The Runaway Bride

"I grad-e-ated in the 6th grade. Only took me three years!" --Jethro Clampett


For all the absurdity of the Jennifer Wilbanks story, I couldn't help but think, "only in Duluth Georgia." When you combine a 32 year-old bride, and 600 wedding guests this far south of the Mason Dixon line, you could produce enough pressure to power a freight train. That said, the media’s portrayal of this sad…okay, pathetic episode is just another example of how the South is constantly portrayed as a backwoods twilight zone. This story is classically Southern but its just another example of the mainstream media's (which is comprised mainly of Yankees and self-hating Southerners) condescending attitude towards the South.

Why is it classically Southern? Because Yankees don’t throw debutante balls for their daughters. When a Southern woman tells her friends, "My daughter came out last weekend", it has nothing to do with sexual orientation.

This story is classically Southern because Northern co-eds don’t pack up and leave school if they don’t get a bid to Kappa Kappa Gamma. When I was a freshman in college, I remember watching a girl and her father quietly pack a U-Haul on Bid-Day. I couldn’t help but think what my father’s reaction would be if I called him up that morning and told him I needed to drop out of school because I didn’t get into a good Frat (alas, the efficacy of disciplining your children with a belt buckle is an altogether different subject).

Weddings, like Deb-Balls and sororities, take on a greater amount of significance the further south one travels (and the higher one climbs the social ladder). I have no doubts that women in the North get cold feet too, but they don’t kidnap themselves.

This is also an example of condescension towards the South. Although interesting, Adrea Peyser’s column yesterday in the New York Post couldn’t help insinuating that most Southerners have trouble keeping their teeth. I realize she lived in the South for a while, but with an attitude like hers, its not surprising she had to "escape." It’s amazing how unwelcome people feel when they treat their neighbors like morons.

A sad but true statement is that most Americans have no idea what the South is like. Why else do you think a guy like Howard Dean would say the things he says with a straight face? Here is a guy who was smart enough to get through Medical school, and yet still refers to an entire region of the country like he would a mischievous cousin with Downs Syndrome.

In closing though, it’s hard to make excuses for Ms. Wilbanks, her fiancé, and the South in general. When Jesse Jackson complains about the negative image of African American men, I roll my eyes and look at the number of violent crimes committed by that group. In the same vein, when Southerners like myself complain that the media makes us look like retards, I have to turn on the TV to listen to Wilbanks’ fiancé brag that she is still a virgin. If we Southerners want to improve our image, we need to muzzle idiots like that.