Roy Blount offers his take on the South

“I left the South in search of the Enlightenment,” writes Roy Blount Jr., who grew up in Decatur, Ga.

“I spent a little over a third of my life, including the presumably most formative years (toilet training through college) living in the South. Mathematically, that makes me about exactly as Southern as the American people, 34 percent of whom are Southern residents.”

“Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South” (Knopf, $25) is Blount’s 20th book, a collection of his best essays on topics ranging from why communism didn’t originate in South Carolina to why Mark Twain is really great to why Bill Clinton is preferable to Robert E. Lee.

From his home in the Berkshires, he gave a sneak preview.

Q. You write about soybeans the way Ann Coulter writes about liberals. Here’s a quote: “The South started going wrong when it started getting so heavy into the cultivation of soybeans.” What have you got against soybeans?

A. They don’t rhyme with “Old times there are not forgotten.” So they are not conducive to a sense of history. They rhyme, in fact, with “Judge Roy Bean’s,” and, therefore, may be conducive to questionable judicial practices.

And they don’t fry up nice. Oh, I know … soy products can be sauteed. But have you ever heard the expression “Southern sauteed”? … Actually, I like tofu. I like pretty nearly everything to eat except head cheese and eel jelly.

Q. I’ve noticed that you have ambivalent feelings about both Bill Clinton and Robert E. Lee. One of your observations in the chapter “Slick Willie and The Marble Man”: “Both of them fought against radical Republicans. Clinton outslicked them, Lee didn’t.”

A. I haven’t met either of them personally, but I dare say I would find Clinton easier to talk to than I would find Lee. … Marse Robert and I have in common that we weren’t able to stay out of the Army, but Clinton and I have in common that we got out of it as soon as we could.

Lee fighting against Virginia is unimaginable, but he let down the side … by not at least trying to talk Virginia out of seceding, and then by not trying to talk Jefferson Davis out of continuing the war for so long after it was lost.

Clinton let down the side by yielding to Monica Lewinsky and thereby giving the radical Republicans a pretext for waylaying his agenda and advancing theirs.

Q. You write, “When I was a boy in Georgia, college sports was Bobby Dodd vs. Bear Bryant immemorial. Compared with that, the Harvard-Yale game is a panel discussion.” Are you still a big fan of college sports?

A. As a boy, in the early ’50s, I was a wholehearted, white-lipped Georgia Tech fan. The Yellow Jackets were light, smart and anti-drudgery. …

Then I realized, A, that I was never going to play college football myself, and, B, that I didn’t want to be an engineer, so I would have to go to some other college than Georgia Tech.

I went to Vanderbilt, on the Grantland Rice Memorial Scholarship for prospective sportswriters. Vanderbilt’s football team could no doubt have whipped Yale’s, but it was no match for Alabama, Ole Miss and all them. In football, the Commodores took a lot of rah-rah out of me.

After college, I gravitated up North … where college sports struck me as lacking mythos: I doubt that football at, say, Colgate was ever coached by anybody who had wrestled a bear. No Princeton coach ever said about a Lehigh coach, “He can beat yourn with his’n, and he can beat his’n with yourn.”

Q. Is the South losing its identity in the age of franchised culture?

A. People have been talking about the South getting less Southern for as long as I can remember, and no doubt people are right.

But recently I’ve been in Mississippi and Massachusetts, and I didn’t have any trouble telling which was which.

Q. There’s an enormous amount of controversy about whether or not the Confederate flag should be displayed at state capitols. What would you recommend to end this controversy?

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A. I don’t think the battle flag necessarily betokens hatred or slavery, but a flag that divides the citizenry it’s supposed to represent is an absurdity.

When it divides people along racial lines, as the Rebel banner does, it’s racist, whether anybody intends it to be or not.

Back in the ’80s, I wrote for Southern magazine a short essay advocating that the South work up a new flag: half of the background blue, for the blues, the other half green, for money. Against that background, a dark brown woman’s hand, an about-the-same-color man’s hand, a tanned white man’s hand, and an about-the-same-color woman’s hand. All of them doing what flags do: waving. And this slogan: “Just Fine, and You?”