NoVa vs. RoVa

There's a cute piece in the WaPo style section comparing Northern Virginia (NoVa) and the rest of Virginia (RoVa). Charlottesville is in RoVa, geographically speaking.

There are such gems as the following:

· In NoVa, a lab is the family dog. In RoVa, a lab is the family meth business.
· In NoVa, people spend their dough at Starbucks, shooting the breeze. In RoVa, people spend time in the breeze, shooting does and bucks.
· In NoVa, they listen to NPR. In RoVa, they listen to the NRA.

Um, this is how people in Charlottesville talk about the rest of the South. The farther I push into what you'd think is the South as conceived by people who don't think they're in it, the less certain I am that any of the redneck hillbilly stereotypes actually exist. I know they do to some extent, after visiting 43 of the 50 states, including all the Deep South, but even most residents of RoVa, I'd guess, live within reasonable driving distance of a Starbucks and can receive NPR on the radios in their aging American pickups. (There's an NPR affiliate in Wise, which is way out in that pointy western part of Virginia, in the middle of Appalachia.) The point of this article is to emphasize how NoVa is far more liberal politically than RoVa, which in a general sense is undoubtedly true, but to conclude that it's all Dukes of Hazzard south of Arlington is dopey.

There are several pages of comments on the article similar to mine. I'm being nicer.