With a title like Better Off Without 'Em, Chuck Thompson's "manifesto" looks like little more than a polemic screed at first glance. Two things, however, make it a surprisingly worthwhile read. First, Thompson presents plenty of evidence that Northerners are being taken for a ride, at least financially, by their neighbors below the Mason-Dixon Line. No southern state but Florida, for example, contributes more money in federal tax revenue than it takes in federal assistance and entitlement programs--even, as Thompson gleefully points out, while conservative politicians in those states rail against big government.
Second, he constantly reminds us of his own hilarious arrogance as he stumbles through nearly two years of southern travels. "Three southern-fried rock pilgrims in the honky-tonk badonkiest bar in South Carolina can't summon a single nugget from the pride of Spartanburg?" Thompson argues when faced with a Skynyrd-playing bar band who claims not to know anything by Marshall Tucker. "Am I the only real redneck in this joint?" he asks--even when, in his Old Navy T-shirt, dirty black Levi's and Nikes, he "might as well be wearing a top hat and carrying a jewel-encrusted walking stick" compared to the rest of the bar's patrons.
Thompson may revel in his regional jackassery, but the facts he musters in support of his political argument are worth note. Then again, it's hard to take him too seriously, when he reveals his deepest animus against the South: the SEC's unfair overrepresentation in college bowl games. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic