As for my love/hate/love relationship with my home region, it's still an ongoing process. I have lived in Athens, Ga., for 19 years. It's a beautiful town with warm and creative people, a super-sized music and arts scene and very liberal politics. It's a great place for my kids to grow up and a pretty wonderful place to come home to after a long tour. It's also a nice liberal enclave, providing a little bit of shelter from the right-wing rhetoric that is so prevalent down here.

In movies and TV, there is one Southern accent that is used interchangeably in any setting, whether it's by an ignorant asshole or a homespun sage whose fatherly wisdom keeps Mayberry peaceful. But in actuality, every region of the South has a distinct and different version. To my ears, the Georgia Drawl is a more pleasing sound than the Alabama Twang I grew up hearing (and possessing). In Athens, the drawl often delivers progressive thought and idealistic visions of how we could better ourselves (if Atlanta's suburbs would just stop encroaching). We have great bars and a couple of award-winning, world-class restaurants where I would be proud to take any visitor.

But in the occasional event that I turn my TV on and actually watch the news, I remain mortified that the most idiotic people in Washington usually seem to have one of our Southern accents. In fact, thanks to Republican redistricting, my beloved Athens is represented in Congress by the worst of the worst. Rep. Paul Broun never met a stupid statement he didn't embrace. He's a “birther,” and even though he was once a practicing medical doctor, he calls evolution “lies from the pit of hell.” I hear he's going to run for the Senate. He'll probably win. Southerners love electing dumbasses, and then we complain when comedians take the “easy way” and make fun of us for being backwoods and stupid.

If the Mason-Dixon Line provided the cultural and political dividing line in the 19th and most of the 20th century, now the divisions are more between rural and urban, blue state and red state. The political divide is as fierce as at any time since the abolition of slavery, and both sides are becoming less inclined to compromise. What all of this means to Southerners, I'm not sure. A large majority of Southerners fall on the red state side of most issues, but there is an ever growing faction of people who feel very strongly opposed to that, not only in big Atlanta or liberal little Athens, but also in more rural areas. I was amazed and very pleased to see the number of Obama signs I saw in my North Alabama birthplace last fall.

I recently had the pleasure of revisiting my old hometown, Florence, Ala. I lived there for 28 turbulent and often troubled years. My relationship with my hometown was as complex as it could possibly be and probably shaped me in ways I'm only now becoming mature enough to fully realize. Florence is a small town of roughly 60,000, nestled on the northern bank (or shoal) of the beautiful (and somewhat polluted) Tennessee River, which nearly a hundred years ago became the site of the first dam built in what became known as the Tennessee Valley Authority project. Wilson Dam, completed in 1921, turned a previously unnavigable river into an artery for shipping. And thanks to FDR, Wilson Dam provided hydroelectric power that brought electricity to one of the poorest regions of the country.