neighbors swap tomatoes. Churches doubling as food pantries. Volunteer fire halls that show up when the house is burning, no matter whose yard sign sits out front. This is the real marrow of rural culture, warts and all, the belonging that Wendell Berry still writes about, in an “economy of affection” that is older than parties and stronger than talking points. While chaos is happening in the big cities, it’s still about family and belonging down here.

The Final Irony

The final irony is this: the grotesque isn’t rural America or rural anywhere. The grotesque is the way it’s misunderstood by people who need us as props in their melodramas of outrage.

O’Connor had it right. Southerners and rural people can still spot the freak. We live alongside them, laugh at them, sometimes follow them, sometimes vote for them. But we also know life is bigger than all that, that the land and the people endure long after the headlines become toilet paper.

Trump will pass. So will the hashtags, the think pieces, the pearl-clutching and chest-thumping. But the corn will still tassel, the hay will still need cutting, and the faithful work of belonging somewhere, to someone, will go on. The south and its country cousins across the world is hard to describe to someone who wasn’t raised in it. But I know it’s right where I belong.

They say we learn more from mistakes than perfection. And the south has sure made its fair share of blunders. And that, my friends, is the true culture of rural America: a culture that outlasts caricature, humbles ideology, and, by some strange Southern alchemy of humor, learned lessons, and the grace of a glass of sweet tea, still has more to teach this nation than all the manifestos and masked men in Washington.