Their outrage stokes my amusement. They seethe; I sigh.

Sure, I understand their defensiveness. Who wouldn’t bristle at some of the allegations and hyperbole? But, enough is enough. 

A fight over federal dollars set Seattle in direct competition with Mobile, Alabama, an aerospace contract battle featuring the usual haggling, string-tugging and roundabout bribery that accompanies such. It was customary politics: seamy and steamy.

The smack talk between both ‘burgs centered the usual stereotypes. Folks from the misty PNW threw out the image of trailer park bumpkins while their counterparts on the humid Gulf Coast growled about “Left Coast, latte liberals.”

Admittedly, the grousing from ‘Bama took me back in time, to decades previous when I first noticed this Southern tendency, of rationalization flirting with nostalgia to warp the future. Even now, when I hear the word “Yankee,” it feels like someone has creaked a vault open. “Remember that? Remember when the world was that small?”

I still hear and read it in Mobile media, when suggestions are met with “If you don’t like it, leave.” 

Alabama columnists and editors often took infantile potshots at Seattle. Disappointing? Yes, since you expect more perspective and less pandering from people in those positions. The spectacle of Mobile indignation was unintentionally entertaining. To hear a place renowned for its educational shortcomings taking shots at a town with high literacy and educational rates, was funny. 

“Where do they get these ideas?” Ponder it. Little things, like Ten Commandments Justice Roy Moore or not rescinding a ban on miscegenation until the last decade, might have something to do with it. 

Mobilians brag about burgeoning industry. A new steel plant was lured with tax waivers...in a state that draws $1.66 in federal funds for every $1 it sends to Washington despite the popular idea the federal government is too big and generous.

Like a lot of places, Alabama voters are deeply divvied by class and race. If you can afford to pay for a select few schools, the educational experience is decent. For everyone else, there’s a struggling public system where education isn’t necessary for the hopeless drones the system requires. Not to mention, those folks are easier to sway, you know.  

Recently, an organization brought Los Angeles gang veterans to Mobile to meet at-risk youth and avert danger. While here, these emissaries from inner city-L.A. had their eyes opened.

“In this country,” John Eads said about the living conditions in North Mobile, “I've never seen anything quite like it. It was pretty raw.”

Visitor Luis Colocio told the Los Angeles Times the poverty he encountered shocked him. “I've never seen a place like this,” he said. “It’s kind of like a third-world country.”

Sure it stings to read that, but it shouldn’t make you apathetic. It should make you determined, to acknowledge it, to fix it. Not so much here. Hot summers must make for thin skin. 

Not long ago, it looked as if the feds’ tanker contract was headed south, then the process was restarted and things are still in limbo. Friction has grown. 

Sen. Patty Murray (D -WA.) insulted the Heart of Dixie when she called into question the ability of Alabamians people to build airplanes. “I would challenge anybody to tell me that they’ve stood on a line in Alabama and seen anybody building anything,” she said. And on that evil liberal bullhorn NPR, of all places! It was careless but unsurprising.

Of course, Alabamians can’t really condemn senatorial antics while boasting a pair like Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions. The former was quoted in the last year as entertaining doubts about Pres. Obama’s legitimate citizenship while the second has a long record of problems with racially charged behavior and came across poorly during the Sotomayor hearings. 

Some Alabamians point to a Boeing plant that opened in South Carolina, of the company’s option for non-union labor to cut costs. They feel the move to Dixie is inevitable. Is this really what we want to see as a national trend?

America’s textile industry did much the same in the last century. As one of Alabama’s rural industry experts said, “We just turned northward and chanted, ‘Cheap labor, cheap land, cheap taxes,’ and they came running.” Textiles were a major blue-collar industry in the South for much of the latter 20th Century. If you ever saw “Norma Rae,” you know why.

These days, the textile industry has dried up, sent over the borders to Third World locales where wages and conditions are of even smaller concern. The South was the last stop stateside before the jobs flew the coop.

Even now, foreign manufacturers are building cars, forging steel and steering other heavy industry down South in greater number. The best – read: cheapest and most exploitative – solution for commercial giants rests south of the Mason-Dixon...for right now. If history shows us anything though, these sunny climes are merely the "jumping off point" once again.

Boy, now there's something to brag about.