Dyslexington

Via SHNV

December 14, 2011
The News-Gazette of Lexington, Virginia
Editor, The News-Gazette:

Dyslexington – [L. ne equus sensus] affliction peculiar to northern
emigrants to small southern towns that prevents them from reading
American history with any comprehension. When presented with objective
facts, patient sees only a jumble of disconnected prejudices; suffers
from inflamed, irrational phobias; visually confuses tokens and symbols
of southern heritage with stereotypical racism as concocted in Hollywood
fiction. Acute victims suffer from distorted vision, an inability to
distinguish St. Andrew’s cross from the Nazi swastika and have publicly
mistaken the former for the Japanese Rising Sun.

Symptoms may include delirium, rage, in-articulation of coherent thought
patterns, non sequitur, ad hoc argumentation, sympathetic identification
with or as Mimi Elrod, psychological denial, knee-jerk paranoia,
cultural amnesia, loss of civic identity and a heightened tendency
toward obsessive brooding over early 19th century social structure.
Unresponsive to reason in the final stages, sufferers of Dyslexington
actually see “slavery” wherever “states’ rights” is spelled out before
their eyes and have even been known to self-destructively support
carpetbaggers for re-election.

Dyslexington is communicable via close contact with professors at
apostate universities ashamed of their namesakes, prolonged armchair
exposure to revisionist cable programming or habitual lassitude toward
widely available reading matter. Unchecked, an entire southern community
may become culturally indistinguishable from any given Boston suburb.
Inoculation is imperative.

Dyslexington, though stubbornly resistant to treatment, is not
incurable. Victims must recognize symptoms and willingly seek self-help.
Opening books published before 1970 alone has often reduced both
arrogance and ignorance by up to 41.3 percent. Sufferers from
Dyslexington should initiate a regimen of applying cold facts to the
thickest part of the skull and schedule a historically themed family
vacation upon first indication of infection.

SHERWIN W. DILLARD JR.
Buena Vista