It's garbage as in it's meaningless and doesn't progress the dialogue. It's another “story” written — really poorly — by a Yankee who makes sweeping generalizations about the South. Here, the sweeping generalization is that the South is “homophobic.” Not true. I live in the South. I am not homophobic. My friends are not homophobic. The basic formula for these kinds of stories (or videos, such as Alexandra Pelosi's recent “snapshot” of Mississippian voters) is: I possess a stereotype about a certain region or people; here is a story reinforcing my stereotype; look, my stereotypes were dead on because I wrote a story about said stereotypes. Please share this stereotype with me; it makes you feel superior. But my chief complaint? It's terribly written. As I said, I understand Buzzfeed is becoming a new media company. Hopefully they will find better writers who can tell a complete story. I usually don't explain myself. You said please. Thanks.

Anna, do the world a favor and please quit “writing.”
And BuzzFeed editors, I understand that BuzzFeed is looking at becoming a “new kind of media company” but garbage like this is just that: garbage.

[sarcasm meter now switched off]

Mark, it's called satire. But hey, it's got Mississippi in the title so it has to be about dumb, fat, poor, racist people, right? I mean, right? Because that's all Mississippi is, right? [sarcasm meter no switched off]

Not known for being the most culturally forward state? Ever heard of Robert Johnson? William Faulkner? Sam Cooke? Elvis Presley? BB King? Eudora Welty? Shelby Foote? Larry Brown? Richard Ford? Need I go on, Christy? This quote by the great Richard Howorth, former mayor of Oxford, Miss., and owner of Square Books, basically sums up my feelings toward the perception of Mississippi as this haven of undying racism.
“Americans have the luxury of a sense of security that Mississippi is so much worse than their community. That gives them a sense of adequacy about their racial views and deprives them of the opportunity we've had to confront these issues and genuinely understand our history.”

The New Republic responds: The Mind of the South
Momentarily doffing my business-beat hat, I want to highlight a strange article in the New York Times this morning. “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,” reads the headline, and the gist of the piece is that Southern voters, by backing McCain this election, have proven that their backward ways are increasingly irrelevant to the American scene. There are lots of good quotes from the usual suspects—Merle Black, Tom Schaller—and lots of interesting anecdotes. But the accompanying graph, a county-level map showing left-right voting levels in 2008 relative to 2004 (hues of blue if the counties tilted more Democratic this time around, hues of red if they tilted further to the GOP), seems to belie most, if not all, of the article’s premise. Across the “Deep South”—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and northern Louisiana, what the rest of the country talks about when it talks about the South—the map is almost entirely blue. Pretty much all of Texas is blue, too. That means that Obama, even if he didn’t win these states, still did better than Kerry. Instead, the red splotches center in eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and southern Louisiana; northern Alabama is pretty red as well. (Interestingly, these are places where Democrats tend to do well, historically, on the local and state level.)  What this all points to is not a waning South, but a fissured and rapidly changing one. Perhaps the most frustrating thing for southerners, and those who study the South, is to watch observers pinch and pull at the region’s boundaries to fit their argument. Sometimes it’s everything from Delaware El Paso; sometimes it’s just rural Georgia. The fact that Obama won three southern states, did better than Kerry in counties across the region, and invigorated a substantial number of minority voters—black southerners are southerners, too, remember—complicates the picture of the South as some sort of static geographic-demographic bloc of racists. What is really surprising is not how stalwart the South is in its ways. It’s that broad swaths of the region look just like the rest of the country.

— Clay Risen

The New Republic responds: http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/11/11/the-mind-of-the-south.aspx 11.11.2008
The Mind of the South
Momentarily doffing my business-beat hat, I want to highlight a strange article in the New York Times this morning. “For South, a Waning Hold on National Politics,” reads the headline, and the gist of the piece is that Southern voters, by backing McCain this election, have proven that their backward ways are increasingly irrelevant to the American scene. There are lots of good quotes from the usual suspects—Merle Black, Tom Schaller—and lots of interesting anecdotes. But the accompanying graph, a county-level map showing left-right voting levels in 2008 relative to 2004 (hues of blue if the counties tilted more Democratic this time around, hues of red if they tilted further to the GOP), seems to belie most, if not all, of the article’s premise. Across the “Deep South”—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and northern Louisiana, what the rest of the country talks about when it talks about the South—the map is almost entirely blue. Pretty much all of Texas is blue, too. That means that Obama, even if he didn’t win these states, still did better than Kerry. Instead, the red splotches center in eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and southern Louisiana; northern Alabama is pretty red as well. (Interestingly, these are places where Democrats tend to do well, historically, on the local and state level.) What this all points to is not a waning South, but a fissured and rapidly changing one. Perhaps the most frustrating thing for southerners, and those who study the South, is to watch observers pinch and pull at the region’s boundaries to fit their argument. Sometimes it’s everything from Delaware El Paso; sometimes it’s just rural Georgia. The fact that Obama won three southern states, did better than Kerry in counties across the region, and invigorated a substantial number of minority voters—black southerners are southerners, too, remember—complicates the picture of the South as some sort of static geographic-demographic bloc of racists. What is really surprising is not how stalwart the South is in its ways. It’s that broad swaths of the region look just like the rest of the country.

—Clay Risen