Charleston Dandy Stephen Colbert

I am a huge fan of Charleston Dandy Stephen Colbert.  He is sort of an intellectual version of Borat.   But when I watched this clip of South Carolina mothers watching a clip of Stephen Colbert and then being interviewed about it, I felt bad for them.

Charleston Dandy Stephen Colbert

Sure, it was an all-white, Southern, small town,  predominantly Republican crowd who would like to see evil degenerate potheads like me thrown in jail for life, but they didn’t look or sound malevolent.   They probably smile and say hello when they meet somebody on the street and occasionally give their neighbors a basket of tomatoes when their garden does well, which is more than you can say for city folks.

But I’m not sure all of them realized that Stephen Colbert was joking in his defense of corporations.  (A lot of them had never heard of Stephen Colbert)

I did get a chuckle out of it when one of the women called Colbert a Charleston Dandy.  It reminded me of my Aunt Louise, who lived in a very small town in Iowa.  Even as children we realized that she was about a century behind everybody else.  She said things like “Warshington” and “Rooshians,” and called pants “britches.”  She once told me that she hated coming into Des Moines because “It seems like every time I go to the store in Des Moines, there’s some colored woman pooshing me.”

People who think that Des Moines, and Charleston, are big, dangerous, out of control liberal cities are totally disconnected from New York and San Francisco.  There really is, as John Edwards used to say, two Americas.  I don’t know if there’s any way to bridge that gap, and I’m just glad I got the hell out.