It's a good thing Southern skin grows thick

Will Ferrell was all over the place at Talladega over the weekend, promoting the movie he stars in that is going to be released Aug. 4.
The movie's called "Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby," and NASCAR is firmly in bed with the company that made the movie in terms of promoting it. "Ricky Bobby" merchandise went on sale at the track this weekend and the NASCAR public relations machine put Ferrell in front of the media as much as possible during the Aaron's 499 weekend.
I don't have anything against Ferrell, per se, but I took a pass on taking part in those sessions since the only possible objective of any of them was to promote his movie. All I've seen are a couple of trailers, so maybe I'm prejudging this film.
But my initial perception is that it's going to be full of the same old stereotypes about people who live in the South.
And if that's true, then I can tell you right now that I am going to hate it. It's not about being able to take a joke, because goodness knows if you're a Southerner you have to have a pretty thick skin to make it through life these days.
Funny's funny. But mean is mean, too, and frankly I am tired of having good, hard-working people made fun of just because they have a Southern accent.
Let's use Kellie Pickler as an example.
Now I know it's not cool to talk about "American Idol," but it's not the No. 1 show on television because nobody pays attention to it.
My sister-in-law, Lori, lives near Pickler's hometown of Albemarle and everybody there was pulling pretty hard for Pickler. So as the weeks went along, I began to hear and read about what people were saying about this young lady who's had a pretty tough life and was just trying to take an advantage of a big break that came her way.
And so, naturally, most of that hacked me off. The Ellie Mae Clampett stuff. The "Kellie can't possibly be that dumb"stories.
Pickler didn't know what calamari was until she went to California? Hey, take a pound of liver mush into the green room for an "American Idol" taping and see how many California natives could tell you what that was.
If you ask me, a slice of fried liver mush will kick calamari's butt in a taste test 100 times out of 100 - and I've had both.
But every week on "Idol," after Pickler sang her guts out, they'd parade her to center stage and do something or say something to make fun of her.
Simon Cowell called her a "minx" one night and Pickler didn't know what that was.
Reckon Cowell would have known what a "cooter" was if Pickler had called him that?
A couple of years ago, a guy named Jeff McGregor got himself a motor home, packed up his wife and spent a year going around in it to NASCAR races. He then wrote himself a book called "Sunday Money" about the experience.
The book was interesting, but in it McGregor kept talking about "off-ramp America."
It's actually a pretty good term to describe the sameness you can see when you travel from place to place if all you take the time to notice is what's within sight of the interstate. But what I kept thinking about when I read the book was that there's a heck of a lot more of that kind of America than there is the kind McGregor and his wife were used to as residents of New York City before they set off on their adventure.
There are a lot more people in this country who're like Kellie Pickler and the people around her hometown who pulled for and voted for her on "American Idol" that there are people who fly from New York to Los Angeles and back and think of everything in between as "flyover country."
And there are a lot more people in this country like the ones I'm betting Will Ferrell's movie will "spoof," which is an euphemism for "make fun of," than there the sycophants who followed him around Talladega all weekend telling him how hilarious his movie's going to be, too.