Posted on 07/14/2005 6:10:21 AM PDT by robowombat
Bias against Southerners misses the mark By RICHARD COX Published July 11, 2005
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Does prejudice exist in Pasco County, an area with a very diverse population and seemingly very progressive?
I am certain that African-Americans, Hispanics and people from other countries, the poor and homeless, as well as members of certain religious faiths, experience treatment different from the mainstream populace. However, I am a member of a minority who has experienced attitudes and reactions from many individuals who assume that I am intellectually and socially challenged.
A very large percentage of the population of New Port Richey in particular is from the Northeast. I personally like the outspokenness, mince-no-words attitude, the ability to criticize as well as accept criticism without being offended, that seems to represent the culture in which Northerners grew up.
My family members seem to have the disadvantage of being born and living most of our lives in the South, in our case, Tennessee. I grew up in Knoxville, a city that many people seem to associate only with the fanatical behavior of our college football fans, and my wife is from a small city near Chattanooga.
There still seems to be a stereotype that some people associate with Tennesseans. When those individuals heard the distinct accent of my wife, my stepdaughter, and myself, it seemed to conjure up that redneck image one might associate with the humor of Jeff Foxworthy and other Southern comedians. That image is of a culture of ignorant hillbillies (certainly due to inbreeding!), barefoot, living in a shack with no indoor plumbing (but certainly an outhouse in back), having a dog living under the front porch, and owning an overgrown lawn populated with broken-down, dilapidated automobiles. And, yes, we all chew tobacco and sit on the front porch swing playing the banjo. Everyone also flies a Confederate flag and reminisces about the War Between the States.
I first noticed this attitude when my stepdaughter, an honor student, came home from middle school several days in tears because several other students harassed her daily, calling her an ignorant redneck and hillbilly among other derogatory terms. My wife and I have experienced the sudden change in facial expressions from many when they hear our accent. They seem to associate our accent with ignorance, and speak in simpler terms so that we can understand what they are saying. Telephone conversations often produce the same reaction.
I beg to differ. Tennessee is the home of several major universities, four major metropolitan areas with all the drug and gang problems associated with other large cities, and the most visited national park in the United States. Oak Ridge, in the Knoxville area, probably has as high a percentage of residents with doctorate degrees as any city in the United States. Tennessee has a musical heritage equal to none, and it is not exclusively country or bluegrass genres. Many nationally prominent politicians are from my home state, including three former presidents.
Tennessee has produced many famous musicians, actors, scientists and other intellectual and talented natives.
Well, to set the story straight, rural areas of most states have their own populace and dwellings that approach this stereotype.
My wife and I grew up in your average suburban neighborhoods, we both graduated from major universities and had successful professional careers, and, to risk seeming boastful, are probably as intelligent and knowledgeable, if not more so, than the average American. Believe it or not, East Tennessee, the section of the state we are from, fervently supported the Union during the Civil War.
I have noticed in the Pasco Times notices of meetings for various groups from areas of the Northeast and from other countries. Perhaps Southerners in our area should form a similar group. With apologies to an African-American group with a similar title, we could call our group the NAASF, the National Association for the Advancement of Southern Folks, Pasco County Branch. I hope there are enough local Southern residents available to attract to our organization.
--Richard Cox, a retired middle school science teacher and department head, lives in New Port Richey
My compliments on your knowledge. I'm going to be Googling every other word in your post for the next hour. LOL.
Thanks for posting those lyrics! I went to see the Drive-By Truckers about a month ago and have bought a couple of their CD's since then. I have been wearing out the "Southern Rock Opera" CD in my car lately!
What, is it in the penumbra?
Bwhahahahahaha!
Read a book, denial is a river in Egypt. Lincoln and the whole grisly industrialist crew -- Seward, Cameron, Stanton, Chase, all of them -- were to blame. But don't go by me.
Jefferson Davis, who, like [Alexander] Stephens, wrote his account after the Civil War, took a similar position. Fort Sumter was rightfully South Carolina's property after secession, and the Confederate government had shown great "forbearance" in trying to reach an equitable settlement with the federal government. But the Lincoln administration destroyed these efforts by sending "a hostile fleet" to Sumter. "The attempt to represent us as the aggressors," Davis argued, "is as unfounded as the complaint made by the wolf against the lamb in the familiar fable. He who makes the assault is not necessarily he that strikes the first blow or fires the first gun."From Davis's point of view, to permit the strengthening of Sumter, even if done in a peaceable manner, was unacceptable. It meant the continued presence of a hostile threat to Charleston. Further, although the ostensible purpose of the expedition was to resupply, not reinforce the fort, the Confederacy had no guarantee that Lincoln would abide by his word. And even if he restricted his actions to resupply in this case, what was to prevent him from attempting to reinforce the fort in the future? Thus, the attack on Sumter was a measure of "defense." To have acquiesced in the fort's relief, even at the risk of firing the first shot, "would have been as unwise as it would be to hesitate to strike down the arm of the assailant, who levels a deadly weapon at one's breast, until he has actually fired."
In the twentieth century, this critical view of Lincoln's actions gained a wide audience through the writings of Charles W. Ramsdell and others. According to Ramsdell, the situation at Sumter presented Lincoln with a series of dilemmas. If he took action to maintain the fort, he would lose the border South and a large segment of northern opinion which wanted to conciliate the South. If he abandoned the fort, he jeopardized the Union by legitimizing the Confederacy. Lincoln also hazarded losing the support of a substantial portion of his own Republican Party, and risked appearing a weak and ineffective leader.
Lincoln could escape these predicaments, however, if he could induce southerners to attack Sumter, "to assume the aggressive and thus put themselves in the wrong in the eyes of the North and of the world." By sending a relief expedition, ostensibly to provide bread to a hungry garrison, Lincoln turned the tables on the Confederates, forcing them to choose whether to permit the fort to be strengthened, or to act as the aggressor. By this "astute strategy," Lincoln maneuvered the South into firing the first shot.
Jefferson Davis was correct to esteem Lincoln a liar: the ships that appeared off the Charleston bar carried hundreds of troops with supplies sufficient to sustain them for a year.
Lincoln's personal secretary agreed with Ramsdell, writing in The Outbreak of Rebellion (there was no rebellion):
As a matter of fact, President Lincoln had not at that date decided the Sumter question; he was following his own sagacious logic in arriving at a conclusion, which was at least partially reached on the 29th of March, when, as we have seen, he made the order to prepare the relief expedition. By this time [Associate Supreme Court Justice] Campbell [of South Carolina], in extreme impatience to further rebellion, was importuning Seward for explanation; and Seward, finding his former prediction at fault, thought it best not to venture a new one. Upon consultation, therefore, the President authorized him to carry to Campbell the first and only assurance the Administration ever made with regard to Sumter -- namely -- that he would not change the military status at Charleston without giving notice. [This was palpably untrue, as reinforcements were embarked with the "relief" expedition, and no notice of their presence was given to the Carolinians. --LG]This, be it observed, occurred on the 1st of April, about which time the policy of Seward favoring delay and conciliation finally and formally [as soon as Congress left town! -- LG] gave way before the President's stronger self-assertion and his carefully matured purpose to force rebellion to put itself flagrantly and fatally in the wrong by attacking Fort Sumter.
[Emphasis added.]
Lincoln started the war. The crime of assault does not involve the striking of a blow; that's battery. Lincoln assaulted the South by advancing a (foreign, hostile) fleet under color of deceitful assurances, in order to induce the South to attempt to remove Sumter from the board in self-defense.
Palmerston got it. Why can't you?
Tks for the kind words.
[You, feigning exasperation] Lord, it is getting deep in here.
Why, don't you think Lincoln had piled up as many unreviewed executive powers as Julius Caesar had? He was making new law the way the Mint made new coin.
I should go by Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens? Two men who led the south into armed rebellion, brought death and destruction down upon it, and then spent the post-war years trying to justify their actions? In other words, go on the word of losers?
Lincoln started the war. The crime of assault does not involve the striking of a blow; that's battery. Lincoln assaulted the South by advancing a (foreign, hostile) fleet under color of deceitful assurances, in order to induce the South to attempt to remove Sumter from the board in self-defense.
Utter nonsense. Your claim that Lincoln's methods were deceitful have no basis in fact. Lincoln made his intentions clear in his letter to Pickens and in the instructions to the relief force.
No.
First off, he said that only women who behaved with disrespect toward his men would be treated like streetwalkers. Second, I don't see anything in the order or in any other order which indicates open season on raping streetwalkers.
Palmerston got it
Palmerston was a High Victorian hypocrite who sanctioned the mass murder of whole towns in India, but is mortified that a "lady" who dumps a chamber pot on the head of an admiral might be called a streetwalker.
You don't read my documentary posts, but you post stuff like that to me. Who are you, Peck's bad boy of the Internet?
I just explained to you -- very nicely, because you refused to read that historian I posted -- explained to you that Americans don't like tyranny and don't sit still for it, unlike German and Japanese, who at the end of World War II simply exchanged one set of masters for another.
The North started the war and won it for their own profit and political power. It was a murder-robbery. And yet you counsel us to become Buddhists and suffer in silence what you wouldn't -- an implicit insult of the first magnitude, to go along with all the other ones you mumble through your keyboard, up there in thoroughly rotten Land 'o Lincoln, where the GOP can't even field a candidate for the Senate anymore, but you can still pretend to look down your nose at the South.
Our votes, money, and moxie brought the GOP back to the majority in Congress, behind Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Trent Lott of Mississippi, and you can't stand it.
I think that is your problem with the South. That, and the fact that you know we remember, and we won't forget what your plaster saint did to the South.
The fact that that isn't what he told Justice Campbell and the Governor of South Carolina -- as recorded by his own secretary, Nicolay -- is the deceit, documented and cemented in amber for everyone to see, immobilized on display for the ages.
Lincoln lied, schemed, and then he made war and conquered and slew. In vast numbers.
For power, and money, and to turn the South into his slave.
It was the final rationalization of the differences between Hamilton's Federalists and the Antifederalists who defended our liberty interest and wrote the Bill of Rights. At the end of the day, the business interests got themselves a man who'd finish the job, a bullmastiff who'd rip America's throat out if necessary, to give the business class what they'd always wanted -- a totally free hand in exploiting the continent, and the complete cooperation of the government. They'd take care of the helotization and proletarization of labor themselves.
That's what Lincoln gave them, and they didn't even have to be grateful to him, thanks to Booth.
Don't you love it when LG starts throwing out the Marxist class warfare rhetoric?
The terms in which he defined "disrespect" would have included every single woman south of the Ohio River. It was ridiculous. The only way those women could avoid the accusation of "disrespect", would have been by dissembling their truest feelings and behaving as servilely as ancient Egyptian temple-harlots.
Sorry, no deal on that one. He meant to humiliate women whom the Federals had never even met.
Second, I don't see anything in the order or in any other order which indicates open season on raping streetwalkers.
Perhaps you'd like to review the 19th-century literature on the sexual availability of streetwalkers, and get back to me.
Palmerston was a High Victorian hypocrite who sanctioned the mass murder of whole towns in India, but is mortified that a "lady" who dumps a chamber pot on the head of an admiral might be called a streetwalker.
I'll let you argue with the British, Lord Palmerston's "sanctioning" of reprisals for sepoy atrocities in India by the British -- maybe Mad Ivan could help out -- and your case that Palmerston was a hypocrite. But Butler's order wasn't directed to the woman who emptied the chamberpot -- although it would have been quite fair to rebuke her, even to jail her. He addressed it generally to all the women in the city.
He was way out of line. He was a thug who came South looking for opportunities to thug. This was an example of his thuggishness, and Palmerston called him on it. Butler was a general officer, not a drunken off-duty militia sergeant.
Odd, considering the Marxist tendencies of Jefferson Davis.
God it IS getting deep around here.
See, that's why I don't read a lot of your stuff. You make blanket claims, like this one, and explain the world to accept your version as the truth whenk in fact, your version is nonsense.
Our votes, money, and moxie brought the GOP back to the majority in Congress, behind Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Trent Lott of Mississippi, and you can't stand it.
No, I can't stand that the GOP has become the party of big government, big spending, and fiscal irresponsibility, thanks to the southern GOP leaders like Gingrich and Lott and Bush. Why do you think so many southern Democrats have switched to the GOP? When they realized that they didn't have to give up their pork and their big intrusive government policies why stay with the Democrats? Just another think that the south has screwed up.
There was no urban proletariat in the United States until the business bunch imported them from Europe, or drove them off the farm with asymmetrical, oligopsonistic markets. (Are you going to suggest that oligopsony is a Marxist figure of rhetoric, now?)
In fact, the only demographic phenomenon remotely approaching what happened during the Industrial Revolution was the Roman mob. Which was created by concentration of wealth and the concomitant separation of the people of Italy from their means of self-support, by buyout. The senatorial and equestrian classes bought the ground out from under them, a few jugera at a time.
Or are you going to accuse the Gracchi of having been Marxist?
It's a phenomenon of the concentration of wealth. You don't have to be Marx to comment on it, or to notice it.
At least he paid attention to the phenomenology and its social price, even if his nostrums were wrong. We, on the other hand, are supposed not to pay attention to the same process as it occurred in America, and as the political tensions it created resulted in the same sort of civil war the Romans suffered. They underwent a revolution imposed, in stages, by concentration of power and wealth -- so are we, in stages. Lincoln's Revolution was a big piece of it, the second stage, after the partially successful Federalist coup d' etat in the Philadelphia Convention. Smell the coffee.
You admit it. I post historical material, and you ignore it. Then you come back and post invective.
You make blanket claims, like this one, and explain the world to accept your version as the truth when in fact, your version is nonsense.
No it isn't nonsense -- I bring history, I bring documents, 4CJ posts documents and quotes from historians, rustbucket does, all of us do. That's why your mastiff pals capitan_refugio and Espinola went after nolu chan, because he was a prolific poster of hard-to-find, illuminative original documents you guys couldn't lie about fast enough or talk your way around. So one of you asked a moderator to shut him up.
But then, let's let the lurkers decide, who's putting up history and historical thinking, versus who's just woofing.
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