Reading the issue of "Southern Partisan" mentioned in the post about Samuel Huntington a few posts below, it strikes me just what the ideology and attitude of the South is which causes them constantly to locate themselves on the wrong side of the issues, pursuing goals which are so ludicrous that no other industrialized country even thinks about doing things like them (Ten Commandments granite statue anyone?).
This issue of Southern Partisan has a discussion of this law suit filed against Vanderbilt University in Tenessee because of a proposed name change to one of the halls . Seems that the United Daughters of the Confederacy ponied up some money in the '30s for a new building, which was then going to be called "Confederate Hall". The hall was built. Vanderbilt wants to change the name to something less charged. The UDC sued Vanderbilt saying that the name was part of the contract that they signed back in the '30s when they gave the money for the hall and that Vanderbilt was violating the terms of the contract. A court recently sided with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Vanderbilt has decided to change the name anyways.
So far so good, right? Clear cut, nothing psychotic, nothing really too far out there. Yet on a side bar to the article SP recounts a meeting between a UDC person and a delegation of Vanderbilt officials where in the course of it someone said of the three people from Vanderbilt that they all came from groups that were oppressed: a Mormon, an African American, and a person of Jewish descent. What happened then seems to be that the UDC person explained their pro-confederate viewpoint and "They seemed to take offense with anything we said about our heritage. They didn't give any response that they were ever listening to us. The whole time they looked at us as if we didn't have any rights", says the UDC belle. What obviously happened was that the Vanderbilt people were trying to explain that by calling the thing Confederate Hall the institution was thereby giving prominance to a period of time identified with the exploitation of blacks, and that the heritage of the Vanderbilt people maybe gave them a better appreciation of why exactly something like that was inappropriate. The Southern Belle responded with an attitude that implies that a Daughter of the Confederacy these days is an oppressed person.
Then Southern Partisan really showed its stripes. On dual paged sidebars running for five pages Southern Partisan outlined how in the early Mormon church blacks didn't have equality, as if to say "See there, one of you claims to be oppressed while you oppressed blacks and no one said that it was a contradiction!". It goes on and on as a tirade against the LDS religion, so excessive a response to this comment by a Vanderbilt official that it seems infantile and childish.
The meaning is clear: Southern Partisan equates the fact that the early LDS church reflected the values and beliefs of the greater society around it with the official support of the enslavement of blacks in the Antebellum South and says that if the LDS guy wants to claim oppression in his history then the United Daughters of the Confederacy should be able to claim oppression too.
Which brings me back to the beginning of this post. Southern Partisan rails against "Political Correctness", yet it features an add for a book called "Myths of American Slavery", where, presumably, Slavery is portrayed as not being that bad. The same author of "Myths" also wrote "The South Was Right!" and "Was Jefferson Davis Right?" Davis being the Confederate President. Presumably they feel that it's politically correct to say that slavery was a bad thing and that the southern civilization based around slavery was morally corrupt because of it. Likewise, the United Daughters of the Confederacy belle thought she was oppressed because her pro-Confederacy view, which may have been pro-slavery either explicitly or implicitly, was regarded as similarly corrupt.
This isn't political correctness it's a statement of fact. What all of this strikes me as is the wail of a class which previously acted as the oppressors crying out that since they've been deprived of their ability to oppress that they've been victimized.
This lead me to think about the attitudes of people in the South. The immaturity, the pettyness, the piggishness, the approval of violence, all of it seems to flow from attitudes established when white people were overtly the oppressors, where they could do anything they wanted to blacks and if blacks so much as batted an eye against their treatment punishment of untrammeled severity was meted out.
Southerners of this sort are pigs and there's more than a passing similarity between them and rich people who think that they can mistreat anyone they want without any consequences ever coming back to them. One is the oppressor in the present day, the other was the oppressor in the past but still clings to the ways of life and attitudes of those days when white men were called "Master" and white women were called "Mistress".
So why care at all about these immature people throwing temper tantrums? There seems to be very little reason to. Their beliefs are against much of the conventional reality which the rest of the United States and the rest of the World lives in.
Why cowtow to them, why cowtow to attitudes which embody the worst of American history?
A master class who believes it has a right to rule has no place in the rulership of the United States, whether that rulership entails political power or business power.
Monday, September 12, 2005
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2 comments:
While many or most White Southerners may fit these stereotypes, there are a lot of Southerners who don't. For example, few black Southerners would agree with the pro-confederacy views you refer to. Stereotyping everyone in a particular region as being the kind of people who stereotype other people is a case of throwing bricks in glass houses.
I have read and own The South Was Right! and Myths of American Slavery. To expound on this, I believe the south should be an independent republic today. Furthermore, I may be the only mormon confederate-american in existance, a faithful LDS member in occupied tennessee, where this renege upon the UDC contract took place.
Myths of american slavery, for the record, establshes that the first american government to introduce slavery is massachussets, and the first to take action against it is virginia, among other things, and deals with the fact that the slave trade was a yankee enterprise along with dutch, of which the american south made up 6% and only 6% of the market share.
Slavery was an american problem, not a southern one. I am also confident that absent force of arms it would have ended by 1900, for economic reasons. Roger Ransom makes interesting points on the economic -cost- of slavery for future years in The Confederate States of America: What might have been.
The southern partisan is a fine newspaper, although I will own up to ignorances widespread throughout the south. The animosity the south holds torward my church pains me, especially as the churches share a history of unlawful limitation and persecution by the federal government.
It is not lost on me that Albert Sidney Johnston of shiloh fame marched on utah during the Mormon War, either. And this does not even begin to enter into the racial problems that have plagued the south since reconstruction.
However..the confederates fought to preserve a system put into place by their forebears at yorktown. The confederates placed into their constitution blocks against tax-and-spend measures, reformed the presidential term policy, instituted a presidential line-item veto, instituted a permanent restriction against tarrifs to husband local industry,outlawed the slave trade, and generally perfected an already wonderful document.
It was a legitamite seccession from a government that had overgrown its bounds, and my forebears number among those who died for it. I will vote until I pass away for the seccession of the south, no matter how futile it is in my lifetime, and in the meantime console myself with the knowledge that the disintigration of the "Perpetual" union of soviet socialist republics has brought us- No empire is eternal, and every culture will eventually re-assert its independence.
Please do not attack my culture, or the sweet ladies of the UDC, however misguided their attacks upon my faith may have been.
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