This is one of the early editions of Firing Line, around the same period that programme-host William F. Buckley Jr. interviewed the Black Panther leaders Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, showing quite undue deference to two violent offenders who should long since have been locked up for life.
It gives a clue as to why Deep South culture should have been treated as such a sensitive topic, reducing Buckley to a nervous and hesitant interviewer, quite without the ebullient cheek that normally makes him so watchable. We hardly hear the word Race (as we also don't when we research Southern literature in general or the Fellowship of Southern Writers in particular, settling for euphemisms like 'distinctive and cherished regional culture'). Even the two distinguished guest-authors Eudora Welty and Walker Percy seem inhibited, often falling back on 'human being', the sure sign of someone with nothing to say, though I enjoyed Percy quoting from one of his novels on the subject of secession, that "It was the great Northern cities that broke away..."
This may leave us wondering whether 'the Southern Imagination' actually means anything. It used to reflect dignity in defeat and the nobility of the hardscrabble farm life. Today we wonder, as Buckley does in his opening remarks, why other regions don't have particular creative qualities ascribed to them. Perhaps 'Gone with the Wind' has simply left us with a psychological need to believe.