Arepas and Gravy

Once again, proof that the rest of the country sees the South as just one big blob of redneck.

Recently, due to the wonders of PaperBackSwap.com, I was able to procure a book that’s been on my reading list for a long while. Academy X: A Novel by Andrew Trees is a fictional tell-all about a hapless New York prep school teacher who navigates through all the lying, cheating, learning disability-faking, college-application-padding, and other shenanigans that go on in such hallowed halls. Trees really taught at such a place. That will become important in a minute.

Oscar de la Gravy's 2010 line

I was enjoying this book as the light reading it was intended to be until our main character decided to amuse himself with a little fake college recommendation letter writing. He recommended Hitler to Berkeley Montessori School in California, for example, and Osama bin Laden to the CIA Academy in Virginia. Ha ha, right? One of this fake college recommendation letters was for notoriously segregationist Arkansas governor Orval Faubus, and it was addressed to the Tuskegee Institute in Georgia.

Wait, what?

Do you mean to tell me that out of a New York prep school teacher, all his beta readers, and Bloomsbury’s copyeditor, nobody realized that Tuskegee is in Alabama? We all look like one big blob of “South” to you, don’t we?  “Tuskegee is down there somewhere, so we’ll just assume it’s in Georgia, because, you know, that’s where that one airport is that we have to pass through to get to Ecuador to swim with the turtles.”

Who’s ignorant now?

And, of course, if I were to write in my book that the MOMA was on 42^nd Street, I would be another dumb redneck.

I wish I could design, because I would make a map of the United States that approximates how these people see the country. It would be one of those maps where things are depicted larger in accordance with their importance. Manhattan would be huge. It takes up the entire upper east coast and it’s shiny, bright and oh so cosmopolitan. (The other boroughs would cling to its sides like petals on a sunflower.) The South, on the other hand, would be a tiny peninsula near the bottom of the map depicted by a little Ku Klux Klan head and maybe, if there’s room down there by the place where cigars come from, a NASCAR.

The thing is, we Southerners, as a whole, don’t hate New York. I would love to visit New York. Hell, I would love to live in New York.  We Southerners, as whole, don’t do anything. We’re made up of individual people who have character, flaws, accomplishments, and all that jazz that everybody else in the world has. All that awesome just doesn’t fit under a Klan hood.

Booker T. Washington is slowly shaking his head at you right now, Trees.

(I read that Trees was fired from his teaching position at an elite private school over this book. I’m sure this wasn’t because of a lack of fact checking.)

Tags: Southern Culture

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Southern Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.