re: More Violence in the South: Explains Our Intense Fandom?

South has always been more of an honor-shame culture, which harkens back to the Greeks and Southern aristocracy and their own views on what was honorable and what wasn't.

Noblisse Oblige: Nobility Obliges - we are kind and gracious not because others really deserve it or because they are are worthy of our kindness, but because that is what noble people do. We are good to others because good people are good to their inferiors. If we are not kind or polite, then it reflects poorly on us and we can't be dishonored that way. So, really it is about us and not the other person.

It is why the white Southerner could say that black people were treated well. He purely saw it through his own lens. HE is a good person, therefore he treats his inferiors well, because that is what his mama taught him and that is what good people do - treat their inferiors well. But, they are still his inferior.

Noblisse Oblige has been the driver of Southern hospitality and kindness and it is what has made Southern religion such a sham. Christianity teaches sacrificial love based on the value of the person before God. Noblisse Oblige is a counterfeit of that and can be laid down at the moment of insult or when it inconveniences someone or harms their "way of life." So, much of Christianity in the South has taken on the Noblisse Oblige of Southern aristocracy from the past and has dressed it up in a "Christian" veneer. The result is a mess.

And yes, football on Saturday is a replaying of war and militias and the Civil War over and over. That is why we care when a Southern team plays Notre Dame or Penn St. or Michigan. It is Gettysburg and Pickett's Charge all over again, except this time we win.

Black and white are fighting together, but the blacks are still seen as inferior, but the whites are kind to them. When they put the uniform on and represent "us," we defend them. If they take it off, they are on their own.

The South is a complicated place. In many ways, culturally, it is still 1861. Or, 1961. Just ask an Ole Miss fan.

As Faulkner says in "Intruder in the Dust,"

quote:

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For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances…

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I think that we still replay a lot of the past, we just aren't conscious of it. Saturdays in the South in football season enables us to relive something that most of us never even knew existed.