I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.

You ask people what their ethnicity is, and a lot of Scots-Irish people either don't know or if they know it they just don't acknowledge it. It's not something they really identify with. They're just plain old Americans, plain vanilla. I don't think they are a self-conscious voting bloc.

But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.

Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record.

As long as there are Japanese tourists, there will be a market for the Old South.

I don't think massification and globalization and all those other 'izations' are necessarily hostile to regionalism.

There's an ethic that says: 'You don't run off to the church for the sacraments of salvation, you establish a personal relationship with God. You don't run off to the courts for justice, you settle it yourself. You don't run off to labor unions to sort out your work relations, you can take this job and shove it if you don't like what you're doing.