Fun:Georgia (U.S. state)

Despite being in the Deep South, it's become quite a swing state recently.

Peachy!

State flag from 1956-2001. The resemblance to the Confederate battle flag is entirely coincidental, Georgians will assure you.

“”A 32-year-old Georgia man lost his leg below the knee after trying to blow up his lawnmower by shooting at it, earning him a rebuke from local authorities... "Yes, it is legal and no, we can’t make people stop doing it," the Walton County Sheriff’s Department said on its Facebook page. "But why folks, just why?"

—Meanwhile, in Georgia

Georgia, otherwise known as the Peach State, is a state in the southern United States, and one of the original thirteen colonies. Interestingly enough, it is, as of the early 2020s, also the only US swing state whose election forecast polls (Erection forecast polls, if you are Herschel Walker) can actually be trusted, often accurate within very close margins. It is also deep within the Southern Bible Belt; if it weren't for the secular enclave of Atlanta (the state's own version of Austin), it wouldn't be so different from its neighbors...

Atlanta is the spiritual home of sweet tea; Augusta is home to golfers. These two facts need not be reconciled but should instead be duly noted. Still, there must be something good about a place that could inspire Brook Benton's Rainy Night in Georgia. Georgia got soul.

LIBERTY is a Pretty Word

Long a one-party state under the thumb of white segregationist conservative Democrats, Georgia became a one-party state under the thumb of white conservative Republicans in the 1990s as the old Dixiecrats were steadily replaced by conservative Republicans, and in the late 2010s became a two-party swing state under... well it depends on what part you live in. Georgians in Minority groups, and all others with a brain are represented by the Democratic Party. That's what progress looks like down in the Peach State. Progress is also sometimes manifested as the substitution of an intolerant religiosity for open racial hate as an appeal to mobilize White voters. To drive home the message, conservative Republicans once even conspired to compel all Georgians who drive cars — the entire population that is not incarcerated — with license plates that bear the inscription In God We Trust. The raw coercive might of the state would've been used to force everyone to bear the mark of Cain the religious majority (I'll say it again, if it weren't for Atlanta...)

Briefly, Georgia was home to a carpetbagger from Pennsylvania named Newt Gingrich, who represented the now-Democratic Sixth District and then moved to the Washington, D.C. area. As Aunt Pittypat said, "Yankees! In Georgia! How'd they ever get in?" A surprising number of politicians in Georgia bear the surname Perdue. Several of the state's Republican U.S. Representatives, including Dr. Phil Gingrey and Dr. Paul Broun, have won recognition for their outstanding achievements in derp. Indeed that made both strong contenders in the Republican Party primary election for the 2014 U.S. Senate nomination.

A few years back, when the economy still sucked, Son-of-a-Bitch Perdue decided, "Fuck it! Kick out the illegals!" and passed a law preventing people from hiring them. Works on paper, but it hurt the rural white poor more than anybody else. The effect was that even legal immigrants with work permits refused to work on Georgia farms. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars lost in economic output; almost brought their agriculture to a standstill. They pulled the bill after farmers raised holy hell about it.

On March 25, 2021, right when Georgia was being praised for making effective change, Governor Brian Kemp decided "oh hell naw" and passed Jim Crow 2.0 SB 202, which is packed with a variety of bullshit ranging from allowing elected officials to alter statewide election results to making it illegal to give food and water in voting lines (Yeah, you heard that right). In short, the law's purpose it to keep the Grumpy Old Pinheads GOP in power in Georgia forever. Despite this, Kemp has managed to situate himself as a supposed defender of democracy because Donald Trump got mad at him for not explicitly overturning the presidential election results in Trump's favor. Hundreds of lawsuits and millions of boycotts later (even by the MLB), the man still refuses to get rid of the law. On the bright side, the Department of Justice is now suing the Governor; and we can all have fingers crossed that Kooky Kemp gets his ass kicked out of the Governor's Mansion this year. (Spoiler alert: He didn't)

Well it's not all that bad, is it?

More recently, Georgia has become a changing state politically (don't worry though, Brian Kemp will make sure that doesn't happen for as long as he can), and the Atlanta suburbs have started to shift blue, thanks to an influx of Black, Asian and Latino voters; another influx of White progressives moving in from big blue states; and existing suburban Whites finally realizing that bigotry is just plain stupid. And there's also Stacey Abrams, she's not very friendly with the governor there, which is a good thing (unless you're a racist, sexist, xenophobic boon).

More importantly, Democrat Joe Biden carried the Peach State 49.47% to 49.24% in the 2020 election. Even after Mr. Cheetohead's outbursts and several recounts, Georgia proved itself as not half as shitty as the states it borders; after all, unlike some of them, its people actually know how paper works. Two months later, Democrats Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff won both of Georgia's Senate seats, kicking out Republican insider traders Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and respectively becoming Georgia's first black and Jewish senators. These wins were possibly thanks to the division in the Peach State's GOP caused by Trump's baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud, which are already credited with making John McCain's ghost laugh at tRump turning Arizona blue. Georgia is now one of only two "blue" states in the South, the other being Virginia.

Georgia has some nice places for y'all who'd rather see the civilized side of The South- like the cities of Atlanta, Savannah, Athens, and Macon. It also has one of the largest African-American populations among the 50 states: many of whom who had never voted before showed up to elect Ossoff and Warnock, thanks to the state's future governor, courtesy of The Donald Stacey Abrams encouraging them to brave the rainy weather, unfair methods of voter suppression in some counties, and ongoing pandemic to go and vote.

Also

Georgia is also home to the only Jewish college-prep boarding school in the world, American Hebrew Academy. No one is sure why. Atlanta houses Coca-Cola, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Turner Broadcasting (CNN, Cartoon Network, TBS, etc.), Cox Cable, and a bunch of other things.

The Concourse "King and Queen" Towers, the only existing twin towers in the U.S., are located in Sandy Springs.

The state was also home to the "Georgia Guidestones," a granite structure that has been the focus of millennial claims by Van Smith and various other conspiracy theorists.

The book Deliverance, later made into the iconic film that launched Burt Reynolds' career, is set in north Georgia. Its specific location is fictional but based on on the Chattooga River, and apart from its iconic exhortation to SQUEAL LIKE A PIG the film's greatest impact was that it immediately turned the river into a whitewater rafting hotspot. North Georgians called its depiction of them appalling and dehumanizing (which is truthfully an extreme understatement), but the book's author, who was from Georgia and quite familiar with the area, maintained that his description was an accurate and faithful representation of the place. The works still serve to scare the living shit out of Appalachian Trail hikers as they walk the Georgian section.

Peachy Thangs!

• CNN
• Coca-Cola
• Georgia Aquarium (world's third largest!)
• Bracefaced girls
• Squidbillies
• The Walking Dead
• Go dawgs!
• We also make Kias!
• Trap music

Peachy people

• Jimmy Carter
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Newt Gingrich
• Herman Cain
• Ye (Yuck!)
• Gene Ray
• Lee Atwater
• Ty Cobb
• Ted Turner
• Marjorie Taylor Greene
• Brian Kemp
• Stacey Abrams
• Jon Ossoff
• Raphael Warnock
• Ray Charles
• Otis Redding
• Hulk Hogan
• Cynthia McKinney
• Herschel Walker

Gallery

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  The Capitol in Atlanta

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  Cumberland Island National Seashore

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  A nighttime view of Atlanta.

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  Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta.

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  The Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached

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  The Blue Ridge Mountains, viewed from Black Rock Mountain State Park