Much has been written about Mayberry, North Carolina, since the death last week of Andy Griffith -- about his show's "false cornpone nostalgia," about the star's indifference toward his Blue Ridge Mountain hometown of Mount Airy. But no writer to my knowledge has tried to imagine a contemporary Mayberry, a Mayberry that would have endured the calamitous "progress" of the past forty years. If America's favorite fictional hamlet had -- Pinocchio-like -- suddenly become a real town, it would have undergone many changes since the show's 1968 finale. And few of those changes would have been for the better.
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