This puts the South in Jersey

As I mentioned, this year we abandoned Sea Isle for Wildwood Crest. That means we're closer to Wildwood, home of Doo Wop Motels and other tackiness. So here I am, ending the summer with our beach vacation -- a time to relax and enjoy. The list of things to do is small: Read a good book (beach variety), hang out on the beach, walk along the boardwalk, lunch in Cape May, shop in Stone Harbor, relax on the deck with a glass (or 2 or 3) of wine.

I also do a little surfing -- on the net, not the ocean, of course. Here I sit, on the deck of our bayside beach house, watching the boats go by, checking out the news and otherwise playing around.

Reading the Inquirer, I see that the Jersey shore is in the news. Sea Isle City no less! As described by Quaker Agitator:

So it's 3:00 am yesterday (Tuesday) morning in Sea Isle City, New Jersey (down at the Jersey shore), and three men were walking down the street together, minding their own business. Two of the men are white, and the other is African-American. Out of nowhere, they were approached by three white "men," who start hurling racial epithets and witty, clever sentence constructions such as "You don't belong in this neighborhood" (more on that in a second). Next thing you know, the three victims, who were in Sea Isle on vacation, were being beaten. A baseball bat was used.
Here's the punchline: The three victims were all off-duty police officers from Cheltenham, Pennsylvania. And none of the white suspects is even from Sea Isle (in other words, from "this neighborhood").

Next up, I happen upon this post by Fourfour describing the latest in Wildwood beachwear, A confederacy of dunces. He has an assortment of pictures, including a confederate flag hermit crab shell (not to be missed), as well as one of this lovely lass (aptly dubbed Daisy Duke by Fourfour), boogieboard in tow:



Fourfour explains:

Wildwood is a body louse clinging to a sweaty shaft of hair in the Armpit of America that is New Jersey. This is, of course, its charm. Wildwood, like many costal resort towns in South Jersey, is home to a tourist-bating boardwalk. But Wildwood's boardwalk is unlike many of its neighboring counterparts. It's a massive, 38-block stretch that sports no fewer than five amusement parks and hundreds of crooked, carnival-type games (knock bottles over, get the ball in the basket, fill the clown's mouth with water to pop the balloon, etc.) complete with managing foreigners who harass anyone who walks by (and, no doubt, annoy everyone with those damn accents). Food is everywhere -- literally. It's being sold everywhere you look, it's on the boardwalk attracting seagulls, it's stuffed in the patrons' mouths. Perhaps the only source of commerce that's more present is that of the junky, "sundry"-cum-T-shirt shop.

Noting the proliferation of Confederate kitsch in Wildwood, Quaker Agitator adds:

Now, before this, Wildwood was most famous for its cute and delightfully tacky "Doo Wop" motels," which I like. This crap, however, I do not like. And the fact that people are selling it - and worse, that some folks are buying it - just goes to show what we have become as a culture: stupid. By stupid, I mean "deliberately ignorant." It's one thing not to know something . . . That's "ignorance." It's quite another thing to know it and yet still think stuff like this is okay. . . .

The Confederate flag of rebellion is just that: it is the flag flown by traitors, people who took up arms against a legitimate government, serving people who wanted to perpetuate the institution of slavery, built upon white supremacy, under the guise of "states' rights." Wearing t-shirts with this flag emblazoned on them, flying this thing off your porch or from your pick-up truck, using this symbol as a beach towel to dry off your child, these things are not about "political correctness," as one of these rags states (that one, at least, lacks misspellings). It's about being stupid, on purpose.

Stupid it is. Hateful it is. Unfortunately, these are just examples of "bigot pride," which I have noted on many occasions (see, e.g., Raging Racists), is becoming increasingly common -- or even worse, "in."

Tags: Sea Isle City, Wildwood, Racism