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Endless complaints. |
Posted on 12/31/2004 2:21:30 PM PST by Caipirabob
What's wrong about this photo? Or if you're a true-born Southerner, what's right?
While scanning through some of the up and coming movies in 2005, I ran across this intriguing title; "CSA: Confederate States of America (2005)". It's an "alternate universe" take on what would the country be like had the South won the civil war.
Stars with bars:
Suffice to say anything from Hollywood on this topic is sure to to bring about all sorts of controversial ideas and discussions. I was surprised that they are approaching such subject matter, and I'm more than a little interested.
Some things are better left dead in the past:
For myself, I was more than pleased with the homage paid to General "Stonewall" Jackson in Turner's "Gods and Generals". Like him, I should have like to believe that the South would have been compelled to end slavery out of Christian dignity rather than continue to enslave their brothers of the freedom that belong equally to all men. Obviously it didn't happen that way.
Would I fight for a South that believed in Slavery today? I have to ask first, would I know any better back then? I don't know. I honestly don't know. My pride for my South and my heritage would have most likely doomed me as it did so many others. I won't skirt the issue, in all likelyhood, slavery may have been an afterthought. Had they been the staple of what I considered property, I possibly would have already been past the point of moral struggle on the point and preparing to kill Northern invaders.
Compelling story or KKK wet dream?:
So what do I feel about this? The photo above nearly brings me to tears, as I highly respect Abraham Lincoln. I don't care if they kick me out of the South. Imagine if GW was in prayer over what to do about a seperatist leftist California. That's how I imagine Lincoln. A great man. I wonder sometimes what my family would have been like today. How many more of us would there be? Would we have held onto the property and prosperity that sustained them before the war? Would I have double the amount of family in the area? How many would I have had to cook for last week for Christmas? Would I have needed to make more "Pate De Fois Gras"?
Well, dunno about that either. Depending on what the previous for this movie are like, I may or may not see it. If they portray it as the United Confederacy of the KKK I won't be attending.
This generation of our clan speaks some 5 languages in addition to English, those being of recent immigrants to this nation. All of them are good Americans. I believe the south would have succombed to the same forces that affected the North. Immigration, war, economics and other huma forces that have changed the map of the world since history began.
Whatever. At least in this alternate universe, it's safe for me to believe that we would have grown to be the benevolent and humane South that I know it is in my heart. I can believe that slavery would have died shortly before or after that lost victory. I can believe that Southern gentlemen would have served the world as the model for behavior. In my alternate universe, it's ok that Spock has a beard. It's my alternate universe after all, it can be what I want.
At any rate, I lived up North for many years. Wonderful people and difficult people. I will always sing their praises as a land full of beautiful Italian girls, maple syrup and Birch beer. My uncle ribbed us once before we left on how we were going up North to live "with all the Yankees". Afterwards I always refered to him as royalty. He is, really. He's "King of the Rednecks". I suppose I'm his court jester.
So what do you think of this movie?
Hmmm...
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams Jaffa hardly counts as serious scholars or students of American history. Adams Jaffa is preoccupied with taxes slavery to the exclusion of everything else
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jaffa's name here may be used interchangably with McPherson, Foner, any staffer at the Claremont Institute, and the majority of liberal historians at any major university today.
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams hardly count as serious scholars or students of American history. Adams is preoccupied with taxes to the exclusion of everything else...blah blah blah...
Hmmm...
No one questions that views of history change and will change over time, but your Woods and Adams Jaffa hardly counts as a serious s or students of American history. Adams Jaffa is preoccupied with taxes slavery to the exclusion of everything else
EDITOR'S NOTE: Jaffa's name here may be used interchangably with McPherson, Foner, any staffer at the Claremont Institute, and the majority of liberal historians at any major university today.
I think we disagree a bit about Lincoln and his purposes. I think your statement certainly describes the attitude of the money-center Republicans in the East, and Lincoln's quote about the tariff was certainly provocative. I'm not sure you can say, though, that Lincoln was on the level with the Corwin Amendment. He certainly lied about it in the First Inaugural -- about his relationship to it -- as you and others have established who've addressed the issue. How can you say he was ever not lying about the amendment? It smells of catspaw from start to finish, to me. Someone, I suppose, will make a case for Lincoln's sincerity, but I'm still inclined to be skeptical.
I think if the departed States had, in March, called Lincoln's bluff (IMHO) by returning to the Union under a promise to pass Corwin, I think Lincoln would have raised the bar and created difficulties, in an attempt to ensure they didn't return, because the South out of the Congress, even just a few States, did too much for Lincoln in terms of control of the Congress.
For one thing, if the seceding States had returned, they'd have stopped his West Virginia ploy -- the significance of West Virginia is that Lincoln was willing to break the Constitution to get a couple more votes in the Senate. So I don't think he'd have made it easy for the seceded States to return, and I think he'd have disowned and snatched the Corwin Amendment off the table in a heartbeat if it looked like the departing States were seriously considering returning to Congress.
I see Lincoln as a stealth radical dressed in a moderate sheepskin, not as the pragmatist willing to compromise the future of antislavery to preserve the Union. Quite the opposite: breaking the Union gave him more power and more control, as a war president, than he would ever have wielded as a peacetime president of an unsundered Union, standing on an antislavery platform.
Think about it, and think about those quotes of Herndon's that nolu chan sent around, and then tell me Lincoln lurched accidentally into war. Tell me that he seriously tried to stop secession without bloodshed through political compromise. See if it doesn't begin to sound thin and tinny to you, laid against those close observations of Lincoln's character by his longtime law partner and political intimate.
What do you think?
[M. Espinola, gurgling through his dribble-glass] These invented terms, such as "southland"?
Need I quote the mighty Lynyrd Skynrd's verse about Neil Young's abuse of the Southland, replying to Young's impertinent put-down and squashing him like a bug?
Educate yourself, suh, and wipe off your chin betimes; you look like a FOOL, suh!
And "Southron" is perfectly good speech meaning a man of the South. And keep a civil tongue in your head when you talk about our South and her People!
Was it only 10,000? LOL!
Of course, having replied to all that, now I know how Tolstoy felt after sending another one off to the printers.
You stand corrected. How ya doin', Wlat?
Meanwhile, if you think someone posted that sentiment, run it down and give us a link. Sure you haven't misunderstood something? Nuance can be so tricky, especially when you don't reference the original post.....Wlat.
Nice of you to bust loose and drop by. But get a towel, willya?
Concurring bump -- hey, Espinola, here's a shovel.
Go bait a Democrat.
Hmmm, someone forgot to tell Herman Melville. Maybe he wrote it in New York!
The pattern of Indians dividing and allying with the English (or French, or Spanish) for advantage is a pretty consistent one. Even Custer had his Crows and Shoshonis.
At Little Big Horn, the Sioux killed the Crow scouts out-of-hand. Who knew it was coming, and sang their death-songs before the battle. The Italian lieutenant in Custer's command -- I forget his name -- sent my great-grandfather, Jack Riley, and the other white scouts away on the eve of the battle; "we have to go down there tomorrow; we're Army and we're under orders -- but you're civilians, and you don't have to go with us; leave now." (One of them, IIRC, was a Californio scion named, by my great-grandfather and his friends, "Kid" Vallejo [they pronounced it, "Vall-eyo"]. Vallejo....now, where have I heard that name before?)
Which is why I'm here, and my sister and my cousins.
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Why do you think that Lincoln refused all attempts to negotiate?
That's really educating one's self ...give me a break! Yankih ...could it be 'potato in the mouth syndrome'? or were you born with that speech impediment?
Seriously, consider proper English tutoring, to hopefully improve & correct speaking skills, especially in public.
Nice talk....
He's right. You're stinking up this forum. standwatie isn't going anywhere. If he is banned because of you, you will never live it down. That's a PROMISE.
From the moment he was elected, Lincoln played tough guy, reminding everyone who was within earshot that he had absolutely no intention of compromising his rock-hard principles or entering into, or even taking notice of, agreements (such as, e.g., Buchanan's armistice) that would tie his hands as the employer of the Executive power.
And Unionist historians, distinguishing him from the real Black Republicans, keep telling us he was the "moderate" candidate!
At least he varied his patter a little; later on he turned in "we will not compromise" for "you are too late."
Actually I was asking the question for information and not as accusation. But I stand the first point which I was trying to make and must have been misunderstood due to my imprecise grammar-Confederate apologists IN THE 1860s defended slavery on the basis that their slaves were better off than Northern factory workers. On that same basis the slavers of pre-1865 should have been happy to spend a year in that blissful condition that they blessed the black population of South for so many years.
Thankfully for the Deep South, the humane attitude of the great Abraham Lincoln still carried enough weight to reduce the burden of Reconstruction. But if the worst day for the Deep South was when the South Carolina hotheads seceded, the second worst day for Dixie was when Booth murdered the South's greatest friend in Washington.
"Slavery As It Exists In America. Slavery As It Exists In England." 1851. This image presents a defense of slavery as a way of life superior to the life of the working poor of industrial England. In the first scene enslaved blacks dance and play, observed by four white men--two Southerners and two Northerners. The southern gentleman comments to the Northerner: "It is a general thing, some few exceptions, after mine have done a certain amount of labor, which they finish by 4 or 5 P.M., I allow them to enjoy themselves in any reasonable way." Contrast this to the second scene, which takes place at a British textile factory. Notice the conversaton between two barefoot youths: "I say Bill, I am going to run away from the Factory, and go to the Coal Mines where they have to work only 14 hours a Day instead of 17 as you do here." Behind them, an impoverished mother comments about life in the factory: "Oh Dear! what wretched Slaves, this Factory Life makes me & my children." The idea that slaves enjoyed a higher standard of living compared to industrial workers in nothern U. S. and British cities, meaning better diets and better working conditions, was commonly argued in defense of slavery. In modern times, some historians have also argued that slave diets, working conditions, housing, and such might have exceeded the living standards of the urban poor in the North. For southern apologists for slavery, the wage slavery of England and the northern states was worse than actual slavery because employers felt no responsibility for the welfare of their "wage slaves." Library of Congress.
http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/scripts/sia/gallery.cgi?collection=politicsdefense
What brought that up? Your regional and socioeconomic prejudices?
...consider proper English tutoring, to hopefully improve & correct speaking skills, especially in public...
By which we are to understand what? Your cheese-whiz southern New England accent, which everyone understands as boardroom buttspeak? The Yale and Harvard business grads, blowing snot on everyone who puts the creme brulee' on their plates, and enjoying little jokes at the expense of the helots beyond the Hudson?
And as for my verbal ability, girl-pal, don't worry about that. It's already been measured by the GRE as somewhere off the Richter scale. If by that crack you mean acquiring the charms of post-indenture East Anglian uyup-speak, I'll pass. Every North American male with a pair of functioning testicles larger than about three millimeters would rather sound like Waylon Jennings or George Jones or Shelby Foote anyway. You can have Ted Kennedy and the rest of his fellow Brahmin-wannabes. You can keep the Brahmins, too, for that matter, and their snotty little Porcellian Club stickpins. We'd rather be people.
Because there was nothing to negotiate. Lincoln had the choice to accept the southern ultimatum or not. He chose not to.
My information was that his policies were carried forward by Andrew Johnson for a couple of years, and then Stevens and the Radicals took over and did it the way they wanted to, working through the Union League clubs and the Freedmen's Bureau.
And what is your point about the comparative conditions of industrial American employment versus agrarian slavery? Agrarian slaves have always been treated worse than anyone else in the labor force, going back to classical times.
Also, working hours might not have told the whole story. Englishwomen imported to America under contract told diaries and memoirs that they found that in America they had to work very much faster than they had in England. The work over here was much tougher and the machines much faster than their British counterparts. But heavy-industrial labor after the Civil War was tougher still, with work in the steel mills about the worst, and coal mines.
The so-called 'music' you listed, where as one would require being on drugs to even attempt to listen to such obnoxious, barnyard noise pollution. lol
Is there really something beyond the Hudson?? Amazing!
Waylon Jennings (redneck)or George Jones (he's okay) or Shelby Foote (never heard of him/it/her...anyway.
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