I
I am walking the floor over this issue and I realize I have done it before … long ago, after the first time I had ever spoken up in a faculty meeting. It is the same, nothing ever changes. It was in a small apartment in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, of this man I was seeing. I had heard for many years that it was a terrible error to speak up in a faculty meeting, but I had done it and I was now walking the floor. For years after that this man who I just saw the other day was concerned I might walk the floor a whole night again.
I think it is terrible how they terrorize graduate students, you will never write, you must never speak. Now I am walking the floor over the question, should I really publish that piece I have already pulled. Walking the floor over the question whether I should ever write or speak.
II
I have been looking for a good version of Walking the Floor over You to illustrate this matter and not finding one I could handle, but I came upon something else, reminiscent of the same era: Tennessee Border. During this period of my first floor-walking I had gone to a very buttoned-down NEH seminar in New England and I was grateful to leave the region at the end. I could feel freedom flash in as I crossed the New York state line, and I had planned to go into the city. But near the level of the George Washington Bridge a fateful program came on the radio, Tennessee Border, it was called, and I thought, “I can be there by nightfall.” I merged right and the traffic eased, so I kicked the car into fifth and ran from New England.
In Tennessee I went to a diner. They had fried potatoes with vegetables from the garden as they do in Tennessee and Kentucky, and I had Louisiana plates and a New Orleans shirt. “You are on your way home.” “Yes, ma’am.” That was when I became a Southerner.
I do not know what to do with that fact but it is one. And I keep being told it is such a terrible thing (you will never write, you must never speak, you must take a job, any job, but you will die if you move to the South), and I must live in a bubble, I cannot know. But the ones in the bubble, explaining, have New York plates.
III
This culture and New England are actually the same: cultures of deference. It is in the Midwest and the West that you can speak directly. Louisiana, though, is also Mediterranean, and in Mediterranean countries you have to fight.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
If that’s true about New England then it helps to explain why I never feel I “get” New England or its people. I’m fine with the mid-Atlantic, though. To some, the taciturn, independent New Englander looks a lot like the laconic, independent Westerner, but they are not at all the same yet I cannot articulate why not.
New England is the most conformist part of the country and it requires the least backbone. Follow the leader. They only claim to be independent, but they have no actual idea of what that might be. The mid-Atlantic reminds me of California…
And Hawaii is something else again. It’s mostly a place of backroom deals and people pounding at the doors to no avail. Wonder how this has affected the way Obama governs.
Hawaii is a colonial sugar island and so must work like Louisiana. I think Obama is under the influence of the Chicago machine. There was also some key piece I or you posted on how he got promoted through the ranks in IL, it all had to do with the banks; can you recall … ?