MEDIA-MADE DIXIE by Jack Temple Kirby Louisiana State University Press; 203 pages; $9.95
In 1861 South Carolina's ex-U.S. Senator Robert Barnwell Rhett saw the future and found it tolerable. By the year 2000, he prophesied, the South would have "established an empire and wrought out a civilization that has never been equaled or surpassed−a civilization teeming with orators, poets, philosophers, statesmen and historians equal to those of Greece and Rome." Five years later the Confederacy was dead. The only thing the South never lost was its capacity to provoke intoxicated visions and literary...