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"FAUX BUBBAS STRADDLE BAR STOOL OF ACHY BREAKY HEARTS"


The national media may call Bill Clinton and Al Gore the Bubba ticket,
but as any Southerner can tell you, these guys are hardly Bubbas.
Bubbas don't go to Harvard and Yale.  If a Bubba ever gave Oxford a
second thought, he'd probably think of it as "the Ole Miss of England."
No, Clinton and Gore are Faux Bubbas - Fake Good Ol' Boys, Counterfeit
Crackers.

But that could work for them because, after all, this is the year of
the Bubba Wannabee.  In politics, we've had Ross Perot, the simple
country billionaire, and George Bush, the high WASP preppie with his
pork rinds and horseshoes.  We're also seeing a phenomenal growth of
country music, tobacco-chewing Hollywood agents driving Range Rovers
down Sunset boulevard and two-step-dancing investment bankers buying
pickup trucks and ranches in Montana.

The Faux Bubba has straddled the bar stool of America's Achy Breaky
heart.

              --RISE OF FAUX BUBBAS--

There are two kinds of Faux Bubba.  Al Gore's kind represents the more
complicated Bubba Wannabees, like Bush and Perot.  Born to wealth and
privilege, refinement and the perks of civilization, they don the bib
overall persona, the rustic coloration and plumage of the Good Ol' Boy,
as a kind of camouflage to disguise their advantages.  They are shrewd
politicians who know that Americans root for the underdog and can be as
unforgiving of life's winners as its losers.

In this way, the Bush, Gore and Perot brand of Faux Bubba is closer to
the yuppie novelists, actors, news anchors and Wall Street brokers
flocking to buy ranches in Montana or Wyoming, to herd cattle and drive
Range Rovers and go white-water canoeing.

This kind of Bubba pose is a testosterone thing.  Bridling under the
demands of civilization, cut off from their senses, battered by the
women's movement, longing for tribal identity, but too proud to beat
drums and weep openly at seminars, they are restoring their masculinity
the only way they know how -- by buying it.  This Faux Bubba lifestyle
offers all the perks and bennies, like dipping snuff and chewing
tobacco, with none of the unpleasant cultural downside, like getting
laid off from your job or being cut up in a knife fight.

Bill Clinton may not be a true Bubba, but he is a true redneck, and
like me is just a generation or two removed from the mill villages and
trailer parks, trying to assimilate like the children of immigrants,
glossing over our ethnicity and trying to "pass" in the predominant
culture.  Clinton never knew his real daddy, who was killed in a car
wreck. His mamma's been married five times and she buried three
husbands.  His step-daddy was drunk, his brother went to prison.  Hell,
Bill Clinton's life is a country song.

His grandfather ran a small-town grocery store in Arkansas.  My grand
parents were Carolina textile workers, called "lintheads" back then.
By the grace of Adolf Hitler, my father escaped the mills.  I was a
military brat, reared in small towns across the South -- some of them
so backward even the Episcopalians handled snakes.

Clinton and I grew up on the historical fault line between the Old
Confederacy and the New South, between Dixie and the Sunbelt.  As
Southerners, we are defined as much by our pastas as our presents, as
much by where we come from as where we are going.

We grew up in a time and place when it cost you something to be right
on race and to question the war in Vietnam.  For our generation of
young Southerners, going against the grain in a part of the country
where white supremacy and military supremacy were articles of faith was
a painful, gut-wrenching rite of passage that turned us inside out,
defined us morally and make us who we are today.  We weren't spoon-fed
our values and ideals.  We had to earn them.  They are not just in our
brains now; they're in our bones.

The modern media age and synthetic mass culture waged war on our Bubba
genes.  They were stalked and assaulted, educated and refined,
gentrified and upwardly mobilized into submission.  But the final
skirmishes of Antietam and Gettysburg, Chickamauga and Chancellorsville
are still being fought on the battlefields of our souls.

We're still recognizable, though.  We're the ones with the designer bib
overalls and the gunracks in our BMWs.  We sometimes confuse sushi with
bait, and we sip our Evian from an old mason jar.  Brought up on grits
and barbecue, we now make our own pasta and dine on soyburger and
calamari.  No matter how hard we try, we still can't use "summer" as a
verb, and when we say "ciao" we really mean "Y'all come see us now,
Y'heah?"

But, as Clinton has seen, being a Bubba today can be risky.  In this
age of political correctness, we white, male, heterosexual Southerners
represent everything wrong with the 20th century.  We are white when
black is beautiful, male when sisterhood is powerful, straight when gay
is good.  We are the wrong color, the wrong race, the wrong sexual
orientation and we speak with the wrong accent.

A National Opinion Research Center survey comparing images of five
ethnic groups -- Jews, blacks, Asians, Hispanics and white Southerners
-- found white Southerners perceived as dumber, lazier and more prone
to violence than "white Americans."

We didn't need a poll to tell us that.  Anti-Southern bias is always
lurking below the surface in the national media.  Hollywood knows that
if you want to make someone a villain or a dimwit, give him a Southern
accent.  We learn the codes of Northern intolerance the way blacks
learn to decipher and interpret the codes of racism.  The malign Morse
by which it is communicated ("...you know, Clinton is smart, too!") is
as recognizable to us as the phrases "welfare chiselers" or "articulate
black man" are to African Americans.

        --A SLICK CHOICE--

Ol' Slick Willie must have been aware of the unconscious bigotry against
white Southerners when he selected another Bubba as his running mate
because he's sure made it work for him.  By stacking the ticket with
Southerners, he changed the question on everybody's mind from, "Did he
commit adultery?" to " Has he committed incest?"  The answer is "No"
and Clinton soars in the polls.

Slick, all right.  And he sho'nuff didn't learn that at Yale.

--by Doug Marlette
  L.A. Times/Washington Post