I think there's a suspicion in the South of people putting on airs. You see it in most successful Southern politicians, but you also see it in someone like Richard Petty, who may be a multimillionaire stock car driver, but he's also beloved because he has a nice self-deprecatory way about him.

We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.

Country music historically has been sort of middle-aged people's music.

The South is like my favorite pair of blue jeans. It's shrunk some, faded a bit, got a few holes in it. it just might split at the seams. It doesn't look much like it used to, but it's more comfortable, and there's probably a lot of wear left in it.

I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.

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.

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