Ironworks Gaming Forum - A few words too many

Since I have several friends in Charlotte and had also heard about this article on the John Boy and Billy Big Show, I created an account and registered.

Here is the article that nanobyte was referring to. It's pretty much the stereotypical Southern-bashing BS.


In our mind there's nothing in Carolina
By Will Bunch
bunchw@phillynews.com

WE knew it all along.

Oh, sure, maybe some had their doubts - when the Eagles fell behind 14-0 in the first quarter, or when it was 4th-and-26, or when Brett Favre got the ball one last time in OT.

But we knew we weren't losers. Where do you think we are - Charlotte?

Charlotte - hometown of the Carolina Panthers - is a sprawling, ugly Sunbelt city that looks a lot like Atlanta. But Atlanta was once "the city too busy to hate."

Charlotte is the city too easy to hate.

This endless and soul-less NASCAR-hypnotized expanse of strip malls and Shoney's finally got its pro franchise when the NFL finally ran out of real cities somewhere between Jacksonville, Fla., and Nashville, Tenn. However, there is one area where the Carolinas can lay claim to major league status: The self-righteous hypocrisy of its rogue's gallery of unreformed segregationists and Bible-thumping con artists.

Here's a reminder of things to hate about Charlotte and the Carolinas. Feel free to clip it out and carry it in your hip pocket every time this week you get too nonchalant about next Sunday.

Has nothing on Green Bay

Last week, we castigated Green Bay, Wis., for having nothing to do. But to paraphrase W.C. Fields, on the whole we'd rather be ice-fishing in one of those wooden shacks in subzero northern Wisconsin than to be forced to spend a week in Charlotte.

Charlotte is so dull that the city's nickname is "Charlotte."

Even Charlotte boosters have to come up with clever euphemisms for "boring." One writer tried to praise it by calling "the quietest big city in America," somehow not quite as stirring as, say, "the city that never sleeps."

Connection Charlotte's online list of "100 things to do" includes "play putt-putt at Celebration Station," "eat ice cream at Ben & Jerry's," "visit the main branch of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Library," and "go shoe-shopping at DSW..." That last one is No. 42! Under the heading of "Raucous Pleasures," Charlotte.com notes that "Jillian's has been called a 'Chuck E. Cheese for grownups.' "

Charlotte Observer sports columnist Tom Sorensen once wondered out loud why so many of its athletes became felons. "Is it our Bourbon Street, our South Beach, our Times Square that gets them? If so, where are our Bourbon Street, our South Beach and our Times Square? Tell me before I get old."

Amen.

Hey, Charlotte: F.U.!

People from Charlotte have always been pretty dumb when it comes to money. In 1799, Conrad Reed found a glittery, 17-pound rock in a stream 25 miles north of town. A local silversmith couldn't identify it, so Reed used it as a doorstop for two years before someone told him the glittery stuff was actually gold.

But Reed seems a financial genius when compared to Charlotte's Edward Crutchfield Jr. - the rocket scientist who schemed to take over Philadelphia's largest bank, CoreStates Financial, with his own Carolina-based First Union Bank in 1998.

Crutchfield was so convinced he could get rich here in Philly that he paid five times what CoreStates should have been worth and then boasted that he'd "stacked billion-dollar bills" on the table.

Once the euphoria wore off, Crutchfield realized the only way to pay for the deal was to hike fees while touting something called a Future Bank where employees wouldn't handle deposits, withdrawals and loan applications - i.e., the things people go to a bank for. Any wonder that Philadelphians left the aptly named F.U. in droves? Within two years, F.U.'s stock was worth less than a Confederate dollar, and Crutchfield was out of a job.

A kick in the Shinn

Actually, it was the NBA that first made the mistake of thinking that Charlotte was a major league city. In 1988, the league awarded a pro franchise to a self-made millionaire and motivational speaker named George Shinn.

Charlotans, or whatever you call them, were so thrilled to have something to do besides buy shoes and hang out at the library that the teal-uniformed Hornets led the NBA in attendance until 1997.

That's when it came out that Shinn, married for 27 years, had taken a women he met while visiting a nephew at a drug rehab center back to his mansion, where she performed oral sex on him. A jury cleared Shinn of sexual assault charges, but during the trial it came out that Shinn had additionally had a two-year affair with a Hornets cheerleader who was also a waitress at a Mexican restaurant where the owner used to go - with his family!

The scandal hurt the Hornets so badly that the team had to leave town. It also really hurt the sales of Shinn's motivational book - titled "Good Morning, Lord."

Hypocrite Hall of Fame

Actually, Shinn is just the latest in a long line of hypocrites to come out of Charlotte and the backward hinterlands that surround it. Here, quickly, is the Carolinas' Hypocrite Hall of Fame.

JIM AND TAMMY FAYE BAKKER. The founders of the Christian fundamentalist PTL Club set a high standard of hypocrisy. Jim Bakker preached family values even though he was a bisexual who arranged to have sex with a buxom (and drugged) church secretary named Jessica Hahn, and then paid her $265,000 in a failed effort to cover it up. His real downfall, though, was a "Christian theme park" called Heritage USA in which Bakker did the Christian thing of bilking scores of small investors. He was jailed, while cosmetically challenged Tammy Faye remarried.

BILLY GRAHAM. Richard Nixon's spiritual adviser did preach a more positive message and was a moderate on race, but ironically it is Nixon's White House tapes that have tarnished Graham's once-stellar image. He urged massive bombing of North Vietnam while he was recorded saying of Jews: "...they don't know how I feel about what they are doing to this country."

We do now, Billy.

JESSE HELMS. Whenever somebody tries this week - and they will - to talk about the New South and North Carolina's high-tech industries, just remind them that the state returned Helms to Washington as recently as 1996!

Helms started in politics in 1950 helping a Senate candidate who won with a doctored picture of the incumbent's wife dancing with a black man, then railed against "Negro hoodlums" as a TV commentator. In Washington, he fought the Martin Luther King holiday and the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act - when he wasn't lending his support to right-wing dictators around the globe.

STROM THURMOND. Jim Bakker had nothing, hypocrisy-wise, on the recently departed Thurmond, who - as a segregationist candidate for president in 1948 - fought to keep what he called "the Nigra race" out of swimming pools and movie theaters even though we know now he was doing the wild thing with his family's teenage black servant.

As a U.S. senator from South Carolina, Thurmond accomplished little but to cement his reputation as a womanizer. He tried and failed to date Lyndon Johnson's teenage daughter, and - in his 90s - attempted to grope Sen. Patty Murray in an elevator. A colleague, John Tower, predicted famously that at Thurmond's funeral "they'll have to beat his ------- down with a baseball bat to close the coffin lid."

(E-mail bunchw@phillynews.

com for the actual word. You must be 18 or over to participate.)

Panthers' felony raps

Tragically, this record of moral turpitude has carried over to the Panthers' football franchise.

No need to discuss the tragic cases of Rae Carruth or Fred Lane (although I can't promise my bad-cop colleague Don Russell won't later this week).

But it's hard to ignore quarterback Kerry Collins, who came out of Penn State with a bright future only to leave Carolina with a drinking problem and a busted jaw after uttering a racial slur to a teammate. Collins had to go to New York - of all places! - to sober up and lead his team to a Super Bowl. And for all you Carolina fans who think that's all in the past, that you can come here to Philadelphia and find success, I must remind you once again of these two letters:

F.U.

According to a follow-up article, the Philadelphia News received over 2,000 emails in response to this article. Their first line response was... People in North Carolina have computers? Who knew?

{sigh}Like I said, typical Southern-bashing. [img]graemlins/dontknowaboutyou.gif[/img] Personally, I don't consider it worth the effort or time to respond to such drivel.