I feel you, dawg. I've had maybe five subscriptions to Garden & Gun over the past seven years. It breaks my heart that Woodford Reserve and Mitch McConnell are from the same economy.

Reza Aslan wrote a great book called How to Win a Cosmic War. His point, fundamentally, is that when Iranians chant "Death to America" they don't mean America the country, or America the people or even America the culture. They mean America the cartoon villain that deposed Mossadegh and propped up SAVAK that actual America shares many characteristics of? And displays many of the same tendencies as? But isn't the America they mean which is why Iranians tend to be largely friendly and fawning towards Americans in the concrete while also being vehemently antagonistic in the abstract:

Iranian president Mohamed Khatami and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei condemned and denounced the attacks and the terrorists who carried them out. Iranians who gathered for a soccer match in Tehran two days after the 9/11 attacks observed a moment of silence. There was also a candlelight vigil. Huge crowds attended candlelit vigils in Iran, and 60,000 spectators observed a minute's silence at Tehran's soccer stadium.

The difference, according to Aslan, is that Islam has the "near enemy" (paging Armenia/Azerbaijan), the "far enemy" (America or Israel as general proxies for agents that oppose islam) and the "cosmic enemy" (things that are fundamentally condemned by the faith - America's "war on drugs" would be a "cosmic war" as there is no corporeal opponent). And while Americans fully understand near enemies and far enemies, they don't understand cosmic enemies and they don't understand that the Islamic hatred of a far enemy is different than the Islamic hatred of a cosmic enemy. He further argues that Americans need to accept that the average resident of Saudi Arabia gives no fucks about America except in the abstract and further, that generally the Jihadis Americans need to worry about are the ones that go to school in Europe and rub up against enough Western Capitalist Dogs to turn the cosmic enemy into the near one. Sho'nuff, Sayyid Qutb ended up radicalized from his time in... Greeley, Colorado.

Thing is, though?

I've had plenty of Southerners tell me "I didn't expect to like you" because I AM their cosmic enemy. I'm their papier mache uncle sam to burn in the square. And we can all get along just fine so long as we don't talk politics, which reminds them that I am literally satan.

THAT, more than anything is what makes the South work: the fact that they can have a near enemy (and my experience is that Southerners need some sort of vendetta against someone over something pointless to feel alive) whose beef is purely operational. They can have a far enemy that is the proximate cause of their woe. But fuckin' hell they need a cosmic enemy in order to define themselves and when you're in the South? You aren't it. But when you're not in the south?

You know you're the bad guy. They tell ya. And they tell ya not to take it personally.