E-Mail This Article to a Friend Southern exposure Why I don’t exactly wish I were in Dixie (though sometimes I have to travel there for business) BY STEVE ALMOND

BACK IN THE ’90s, I spent a couple of years in North Carolina, which was clearly a mistake for everyone involved, given that I tend to have trouble with the concept known as manners, and given that I tend not to give a shit about college basketball, and given that I tend to be a Jew.

Nonetheless, my "work" occasionally takes me back to the South, as it did last month, which I spent mostly in Alabama and Mississippi, states that, frankly, make North Carolina look like the suburbs of the Confederacy.

Now I know it’s fashionable up here in New England to tease people of Deep Southern extraction, to make them out as Bible-spoutin’, tabacky-chewin’, NASCAR-worshippin’, pointy-hood-wearin’ hicks. So I want to say up front that this column will not traffic in such ignorant stereotypes.

No, it’s my hope to forge a whole new set of stereotypes, ones that are far more bitter and specific.

Obviously, I’m just kidding. I love Southerners. I had two for lunch.

Seriously, the thing I realized after two weeks in the South (which I refer to, almost habitually, as the Dirty Dirty) is that the region is just an exaggerated version of the rest of country. America squared, basically.

Let me begin with Southern cuisine.

The first meal I enjoyed in Oxford, Mississippi, consisted of fried catfish, hush puppies (fried corn meal), fries, and coleslaw. Slaw is the official vegetable of the South. It is primarily mayonnaise, with a dash of shredded cabbage.

My other meals included turkey deep-fried in peanut oil, pork-enchilada pie, and cheese grits topped with butter-fried shrimp and bacon, a meal I consumed with such naked lust that, technically, my heart may no longer be beating.

I was also offered — not once but several times — a late-night snack called "fried chicken on a stick," which was available at most finer gas stations. Are we not, as a culture, in a deeply spiritual sense, evolving toward fried chicken on a stick?

I think you know the answer.

As for civic discourse, the people of the South are most comfortable with two forms: the billboard and the bumper sticker. My favorite example of the latter, from among a vast array, was the aphorism slapped onto the rear fender of a silver Cadillac Escalade: THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH — EVENTUALLY.

If we Yankees are honest with ourselves, we have to admit we’re headed in the same direction. The awkwardness of direct speech (as in to another human being) is gradually, thankfully, being phased out.

When conversation is absolutely unavoidable, Southerners do a great job of avoiding any topic that might offend. Overall, not offending is the chief aim of most social encounters. Thus, the language down there is carefully coded.

Here are a few examples.

"You just visiting?"

This means: "When are you returning to wherever you came from?"

"We’ve made a lot of progress in the last few years."

This means: "We no longer hate black people so much."

This is by and large true, though I did not see a lot of evidence that blacks and whites do much interacting, unless you consider "Would you like waffle fries with that?" a meaningful interaction.

But again, let us look at our own cities. Is it really so different in Boston, or Detroit? Aside from the waffle fries, I mean.

Perhaps my favorite Southern linguistic flourish is the phrase bless her heart!

Those of you from the North may not be hip to this elegant construction, which adds an instant wallop of passive-aggressive pity to any observation. Some examples:

She’s not the most graceful dancer, bless her heart!

He didn’t exactly get his daddy’s brains, bless his heart!

They just got out of rehab, bless their hearts!

Another aspect of Southern culture that strikes me as highly evolved is the region’s sense of infighting. Here in New England, we spend a lot of time pretending that New York doesn’t kick our ass sideways. Down there, they bash on each other, too. The people of Georgia tease the people of Alabama for being dumb, then the Alabamans dump on the Mississippians, which is, as these things go, not the most solid defense of the original indictment.

Mississippians, for their part, don’t argue the point much. As my friend Preston noted, "Hey, the tallest building in our state is a casino. You do the math."

There’s also a lot of racial guilt in the South, which people are always acknowledging in weird, awkward ways. I had four different (white) people tell me that Birmingham used to be called Bombingham, on account of the bombing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 16th Street Church, a blast that killed four kids who were in Sunday school. (Oddly, they didn’t refer to the perpetrators as terrorists. No, these were simple Klansmen.)

This is another way in which the South is really out on the leading edge. Because we all live, these days, in an era of the angry white man: George W. Bush. Rush Limbaugh. Bill O’Reilly. Tom DeLay. Michael Moore. The South just had the early franchise.

I remember sitting at an outdoor café down in Greensboro and hearing a guy at the next table tell his friend, in an embittered murmur, "Adolf Hitler did a lot of good things for the German people. Might have killed a few too many Jews, but he was a good leader."

The saddest thing wasn’t that his friend was Asian; it was that his friend agreed with him.

I don’t mean to imply, of course, that this sort of thing happens often in the South. Not true. It only happens when Southern men think there’s no one else around.

Again, I kid.

At the end of the day, my feeling about the people of the South is one of deep love and respect. It isn’t their fault that they enslaved an entire race and then fought a war to defend this practice.

Or, well, maybe it sort of is. Still, that was a long time ago and all those folks are dead and today’s Southerners are trying hard to lead good, Christian lives — bless their hearts!

Southerners may write nasty e-mails to Steve Almond at www.bbchow.com