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Locked on 04/13/2005 10:44:44 AM PDT by Admin Moderator, reason:
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?
Learning the lessons is precisely what the interest of some of the people on this thread is about. If you can't find it under all the rodomontade, well, that's understandable. The thread's in decay now, but there have been actual discussions on earlier threads that got pulled when people threw tantrums and called other people names.
The premise of the thread was asinine from the start. We are Americans by God, let's start acting like Americans. You can't go backward you can only go forward. I don't play what ifs, I'm Irish.
Well, which is it, Irish or American? 8^p
The point is, the person who put up the thread was engaging in a bit of discussion-bait by positing antihistorical circumstances and conspicuously wondering aloud how different things would be, if things had been different. Well, how droll, but the real discussion is whether there is something we ought to be paying attention to and learning about the Civil War era that has meaning for us in the here and now. And there is.
The problem is twofold. Southerners have generally been brought up with their own history of the Civil War, their own "civil war" flag and roster of heroes and battles, and Northerners have had theirs, and everyone has respected the truce over those old issues conjoined on us by the veterans of those battles themselves, who when they gathered together on the old battlefields, unfailingly set an example of letting bygones be bygones and of reconciling with one another. They had, after all, done their best through four years of war to kill each other, and they'd lived much the same lives while afield with the armies. The rest of society got the message, and all was peace for the most part except for scholarly quibbles over orders of battle and the occasional theorist like Otto Eisenshiml who would write a brooding book about conspiracy in Edwin Stanton's office, and he'd be generally ignored.
Then James McPherson and the faculty Marxists came along, and started doing politics as history, and jabbing fingers at the South. In the name of trying to break Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", they worked with President Bill Clinton to "contextualize" (i.e. propagandize) the Civil War for modern purposes of the American political Left: attempting to drive a wedge between the Midwestern and urban Republicans on the one hand, and the conservative Southerners on the other who have been the rock of Republican and conservative political successes since 1968, when the South put Richard Nixon in the White House, not at all coincidentally defeating an ur-liberal in the person of Hubert Humphrey.
There is more, much more, but that is the beginning of the discussion on Free Republic between the largely Jeffersonian Southerners and the adherents of Lincoln's super-Hamiltonian vision for the country that has been, besides the cause of the South's destruction, the root of "big government", entitlement government, and corporate-welfarist, superstatal policies that are being formulated now under such rubrics as NAFTA, WTO, alienation of authority and sovereignty, the Law of the Sea Treaty, "globalization", open borders, the Kyoto Accords, and political globalization. That is the other part of the problem: American empire has its fans, who like to feast on the defeat of the Jeffersonians and who have come to the boards to purge them of the Southerners, by precipitating fist fights and (they hope) getting someone on the wicked Southerners' side to say something intemperate enough that they can go to the Moderators and have the person banned, thus moving FR closer to their ideal of a Potemkin forum, a Disneyland of "respectable" National Greatness Republican (McKinleyite) opinionmaking and partisan organizing, that will showcase the policies of the Bush Administration, whatever they are, and smooth out the individualistic wrinkles left over from the old days, when Free Republic was a roiling, brawling free-for-all of individualism and untrammeled conservatism of every stripe.
The principles being argued here, when we're discussion principles and not getting involved with personalities, are highly relevant to all of the above.
Wasn't it precisely the reminder of that time away from forum that caused the last thread to go "poof" at what, 1800 posts?
And the discovery that #3Fan, member in good standing of the Wlat Gang, was posting neo-Nazi material penned by the notorious, late Bertrand Comparet, that caused the Late, Great Thread to be pulled in its entirety, all 4,400 posts of it?
That was the thread to which our Capitan had posted material that had been, ummmmmm, compromised from certain Supreme Court briefs and made to do duty for the actual opinions handed down in famous cases, wasn't it?
Spot on, you nailed it. With few exceptions, their adherents simply post argumentum ad hominem. Those posters are no longer worth responding to, reasoned discourse is simply lost on them.
Was that when a certain poster of theirs experienced a 30 day hiatus?
Well, I'm sure the hiatus wasn't humiliating per se, but having it broadcase sure was. That's thread-pulling time!
All spent setting up a company, of course. The censure note sent to him must've been the inspiration!
"have you considered that you are becoming a laughingstock on FR??"
Once I spent 3 seconds considering your comment, then realized you were already the holder of the title in question :)
Hello, Moeith, yo Larryith, and of course Shempith. (Guess which of you?) What art thou doing? Holding the final reb meeting? ;)
Your not-so-veiled threat that you soon intend to start pounding at the abuse button with trumped up, hyperbolic, and fabrication-filled allegations against us with the specific purpose of getting this thread pulled and/or one or more of its participants admonished in a manner that has been thus far overwhelmingly frequented upon your own wretched ilk (WhiskeyPapa, #3Nazi, cvn76, Held_to_Ransom and all his aka's, and of course the existing present contingent of crass, vulgar-mouthed bilge spewers, cyberstalkers, and chronic bandwidth thiefs that is all too familiar to you in the first hand, to name a few), I'll simply sit back, crank up the the music of defiance to your jackbooted smear tactics, and in the process collectively dump a small token of it returned favors on your connection.
"Who's your boss? Who put you up to this?", "This is libel. Who's sponsoring you?" "..you've a bloodthirstiness about you that would gag a leech.."
Anyone lurking under your bed?
Turn it up!
You wish, pencilpusher
Check out Espinola's latest. He thinks Lynyrd Skynyrd is "hippie drug music" and he thinks an LP cover is a poster!
Such mistakes are typically suggestive that his musical tastes are either older or newer than the aforementioned. IOW, a browse through his music collection will likely reveal either something from the repugnant range of Michael Jackson through Green Day or the world's largest collection of Perry Como.
Okay hippie, whatever you say.
Though your ignorance persists on public display, I sure don't see any sign of your musical tastes (or lack thereof).
Bump and Amen!
Prob'ly thinks Mussel Shoals is a beach in California.
And that an LP is an LS-120 diskette, or an Oracle certification.
Klezmer acid ska. Or maybe Gregorian salsa bop.
Something bleeding-edge. Or at least, bleeding.
Conjunto doo-wop standards.
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