Media-Made Dixie [antikvár]

Preface to the Revised Edition Almost a decade has sped by since those salad days of early 1977, when I wrote the epilogue to the first edition of Media-Made Dixie. Jimmy Carter's administration was underway, the television serialization of Alex Haley's Roots had just been broadcast, and Billy Carter was on the brink of peddling his own brand of beer and "Red-Neck Lobbyist" T-shirts. Larry L. King had recently declared in Esquire that "We Ain't Trash No More!" and I, too, believed in those fabulous moments that a new era had dawned. So at the end of the eighth chapter and in that epilogue, I euphorically surpassed my evidence that yankees had accepted the South at last, and rushed on to predict Dixie's imminent demise as a distinctive region. Some scholarly reviewers ignored my rash conclusion in favor of predictable second-guessing of selections for emphasis, nitpicking, and/or stubborn misunderstanding of the modest intentions I had set down in the preface. Reviewers in southern newspapers, however, could see little else. Like mine, their livelihoods and hobbies are what John Shelton Reed calls dixiology; and they thought they saw a brother insanely urinating in the campfire. Reed, the columnists, and the southern masses nonetheless kept the fire burning, and now I publicly repent: I actually saw (and felt) the flames all along. So this revised edition properly and (I hope) clearly separates the matters of image and perception, which are the business of this book, from sociology, which is not. The new ending may be rash, too, however. Once more I have attempted to interpret historically events very recent and still unfolding. This is always risky. In a few years I may bear fresh lumps and bruises, but my hide is toughened for that eventuality. I fully ix