The porous borders between regions in America are sometimes as hard to navigate as a Chevy Malibu that’s lost its power steering, rear-view mirror, and left front tire. Being from St. Louis, I get wrongfully accused of being from the South more than I’d like. People from the South think St. Louis is in Ohio. People from the West Coast just grimace and ask about our baseball team, being cut off from any points of reference whatsoever by the Rocky Mountains.
But, even if you’re well-versed in regional cultures, the difference between Appalachia and the Deep South, you know that the cultural borders don’t always match the political ones. This is especially true in parts of what’s known as The New South, where entrepreneurial, educated carpetbaggers came down from the North to add a vibrancy and changing face to previously backwater southern regions. It’s also where entrepreneurial immigrants from south of the border come to be harassed, ostracized, and tormented by the old blood, who happen to be making a killing off of all their hard work. And it’s in this mixing of all types that the cultural signifiers get muddled. They get confused and mixed up. The most vulgar machinations of capitalism mate with quasi-mystical mass-nostalgia, and you get a Confederate flag and pot leaf beach towel. The cutting edge of science mixes with brutal sport culture and you get Gatorade.
But sometimes the signs are so muddled, even the well-traveled cultural traveler gets confused. Take this picture for instance:
I saw it on a t-shirt at a beach-side trinket store in North Carolina. I think it’s in the same category as those “vaguely antagonistic towards no one in particular” red-neck t-shirts that were popular in the ’90s. But even considering that — what kind of threat is this? Is the word “mate” a stand in for something here? All of the shirts I saw were, in some way, a declaration of Southern identity. Some had to do with fishing or hunting. Some with being drunk and hating Obama. But what does this say about itself? All cheap, red-neck t-shirts are “meta,” in the banal sense of the word, but its possibly the hardest code to crack I’ve ever seen.
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