When I was in New Orleans for training, it was still culturally isolated and an island unto itself, more tied to the Caribbean and South America and Old World traditions. Basically, I was a stranger in a strange world, and nothing that I knew or took for granted from California mattered a whit except for some blob of prejudice about what California meant from some TV shows.
I had nothing to talk about at parties, because all conversation seemed to spin around first, second and third degrees of separation and mutual acquaintances, which could include the population of the entire city or state at that time, all of which I was unfamiliar with. Different local celebrities, different important people etc.
When we visited a couple of years ago and stayed in the French Quarter, we saw smoke curling up. The head of the plastic surgery department at Tulane (gay who liked black rough trade) had been murdered and his house set on fire. It never even made any national news when we got back to Cali. I was only able to ever find one online reference afterwards that it remained a cold case.
The goal of propaganda and demoralization is to distort the significance of subversive small things to make you believe they are common or more than they are. The graph shows the propaganda power of MSM. Glad it's fading.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb12/grand-game-perception-mgt2-12.html