After a morning of grinning and bearing it – or, if you prefer, grabbing our ankles and saying ‘thank you sir may I have another!?’ – by putting up with fake Southern hospitality, we swung through Tupelo, Mississippi, on the way to Alabama. If you know your history of The King, you’ll know that Elvis Aaron Presley (who, incidentally, has the best middle name in the history of the world) was born in 1939 in Tupelo.

While I declined to pay any money for the privilege of touring the six-by-12 foot trailer-esque thing in which Elvis was born, I did take some great pictures of an old lady sitting on the porch swing, so that was a plus.

But nothing could prep me for the redneck sideshow carnival campground visible from the side of Interstate 20 between Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta.

I had been warned that we were coming up on Talladega, the raceway that I had peripherally heard of by means of Will Ferrell’s Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. I should have seen the 1974 Pontiac with a Dale Earnhart ‘3’ flag on one side and a Dale Earnhart Jr. ‘8’ flag on the other as an indicator of what was to come. But I was caught unprepared, for when we rounded a corner, I saw …

Trailers. Pickups. Rebel Confederate flags. Shirtless men atop said trailers. Lawn chairs. Smoke from (I’m guessing) bonfires that were burning effigies of hated drives … and tires, maybe. It was like the footage from Woodstock 1994, but replace the sea of bodies with any sort of redneck conveyance, and there ya go. As far as the eye could see. And according to my calculations, this impromptu Talladega parking lot was a straight 10-mile shot, not including roads and turns and things like ‘traffic,’ from the actual raceway.

It’s a good thing that I spent a part of my afternoon prior to the tackiness of Tupelo and the difficult-to-comprehend gathering by the side of I-20 at the home of Nobel-winning writer William Faulkner.

I’ve decided that in order to write the Next Great American Novel, I have to either a) move to Paris, or b) purchase a reconstructed Civil-War era mansion where I will spend my days figuring out how to deal with my newfound literary fame. Or I could make like Faulkner and do both.

Either way, it was great to see someone who, as a way of figuring out his own thoughts, wrote daily postings and notes on his own walls.

Again: He wrote on the walls of his own study to make sure his ideas were both immediately accessible and constantly surrounding him. Now all I have to do is buy that Civil-War era home … any donors?

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A Footnote on the Southern Economy, Wal-Mart and the Super Happy China Buffet.A fully mature free-market economy consists of many interlocking, often unquantifiable factors competing in a (mostly) privately owned, laissez-faire structure. Such an economic arrangement is propped up by many different factors: the amount of industry, the type of manufacturing, et cetera. It would seem that, in order to maintain a healthy economy, it would be a good idea to ensure a wide breadth of retailers, producers, suppliers and the like.

This is not the case in the South. I’m all for open markets, but the one thing I’ve noticed is the preponderance of Wal-Mart in the South. And by ‘preponderance,’ I mean that *every single town* we’ve passed by or been through – if its population is greater than, say, 3,000 – has a Wal-Mart. Like clockwork, we saw a Wal-Mart every 40 or so miles. And many of these are Wal-Mart Supercenters. In case you don’t know, Wal-Mart Supercenters sell standard fare – as well as food, thus eliminating the need for just about any other sort of store within the immediate area.

While I don’t have anything against Wal-Mart, I’m just noticing that the entirety of the Southern economy is predicated on one single (omnibus) retailer. If Wal-Mart were to go under, Enron-style, the South would be more than screwed. Well, I suppose people could still find foodservice establishments, which brings me to part two of my economic analysis.

As a sub-tier of the Southern economy, you have your restaurants. Sure, there are the McDonald’s chains and the gas stations and such, but far and away the most prevalent restaurant is the Chinese buffet. You have your Happy Buffet. You have your Super Buffet. You have your China Buffet. And, of course, you have your Happy Super China Buffet. It’s all the same crap, and there are at least four of them in each small town.

Right next to the Wal-Mart, of course.

I’m absolutely sure a Harvard Business School case study could be written about this.