Gingrich in the land of racism and religiousity

I lived there for almost a decade, so I’m familiar with the challenge of covering politics in the US South. The challenge stems from that region’s peculiar social phenomenon: double consciousness. 

Basically, seeing shouldn’t always be believing. During the GOP primaries in South Carolina, I smiled to myself when I read reporting that was awed by churches that look like shacks, trios of wooden crosses mounted on roadsides and highway billboards admonishing drivers that they must be born again. I was reminded of HL Mencken, ever the cosmopolitan aesthete, failing to comprehend the pentecostal essence of public life there. And like Mencken, the reporting I read was factual, credible and sometimes funny, but often unable to see through the veil of culture to concrete truth.

Like the US as a whole, the land is soaked with religiousity and racism, but unlike the rest of the country, the land has been soaking in them for about 400 years. The result is that religion and racism are completely natural features in the landscape of public affairs – and that to notice would be like noticing the air you breath and the water you drink, and doing that is to stand outside of the normal patterns of political life.
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