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from Arkansas. Perhaps he had just had his fill of condescension. He was a proud man, a farm owner back home in the Ozarks, and, besides, what business was it of some Yakima popcorn popper where they were from anyhow ? But my grandpa was also known to have a little fun with people, and it is quite possible that his claiming Texas was a studied response he’d concocted to use on all the smart-alecks and uppity folks he had encountered on the laborer’s trail. Whatever it was flashing through the mind of Bryan Blevins that August day some two thousand miles from home, the scene itself has played out innumerable times. Those of us who have ventured very far beyond our state’s confines have almost certainly found ourselves playing Arkansas Peter at least once—tempted on the one hand to deny our benighted state of origin or residence, on the other to lop off the ear of her detractor. That last reaction, I assume and hope, is only figurative. If you have sliced off the ear of a New Yorker or Californian who would defame the old Bear State, well, then bully for you; but, as we shall see, you were simply satisfying one of our oldest stereotypes and thus cutting off an ear to spite your face, so to speak. The joke and anecdote point toward a few of the central concepts of this book. The first, probably more of a conceit than a concept, is that Arkansas has for one reason or another undergone more caricaturing and stereotyping in the American imagination than has just about any other state. Arkansas has, of course, not stood alone as a bastion of backwoodsiness. Davy Crockett called Tennessee home; Georgia lays claim to Sut Lovingood, Jeeter Lester, and the mountain menagerie from Deliverance; and every other state south of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Pecos has at one time or another been noted for its overabundance of rednecks, hillbillies, and good old boys. New Yorkers have had their fun at the expense of New Jersey’s honor for as long as anyone can remember; Kansas has taken it on the chin more than once; and Montana has in recent years emerged as a haven for renegades, unibombers, and anyone else claiming an arsenal larger than that of most third-world armies. So Arkansas isn’t the only state that has been maligned for being, or at least appearing to be, out of step with mainstream American society. There seems to be no scientific way to quantify the level of stereotyping to which Arkansas has been subjected in comparison with other states, southern and nonsouthern, but the general consensus around the Natural State is that Arkansas was at some point in the murky past singled out and given a special place in the American consciousness . And it’s a specialness that many in the state would just as soon do without. In a 1954 magazine essay, Eugene Newsom expressed the opinion of many in his native state: “It is safe to say, I believe, that Arkansas has been the butt of more jokes running from raillery to ridicule than any other political entity in the country.” As recently as the Reagan era, a book on the fifty states portrayed Arkansas as having been “touched less by ways 4 ✧ INTRODUCTION BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 4 of industrialized society than any of its neighbors . . . It was an island set apart, a civilization primitive and poor.”1 Little wonder then that the collective population of Arkansas, according to a 1942 Time article, “developed a mass inferiority complex unique in American history.”2 This concept is just as crucial to our story. Arkansas’s “special” place in the American consciousness contributed to the Yakima popcorn girl’s derision, just as the collective inferiority complex influenced my grandpa’s reaction. The writer for Time was on to something, for defensiveness is a part of our cultural inheritance. At some point in an Arkansan’s development—somewhere between the age of accountability and the first hangover—we realize that the old Wonder State is the butt of a perpetual national joke. Developmental psychologists refer to this experience as the “yee-haw moment”—the level of consciousness one must achieve to understand one should be offended by The Beverly Hillbillies, even though one may not be. Arkansas natives come to this heightened sense of selfawareness at...

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