Because I live less than twenty miles north of the Maxon-Dixon line, I can quickly wind up in Dixie simply by making a wrong turn. While I was in Maine, things felt much different. Almost every town up there has a little square with a statue honoring veterans of the Civil War. And it’s so far away from where the fighting occurred that it made me wonder about Mainers’ motivation for preserving the Union. What’s clear, however, is that there is a ton of civic pride about Maine’s role in defeating the traitorous Confederate insurgency.
When I hear Detroit-born rocker Ted Nugent suggest that things might have been better if the South had won the war, it grates on my ears. But I think it is the logical conclusion for anyone who follows the modern GOP and their states’ rights rhetoric. The GOP’s appeal isn’t limited to the South, but that’s their power base and that’s where their ideology gathers strength.
It’s increasingly clear that liberals and conservatives don’t want to live together. Not only do we not want to live on each other’s terms, we don’t even want to live with the compromises that are made necessary by our mutual existence.
i’ve been saying this for a LONG time. I will repeat: if the southern states seceded again, no one would fight to keep them. Let ’em go, but not before we erect a HUGE wall to keep them out, and target a good portion of our nukes at them for the purpose of deterrence. (who woulda thought MAD could serve a domestic purpose, eh?)
um… white hicks have ALWAYS said that crap. only issue is that you haven’t been listening.
More generally, “good” white folks didn’t start listening until THEY actually started getting treated the way black folks are treated.
Your own self-blindness-cum-epihphany is clear with you:
“The GOP’s appeal isn’t limited to the South, but that’s their power base and that’s where their ideology gathers strength.”
Um DURR.
It’s ok though. In a maximum of 4 more years, we’ll go back to having a white President, and you can merrily go back to pretending it was all a bad dream. 🙂
don’t you think that’s an unnecessarily nasty comment, targeted at the wrong person?
I mean, if you WANT me to get into all the ways your comment is meanspirited, unnecessary, and factually innacurate, I can and will. But I don’t think Booman needs me to defend him.
Go bitch at the real enemy. You have dramatically and unfairly mischaracterized our host, to the extent that i have to wonder if you’ve ever actually read this blog.
um… white hicks have ALWAYS said that crap. only issue is that you haven’t been listening.
Oh, was that your experience living in Maine? Please, tell us more, omniscient one.
Because where I live, the white hicks make fun of the South.
hey let’s deal in reality when responding to SFF.
SFF is totally offbase when he says “only issue is that you haven’t been listening” to racist white hicks. But that doesn’t mean that SFF is wrong that “white hicks have ALWAYS said that crap”, in the south, the north, or anywhere else. Fact is, there is plenty of racisim among northern white hicks, whether urban or rural.
The Boston busing riots happened, and Boston is still de facto segregated in terms of where people live. When I lived in New Haven, I heard some of the most racist comments about blacks that I have ever heard, except for perhaps Philly. And while Philly has come a long way since Frank Rizzo welcomed a state visit from Nigeria as coming from “Niggeria”, it’s still true that the white working class that supported Obama called him “the nigger”.
White hicks in the north may despise and loathe the south, but that doesn’t make them any less racist. SFF is wrong that booman “only just began listening”, but he or she is not wrong that the white hicks have ALWAYS said that crap. Because they HAVE.
hey let’s deal in reality when responding to SFF.
Even better, let’s be both reality-based and on-topic.
Fact is, there is plenty of racisim among northern white hicks, whether urban or rural.
But “racism” is not the same thing as lauding the Confederacy, the subject of Nugent’s remarks and BooMan’s post. You seem to have lost the thread just as much as fruitfly.
I don’t need you to tell me the history of Massachusetts.
go fuck yourself then, you stupid asshole.
…or as they call you at balloon juice and LGM, “amoral troll”.
Is this the sort of behavior the site’s moderator wishes to encourage?
Where there is such a basic failure of impulse control, standard norms of social behavior, and general decorum as brendan so consistently demonstrates, it might make sense for there to be some sort of intervention to keep the Frog Pond from becoming the “Suck a Bag of Dicks” Pond.
Or not. I guess it’s up to Martin what he wants his comment threads to be.
JFL
Is that supposed to be the graphic that goes with your previous comment?
That’s pretty much how I pictured you as you delivered your vapid string of profanity.
I’m letting joe from Slowell have the last word so he feels like a winner.
Apparently, you aren’t.
New Jersey has monuments that honor the Civil War soldiers. The local historical society has a lot of information about those who served from the area in the war.
The small contingent of of racist screamers is dying and doesn’t like it.
My folks live near the Jersey shore, so I spend a bit of time up there.
There are many areas of South Jersey that might as well be below the M-D line. A few years ago, I had to quit a band because the drummer was such a disgusting racist. It was disgusting.
OT, Cape May, NJ is actually below the Mason Dixon line. Today’s moment of interesting trivia.
.
When you got back home, did you scrub your boots, wash your clothes and take a shower?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."where I was, all the political sentiment I saw was expressed against the governor.
Let me guess: Portland?
I stopped in Portland yesterday, on the way home. But, no, I was in Acadia.
oh that area is lovely. I wish I’d known before you left, I woulda sent you by my friend Fred’s place. Great guy, very progressive, lives off the grid.
When we used to shop at the IGA in Southwest Harbor they would be selling Bob Marley CDs…I was suprised at first but then saw that there’s a local Maine standup comic named Bob Marley (white of course)…:-)
The Republican party was not always this way. I see the current GOP as Libertarian/Bircher beliefs, not Republican. There’s plenty of information out there about Libertarian Roger Ailes paranoia and Rupert Murdoch and the corruption that is being uncovered. Fox News is the main source of information for Republicans these days.
I think the reason Fox/Ailes/Koch/Murdoch have had so much influence is psychological. I’ve noticed there is a way of thinking that is held by the right and it’s very threatening to them if anyone has a different opinion. Psychologically it looks like they project their fears onto someone else and to get rid of the fear they have to either control the other person and their ideas or get rid of them. The right has been told that any other news source that doesn’t agree with them is liberal so don’t listen to it. President Obama is the antichrist or some type of “other” so don’t listen to him — that’s why the stupid birther crap hangs around. They’re told not to check for facts, then the GOP/Fox News beats the drum about how frightening everything is and puts the blame on President Obama and liberals. They have been listening to that Fox/right nonsense on television and in churches for years and years.
The right says they want to be free and the terribly, tragically sad thing is that they will never be free because the fear is in their own heads. They will always be influenced to blame someone else and they will be trapped until they learn to deal with their own feelings.
I admire President Obama very much and he is doing an outstanding job campaigning. The Bain ads are so effective. He’s not only educating viewers about Romney, but about that type of “business” thinking and what it means to the lives of the people watching. The GOP gets louder because he’s right and they know it.
For every problem there are always, always solutions. We are absolutely capable of finding ways to stay sane to create the kind of world we want to live in individually and together. We can do it.
You are right. The Republican Party did not used to be this way. It was the Democrats instead (thanks Strom Thurmond).
The prison one’s own mind can make is more hellish than anything ever physically devised by man.
Come to my neck of the woods. You can visit Robert E. Lee elementary school right next to my courthouse. Then you can transfer onto Jefferson Davis Highway, and pass by the Stonewall Jackson Shrine.
People who study the issue generally think the CSA would have been a tremendous mess of infighting and economic sluggishness, so in no possible way would it have been better for the CSA to win. Unless of course, you measure “victory” solely on the basis of being able to oppress people. There are endless fights in my circles over whether slavery would have withered away or not, but absent a lot of things going right and changes in mindset, the CSA would have been a “failed state” for many many years.
On the other hand, a CSA victory might have been better for the USA. It would have removed southern resources yes, but as the industrial era continued the north would not have had to spend money and resources to accommodate and triage the southerners. It would have made immigrants a stronger block (probably) but there would have been immigrants from the south as well.
As someone who us a non-white whose family was from Texas (I was born in the North) I would likely have been killed or beat or starved or whatever, but as a whole the world might have been a better place if the CSA could have lived how it wanted and been to dysfunctional to inflict her ideals on the rest of us.
Oh.
You mean like the U.S today, I guess.
Maybe the South did “rise again,” eh?
Just as it’s always been.
Just as it’s always been.
Get used to it.
The Neanderthals didn’t die out.
They just intermarried.
Just as it’s always been.
Bet on it.
AG
No. Like Paraguay 90 years ago.
More like Paragoric.
(“You could look it up.” as Casey Stengel used to say.)
AG
I got to say, it’s a nice try but I think you felt flat with this attempt.
I do keep trying…
AG
“People who study the issue generally think the CSA would have been a tremendous mess of infighting and economic sluggishness . . . “
Yet another resemblance to the modern Republican party.
Ted Nugent is marketing, nothing more.
But his situation and sentiment are not uncommon. I see enough “Yankee by birth; rebel by the grace of God” license plates around here to wonder that the North’s understanding of the Civil War was and the subsequent erection of memorials to the G. A. R.
Nugent’s attitude is sorta like that of the Civil War-era Copperheads. And is probably rooted in growing up in the burbs of Detroit during the 1950s and 1960s.
But American culture itself created this situation by several times casting the Southern rebellion as a “noble cause”. Defending privatized work camps (gulags) was not a noble cause no matter how many of my ancestors were obligated by opinion or conscription to fight and die for the Confederate States of America.
By the by, BooMan, if you want to see another statue of a Union infantryman, there is one in Bennettsville, SC. It seems the monument company shipped the wrong figure and it was years before anyone noticed. The inscription still honors the CSA but the uniform is a Union uniform.
We got the wrong dead guy delivered up heah. Come Memorial Day, there’s one Confederate flag in the cemetery.
“But American culture itself created this situation by several times casting the Southern rebellion as a “noble cause”.
I always thought it was the southern division of American culture that mainly did that.
It was both. And it occurred between 1876 (the Rutherford B. Hayes “home rule” election, to use a Southern view of it) and the legalization of segregation in the 1890s.
And you can see its persistence in the South and non-South in the reception of D. W. Griffiths “Birth of a Nation”, which is the cinema version of the “noble cause”. The logic went like this: we both fought for noble causes, so let’s get along as one country again; the CSA could have easily have won as the Union. It was a bit of an illusion that moved to the flag-waving imperialism of the turn of the 20th century.
Tolerance by the non-South of Southern peculiarities is what has perpetuated the national dysfunction that assertion of Southern “heritage” promotes. When the complexity of Southern heritage is pushed over the self-created caricature of a backwater minority in the South, we might be able to deal with some of our problems. Instead that Southern “heritage” and its ideological underpinnings have infected Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states outside the South.
Making it totally the responsibility of Southerners to solve it misses the fact that the legitimation of the non-South makes it that much more difficult to deal with. And that legitimation was most recently delivered by the coalition that elected Ronald Reagan.
Lowell’s Civil War memorial features a wing-ed Nike holding aloft a laurel wreath.
In Maine, as in much of New England, there was a great deal of abolitionist sentiment driving support for the Union cause, right from the beginning. Moreso than in other parts of the North.
Funny how history provides tragic ironies. Greenville, SC, the home of Jim DeMint was at the time of the Civil War a hotbed of opposition to secession. Unionist Democrats they called themselves. Won’t find many people admitting their ancestors were Unionist Democrats in that part of the world now.
Yeah.
“Abolitionist” as long as they didn’t have to live anywhere near the results.
C’mon, man. I lived in Boston 1965-1967/’68. A more racist community never existed. And I know because I was hanging out with a totally mixed-race crowd of young jazz musicians. Common wisdom in the jazz community was that Boston was by far the most dangerous city for a stand-up black man in the U.S.. Bar none. Between the cops, the Italian mob and the Irish mob? Fuggedaboudit!!
Maine?
Please.
As recently as the 1980s a black Ph.D who I invited to come hang out in my family’s adopted Maine area…Rockland/Camden…felt totally paranoid just walking down the street of upscale Camden ME in the middle of the tourist season. No allies as far as the eye could see except for me and my mother.
Deep.
Y’all are talking about the “Mason Dixon” line here in the U.S. How yesterday is that idea!!!???
Now it’s the Manson/Nixon line.
Bet on it.
Been that way since the so-called “Civil Rights” ’60s.
More like a spiderweb than a line actually, it crosses and crisscrosses the country, north to south and east to west.
People of color know on which side they are residing at the moment just by the way people look (or don’t look) at them on the street, the way cops ands storekeeper deal with them. It can be anywhere…Great Neck, Long Island, Portland, Maine or Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Anywheresville, U.S.A.
Bet on that as well.
Manson/Nixon.
Y’cain’t have one widout the…
Uh–uh-other.
Yup.
Remember, folks.
It ain’t over yet.
Not by a long shot.
AG
It’s funny how predictable it is whose defense you leap to (George Zimmerman) and whose good name you can’t allow to stand without throwing a little mud (abolitionists, Unionists).
I think it’s very interesting that your response to my observation about abolitionism in New England – a point you don’t even seem to dispute – is to say that was so racism in South Boston in the 1970s. Well,no kidding. And…?
I mean, of course,…”Joe from Lowell”…
What the fuck are you talking about?
And…as always…
Have a nice day.
Sincerely…
AG
I’m talking about the motivations for Maine in the Civil War. You know, the point that BooMan brought up in the post.
You seem to be talking about Boston in the 1970s. I don’t exactly know why.
Do you really think that “Mainers” were any different in terms of practical, real-time, face-to-face race relations in the 1700s/1800s than they are today?
Please.
I wonder what the percentage of people of color was in say Portland, ME around the same time that the rougher white elements of NYC were massacring people of color during the Civil War era riots. And if there were any people of color living there, I wonder what social position they occupied.
Whaddayou think?
Please.
Get real.
The Civil War was fought over economic and geographic issues, not “racial” ones except insofar as those issues impacted the economic relations of north and south.
Please.
AG
Two comments:
If I could overlook the plight of the slaves, I would agree with him.
It’s not too late. We could do an exchange, take all the liberals to the north and west, send the conservatives to the south, build a huge wall between us. They would love it. Only problem is, within a generation, they would be a third-world nation begging for help. But maybe they would have learned a bit.
That’s gonna be one huge migration. Who gets the Midwest?
So, that means that the Okies in Bakersfield go back to Oklahoma? And George Will could relocate to Nawlins. And Connecticut Anne Coulter is confined to areas where the summer temperature can reach triple digits and the humidity can go above 75% at the same time. And Mitt Romney goes to Florida.
Here’s a better idea. Why don’t a whole lot of y’all come down here and help the progressives who are here out. Job situation tends to be better in a lot of the big cities down here. Housing tends to be cheaper too. With enough critical mass, might even be able to turn Mississippi and Alabama around.
That’s a fine idea. Unfortunately, after growing up in California, there’s no way I could handle the southern weather. Or hurricanes. Maybe others could. I’ll keep sending money and wishing you luck, though.
As for the Southern weather, it took me a two years to get accustomed to the heat and humidity again after living in the Midwest. I’ve found that I can handle most weather, however. Weater’s not a big deal for me; it’s the weather.
If you get a hundred miles or so in from the Gulf Coast or the Atlantic, your worry about hurricanes is negligible. Less probability than serious earthquakes in California. That would include cities like Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Dallas-Fort Worth, Midland-Odessa, El Paso, San Antonio, Austin, Little Rock, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville, Knoxville, Jackson MS, Shreveport, Montgomery, Macon, Columbia SC, Greenville-Spartanburg SC, Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, Roanoke, Charlottesville, Richmond, and lots of smaller interesting places.
But the non-hurricane places have tornadoes.
And having lived through both…. I’ll take hurricanes.
You can see those big bastards coming several days out.
With tornadoes if you get five minutes you’re DAMNED lucky.
I’ve long thought that we should concede to the South its point about secession, but require a supermajority of popular vote – not a transient majority or a legislative vote. I think the constitution should be amended to allow secession whenever 70% of the voters in the state in a Presidential election vote for it. Such a high threshold is almost impossible, of course, but not impossible, so it keeps the option open in extremis. It also encourages the would-ve secessionists to concentrate their numbers in one or two states, which would have a number of secondary political effects. Of course, it goes both ways. Should the conservatives gain insurmountable supremacy, I may be looking to secede myself.
Also make it clear that secession is a one-way ticket out, and it’s a clean cut – no “open borders,” no “cross-border lifestyle.”
The secessionists I know see it as a perfect Republican deal — they get all the benefits at someone else’s expense. It needs to be ABSOLUTELY CLEAR that that does NOT fly. You leave, you’re OUT. Any movable federal property is removed, all contracts between private companies and the federal government are severed immediately without recourse, your citizens need visas to cross borders. Software licenses are no longer valid, import/export restrictions need to be worked out, financial transfer rules have to be written and every aspect of the international relationship has to be negotiated. It all goes to square one.
Oh… and as a foreign nation of at best very dubious intentions, you’ll be needing to supply your military elsewhere, you understand.
Walk away with the clothes on your back, basically.