"There is a class of people (in the South, among whom your author's kin were included), men women and children, who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order."Genral Sherman to Thomas Ewing (Order #11)
A curious pehnomenon occurs after and around every election in this country. Whether the Yankee Statist wins, loses or draws, he turns his attention to The South...to bitterly damn our existence or, rejoice in our immenent extiction.
Welcome to the new Civil War
"On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.
"If only it had been so." Andrew O'Hehir
Sorry about yer luck prick...but, we're still here and I'm raising one just like me. Of course, all I want, all he will want, all my fathers have wanted for generations is to be free of any and all connection with you....and your empire. We don't care how you live your life because we don't think about you...except to the extent that we are forced to continue in the political process of this ridiculous construct you call the United States. Sorry, Andy...as long as we have to be here we aren't just going to shut our mouths until you want to hear a story or a bit of song.
For Andy Southern culture isn't really a culture at all...it's just a corporate expression of racism and bigotry. What was actually done to the South was less than we deserved...
Look to the South and you who went with us through that land can best say if they have not been fearfully punished. Mourning is in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of their country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste, their commerce gone, their system of labor annihilated and destroyed. Ruin and poverty and distress everywhere, and now pestilence adding to the very cap sheaf of their stack of misery.
Sherman
Southern Discomfort
Take heart Andy, according to George Parker we are once again on the verge of extinction...but, beware
Northern liberals should not be too quick to cheer, though. At the end of “The Mind of the South,” Cash has this description of “the South at its best”: “proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.” These remain qualities that the rest of the country needs and often calls on. The South’s vices—“violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas”—grow particularly acute during periods when it is marginalized and left behind. An estrangement between the South and the rest of the country would bring out the worst in both—dangerous insularity in the first, smug self-deception in the second.*
Again...as long as they smile and dance for you they're fine but, they are still under the delusion that they have some say in the affairs of the country.
Let me put this as clearly and as literally as I can (the only way to be understood among these, rootless, block headed, bell ends). We have tried to separate ourselves from you before and you responded by trying to exterminate Us. You failed. You have failed repeatedly. Why do you persist in this failed endevour when all we want is to be shed of you...and your absurd, greedy, warmonger, self-rightous, culturless, loud, obnoxious country?
*Interesting that the auther relies so heavily on Cash. If he had written "The Mind of India" rather than the "Southern Mind," Cash would already and rightly have been thrown on the trash heap of Orientilists but, because he wrote it for the U.S. Empire...he's still lauded.
If you doubt me read the contemporary critique of his work by Donald Davidson...where he rips Cash a brand new, two story, brick, two-car garage, asshole....decades before Edward Said picked up his first rock for the cameras.
A curious pehnomenon occurs after and around every election in this country. Whether the Yankee Statist wins, loses or draws, he turns his attention to The South...to bitterly damn our existence or, rejoice in our immenent extiction.
Welcome to the new Civil War
"On a repeat viewing of Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” over the New Year’s holiday, a scene I had barely noticed the first time jumped out at me. Confederate vice-president Alexander Stephens (played with reptilian gentility by Jackie Earle Haley), in a secret meeting aboard a steamboat with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward, faces up to the reality that the era of slavery has come to an end. Ratification of the 13th Amendment, Stephens muses, will destroy the basis of the Southern economy and the South’s traditional way of life. “We won’t know ourselves anymore,” he says.
"If only it had been so." Andrew O'Hehir
Sorry about yer luck prick...but, we're still here and I'm raising one just like me. Of course, all I want, all he will want, all my fathers have wanted for generations is to be free of any and all connection with you....and your empire. We don't care how you live your life because we don't think about you...except to the extent that we are forced to continue in the political process of this ridiculous construct you call the United States. Sorry, Andy...as long as we have to be here we aren't just going to shut our mouths until you want to hear a story or a bit of song.
For Andy Southern culture isn't really a culture at all...it's just a corporate expression of racism and bigotry. What was actually done to the South was less than we deserved...
Look to the South and you who went with us through that land can best say if they have not been fearfully punished. Mourning is in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of their country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste, their commerce gone, their system of labor annihilated and destroyed. Ruin and poverty and distress everywhere, and now pestilence adding to the very cap sheaf of their stack of misery.Sherman
Southern Discomfort
Take heart Andy, according to George Parker we are once again on the verge of extinction...but, beware
Northern liberals should not be too quick to cheer, though. At the end of “The Mind of the South,” Cash has this description of “the South at its best”: “proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal.” These remain qualities that the rest of the country needs and often calls on. The South’s vices—“violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas”—grow particularly acute during periods when it is marginalized and left behind. An estrangement between the South and the rest of the country would bring out the worst in both—dangerous insularity in the first, smug self-deception in the second.*
Again...as long as they smile and dance for you they're fine but, they are still under the delusion that they have some say in the affairs of the country.
Let me put this as clearly and as literally as I can (the only way to be understood among these, rootless, block headed, bell ends). We have tried to separate ourselves from you before and you responded by trying to exterminate Us. You failed. You have failed repeatedly. Why do you persist in this failed endevour when all we want is to be shed of you...and your absurd, greedy, warmonger, self-rightous, culturless, loud, obnoxious country?
*Interesting that the auther relies so heavily on Cash. If he had written "The Mind of India" rather than the "Southern Mind," Cash would already and rightly have been thrown on the trash heap of Orientilists but, because he wrote it for the U.S. Empire...he's still lauded.
If you doubt me read the contemporary critique of his work by Donald Davidson...where he rips Cash a brand new, two story, brick, two-car garage, asshole....decades before Edward Said picked up his first rock for the cameras.
Hmmm interseting. Sounds like i need to watch lincoln, to start!
ReplyDeleteYou'll have to tell me about it.
DeleteShocking I know but I have no interest in, from what I've read, viewing Lincoln-porn no matter how good the production value.
:)
Is secession actually a popular idea there, and what are the avenues that would lead to it?
ReplyDeleteAs an explicit desire...No. Southerners are extremely and reflexively loyal. This is something that's actually mocked from time to time. My old adviser, and contributor to Hupo, Robert McElvaine wrote an editorial for the New York Times in which he pointed out how ridiculous it was that Southerners would fly U.S. and Confederate battle flags at the same time.
DeleteIf you really began to drill people on the issue...they would be secessionists in all but name.
Of course, among some of us (in particular the people addressed by these articles, and there are more of us than is thought) it is not only a popular idea but a sincere desire.
There have been petitions that have generated a lot of interest in the idea...it's a start but, it's something that really needs to take hold of the imagination before it can become a political possibility.
Interesting read there mate. It sounds like a fear of losing Identity something that you feel you belong to through heritage. The idea that you could culturally remove someones heritage is a very scary concept indeed.
ReplyDeleteBut I get the feeling from your writing that it goes further than that, after all blood was spilled in the name of that identity. Like a USA flag on a Confederate grave other ideals seem well out of place.
The real problem here is that our indentity is well intact...despite every effort. We aren't going to change. They aren't going to stop demanding that we do.
DeleteThe stupidity will continue as long as we continue in this imperialist nonsense.