I’ve never been that far to the south but lately I’ve been reading and watching those novels and movies.
The prevalent idea is: in this world (Texas?) you are alone, nobody gives a cr*p about you, do not trust anyone because they’ll take advantage of you, ridicule and mock you. The world (or maybe only Texas?) is an inhospitable, inhuman, Darwinist place.
I lived in Louisiana for a while, and I met a bunch of people from Texas.
Texas and the south in general, while having a lot of problems, do still have lots of beautiful, thoughtful, and amazing people there who didn’t ask to be born into such a shithole, and they do what they can to make it better.
A lot of them are artists, I’ve known several musicians from Texas who are good people and while they may be centrist they’re “leftist” by Texan standards. They are pot smoking hippies in most Texans eyes.
In Louisiana in particular, there was an unexpected but large group of Linux enthusiasts, even at the university level. I remember Whitebox Linux being a complete re-implementation of Redhat that one of the schools endorsed.
My local coffee shop was run by a Linux enthusiast who programmed his own till. He lived above the shop and ran it for years. He was kind and giving and once made my friend and I free coffee when we came in wild-eyed from a night of tripping absolute balls. He was also a pot smoking hippie, but really a pot smoking hippie, not just viewed as one.
These books and films are about the dregs of the dregs. You only encounter the worst if you go looking for the worst. In the south especially, most “shady shakedowns” are pretty fucking obvious and telegraphed if you have half a fucking brain, so it’s fairly easy to avoid most situations of that nature. You’re not exactly working with the most clever people when dealing with the “criminal element” of the south, which can limit their capacity for deceitfulness.