How Yankees and southerners can live in harmony

            I grew up in West Virginia, which vantage point allows something like objectivity. Let me posit a few attitude adjustments that could finesse some of the old rifts.

            For example, southerners could forgo the conceit that college football is not played outside the Southeastern Conference. It is, although not as belligerently.

            And southerners could forgo calling The Civil War the War Between the States, an awkward construct that only obfuscates while failing to make the intended point. Let reenactors on both sides conjoin to reenact the Battle of Iwo Jima with Stone Mountain as Mount Suribachi. By the way, not all Civil War buffs are southerners. Mario Cuomo and Richard Dreyfuss are cases in point.

            Northerners could be encouraged to embrace NASCAR with a couple of dirt tracks in, say, Massachusetts. Maybe throw in some Waffle Houses which would render obsolete all the stupid jokes about grits.

            The two regions might agree that southern novelists are no more eccentric or gothic than northern novelists. For every Flannery O’Conner there’s an Edgar Allan Poe.

            And by the way, Pennsylvanians (not southerners) fought a small war for the right to make whiskey at home. President George Washington himself led the army that quashed the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, and forced trans-Allegheny frontierspeople to pay a whopping 25 percent whiskey tax to the new U.S. government.

            And perhaps some northern real estate developer could create a Yankee version of The Villages where southern retirees could play hockey and learn ice fishing. Escapees bent on reaching the Florida Villages would be incarcerated at the Village Prison.

            But seriously, we could all acknowledge that there is no such thing as a southern accent. There is a New Orleans accent, an Atlanta accent, a Charleston accent, all with variations. There are also accents distinctive to Boston, Chicago and New York. Why one is more subject to parody than another is something I’ve never understood. On a recent visit to a north Georgia high school, I noticed that the kids seemed accent-free, unless there’s such a thing as a Disney Channel accent.

            The thing is, we’re learning to like one another. Mason-Dixon is disappearing, except for a few unreconstructed denizens like the elderly lady who still blamed “the Abraham Lincoln administration for The War of Northern Aggression.” Seated with her around the bridge table were natives of Milwaukee, Hartford and rural Vermont, all of whom smiled politely, unwilling to challenge the sensibility of their friend.