When I was growing up in Ohio, the South began at the banks of the Ohio river.  Below that muddy line, everyone knew, there lived a different breed of backward and uneducated people with lazy minds and even lazier language skills.  You could have contempt for them, a privilege I indulged from time to time.  I personally learned this contempt from two main sources. The first was from the television.  Any discerning youngster could see that denigrating Southerners was the daily fare of the national news.  Nothing very good was ever said about that corner of America.  TV reporters were more polite then than they are now, but even back in the day, there was something both explicitly and implicitly New York–ish about the evening news.  New York was where the networks lived.  The South was a place reporters visited after they had prepared themselves by reporting from a war zone or a third-world country...(Read Full Article)