July 28, 2019: Wall St. Journal: “Southern Football’s Dating Game”

On November 13, 2009, the Wall Street Journal published a curious article, the title of which is given above. An intrepid (I’m not being ironic) reporter traveled to Auburn, Alabama and Auburn University (remember that place?) The author interviewed a number of fraternity boys who gave their opinions about how taking girls to football games was part of the social firmament. (Here’s the link to the article, but WSJ is behind a paywall that perhaps you, like me, can bypass.

(https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703683804574532052658242422)

Nothing had changed since I was there from 1976-82 as an instructor of English. The boys in 2009 were every bit as exclusive, snobby, xenophobic, and sexist as they were when I taught there. One boy even said something to the effect that you wouldn’t want to take a girl who would knew too much about football or would talk too much “because she was from the North or something.”

Those of you who know me will not be surprised to know that when I read that article, I had had a drink or two. Or ten. So I placed fingers carefully to keyboard and keyed a letter to the editor during which I noted that thirty years hadn’t changed a thing: the campus where the KA fraternity donned Confederate uniforms and rode horses downtown during some Confederate holiday hadn’t changed a bit. I concluded my letter, party on like it’s 1792, boys, or, more to the point, 1861. Hit SEND.

This is when I learned that newspapers no longer get in touch with you to confirm anything before they print a letter you send them. If the WSJ had called, I would have chuckled and said, no, never mind, I was just kidding, please don’t publish it.

They printed it under the hilariously-named Peyton Alsobrook’s sobbing response (my sister-in-law pronounced Peyton’s name “southern Gothic”). Peyton did not assert that he had been misquoted, merely that

• Although we at Auburn University are honored to be mentioned in such a prestigious newspaper [that was so southern passive-aggressively ironic], I don’t believe the article portrays the true reasons for our Southern traditions. The tradition of dressing up and taking dates to football games dates all the way back to the late 1800s, when people believed the games to be social events where appearance and acquaintances reflected your social stature [why would you admit that?]. The tradition has carried on through the years because Auburn greatly values its past [like owning people].

The shit rain fell on me immediately and in quantity (they probably found my email address for my writing business online). Auburn folks--for so they like to refer to themselves—or sometimes “Auburn people”, when they’re being formal, let me have it. How could you be so disloyal to someone who employed you? One guy, who worked for Raymond James in Tampa and used his work email address, wrote me using every big word he knew to chastise me.

One guy—and this I found kind of scary—found a description of our house, presumably on the Kitsap County website, and said that because my house was so small, I had low self-esteem and was just trying to make myself feel better. Someone else said, but OH, the traffic in Seattle is terrible! You get the picture. One or two people, probably writing with their doors locked, lights off, and blinds drawn, wrote to praise me and to say that I’d gotten it right.

What is bewildering is that NO one who wrote either me or the WSJ claimed that any of the kids in the article had been misquoted. The unspoken assertion was that you Yankees/outsiders don’t understand our amazing southern traditional chivalry. I wonder if they know what hoisted on your own petard means?

At some point, Peyton Alsobrook himself emailed me. First, he wailed about how he had been so viciously attacked for what he had been quoted as saying and claimed that it had been the WORST week of his life. He pleaded with me to understand, and then he threatened to pray for me. I had no answer for that but to write him back and threaten to pray for him, too.

A couple of weeks after all of this occurred, I wrote the author of the article, Hannah Karp, and told her how I’d been attacked and asked what reaction the WSJ had had. She said that typically when they wrote an article that involved a university, they received a lot more mail than about anything else. But Auburn’s response, she reported, had been utterly over the top.

I doubt that there’s a better example of shooting the messenger. “Auburn folks” are essential southerners: they dislike and are suspicious of outsiders. Forget Southern hospitality: it’s a myth. If they’re being so nice to you, it’s because they’re calculating really hard what threat you pose to them and how they can counter you. Hold your friends close, but your enemies closer. As clueless about my life as I’ve been, this is something I get.

The shoot-the-messenger aspect of this is more troubling, because it indicates that people who are either college students or even alumni of a major American university are unable to think clearly enough to realize that they’re doing it.

What did I do, other than point out the attitudes that the students had clearly expressed—and never disowned after the article was published? I merely observed. And their reaction was not to contemplate the observations but simply to attack the person who made them. How attenuated can you get from the point that Auburn “folks” are living in the 19th century, by their own admission, than to say that Seattle has awful traffic? (Meanwhile, have they spent any time on Atlanta’s interstate parking lots?)

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the southern red states is their steadfast protection of their territory and their values. If they protect those things mindlessly, by definition they’re not thinking about them. That’s evident in their words. It’s been 150 years since the end of the War of Northern Aggression, and there’s still no talking to them.

We're all white, and we're all drunk!

We're all white, too, and not one of us feels as ridiculous as we are.