Dixie Bump!
Posted on 11/03/2002 10:39:04 PM PST by GalvestonBeachcomber
At the close of the War Between the States, President Abraham Lincoln visited the abandoned Confederate capital of Richmond, Va. He asked an Army band to play "Dixie," remarking that it had always been one of his favorite tunes.
Question: If Abraham Lincoln could enjoy "Dixie" played by a Yankee Army band in the immediate aftermath of a bloody war, why can't high-school or college bands play the tune in the year 2002?
"Dixie," after all, was just a show tune, and the lyrics have nothing to do with the war or with any of the issues that caused the war. When I was growing up, bands played "Dixie" all the time, usually followed by "Battle Hymn of the Republic." That was kind of a musical way of saying the war is over and let's get on with it.
The current spasm of political correctness began sometime in the 1980s. "Dixie" is banned, children are suspended or expelled for wearing Confederate symbols, there are fights about Confederate monuments, buildings are being renamed, and the National Park Service is trying to rewrite all its scripts so visitors to battle sites will get a dose of propaganda that the war was all and only about slavery.
Sorry, but it wasn't, though that was certainly an issue for some people on both sides. The rewriting of history to convert it into propaganda in the service of a current political cause is the issue that should concern us. We should take our history straight and factual, not filtered by ideology or some scheme to get reparations for slavery — which, by the way, is one of the silliest con games ever heard of. They want people who never owned a slave and whose ancestors freed the slaves to pay reparations to people who never were slaves. But that's what happens when you have too many lawyers and too many academics cluttering up a country.
We Southerners don't wish to fight the war again, but we also don't want another Reconstruction. The first one was bad enough. We don't want our children brainwashed into believing their Southern ancestors were slobbering retards, which is the current Hollywood stereotype of most Southerners. We don't want them given a false picture of the war and the issues that led up to it.
Part of the political-correctness problem is just the dumbing down of Americans. Most of them are so ignorant of history that you can tell them anything and they will believe it — but even worse, they really don't care.
Another part of the problem of political correctness is that Congress, through the years, has created 1,001 grounds for minorities to sue. The only people who can't claim discrimination as a basis for a lawsuit are straight white males.
True discrimination should, of course, be dealt with, but wearing a Confederate lapel pin or holding a gathering in an old cemetery for a memorial service has nothing to do with discrimination — or with racism, for that matter. If Confederate symbols offend some people, so what. There are lots of things in our society today that I find offensive, but one's subjective feelings are not proper grounds for government intervention. Whatever happened to the good old American values of live and let live and mind your own business?
The final part of the political-correctness problem is plain old cowardice. Nobody is more cowardly than academics and educators, except perhaps the media and politicians. They are the very ones who should be leading the fight for free discussion of all ideas, but in fact they are leading the charge to stifle free speech.
They are terrified someone will shout "racist" or "anti-Semite" or "homophobe," and so, logically, special pleaders use these tactics to intimidate them. Reading some solid history books and developing some backbone would do wonders for this country and spell the end of political correctness
Old times there are not forgotten. Look away from the welfare state...
Or something like that.
There is a need for reparations. Emancipation remains uncompensated.
DixieOh, I wish I was in the land of cotton,
Old times there are not forgotten,
Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land.
In Dixie Land, where I was born in,
early on one frosty mornin',
Look away, look away, look away Dixie Land.I wish I was in Dixie, Hooray! Hooray!
In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand
to live and die in Dixie.
Away, away, away down south in Dixie.
Away, away, away down south in Dixie
LOL! Oh, man - that's un-PC, even for ME!
Yep.
February 21, 1960, New Roads, Louisiana.
Deo Vindice!
Bump.
Dixie Bump!
We must abolish the 14th Amendment, Section 4.
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