The Doctor is IN (Delving into the paleoconservative neo-Confederate mindset)

It was wholly a pleasure to read your letter to the paper. Specifically, the kind of pleasure a psychoanalyst might feel on spotting a favorite patient out in the waiting room, someone with not just one exotic delusion but a whole walking, talking basket of them.

For I could just as easily have addressed this letter to Dear anti-Abraham Lincoln, or Dear anti-Semite, or just Dear generally anti-American. After all, this is a whole nation of immigrants. Even the first Americans came here from somewhere else.

The most impressive thing about your short yet full-to-bursting letter is how many apoplectic hatreds you can express in only six short paragraphs. We do have a lot of irons in the fire these days, don't we? Now you just lie down on the couch here and relax. If you can.

I'm reminded of the early days of Pine Bluff's mental health center, when a visiting psychiatrist from the big, cosmopolitan city of Little Rock used to come down every Friday. His devotion to his work was impressive, and we would regularly thank him for it. "Oh, don't thank me," he would reply. "It's my privilege. Here I see the orchids of the mental profession!"

We figured the explanation was our proximity to Mississippi and the whole complex nexus of antebellum complexes, literary genius, and absolute distillation of Southernness that is the state (of mind) called Mississippi.

But when I looked at the postmark of your letter, it was from western Arkansas, almost in Indian Territory, not near the Delta at all. Which pretty much shot my Mississippi theory as an explanation for your various paranoias. Besides, your delusions are hard-core, almost Midwestern nativist rather than succulent Deep South — more Gerald Winrod or Gerald L. K. Smith than Ross Barnett.

And there's nothing at all distinctive about your anti-semitic conspiracy theories, which are immediately recognizable as the classical, universal, Protocols of the Elders of Zion variety. I expected you to mention the Illuminati any minute, or at least the Bilderbergers. Yours is the kind of scenario that pictures us all meeting every Friday night in some basement to take over the world. (I think it was Mary McCarthy who said anti-semitism is the only form of intellectuality that appeals to stupid people.) Dr. Greenberg's Rx: Go easy on the fatty foods and conspiracy theories.

I suppose I should be deeply offended, go into a grand huff, and generally stomp my Size 15s at your attack on Jews, American immigrants, Abraham Lincoln, civil liberties, the philosopher Leo Strauss (whom you also completely misunderstand) and … well, the list is too long for just one column. Instead, I am amused.

I'm amused because even somebody on the western fringe of the Old Confederacy who's concerned about the subversive influx of an ethnic group with its own distinctive customs, accent, history, and language subverting the United States of America ought to realize just how close to home he's hitting. You could be describing a people that actually took up arms against the United States of America (1861-65), set up its own short-lived regime, and remains the most unassimilable of American minorities. A minority group so unself-conscious it assumes it's the majority. Ain't that a hoot?

Rather than disappear into the general American culture the way a good ethnic group is supposed to do, Southerners seem to become more Southern with every generation — no matter in what part of the country or the world we find ourselves. Recommended reading: The Enduring South: Subcultural Persistence in Mass Society by John Shelton Reed at Chapel Hill, aka the De Tocqueville of Dixie. There's an interesting story behind that little book. It started out as your standard doctoral dissertation in Columbia University's sociology department. Young Reed was assigned 30 years' worth of Gallup Polls to go through in order to demonstrate his thesis, to wit, "the decrease in regional differences in attitudes and values as the South had become an urban, industrial region increasingly like the rest of the United States."

Uh huh. Well, you can imagine how that bright shining theory turned out. It had everything going for it except the data, which, as this young graduate student plowed through all those old public opinion surveys, turned out to be going in precisely the other direction.

Years later, John Shelton Reed, now the dean, literally, of his profession, would recall the sinking sensation he felt at the time: "I came to know the despair of the graduate student whose dissertation is falling apart in his hands …."

That's when it hit him: "Southerners were behaving like the immigrant ethnic groups I had come to know in Boston and New York, groups whose own resistance to assimilation was just then being discovered and chronicled in books like Beyond the Melting Pot and The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnic...."

It must have been a Eureka! experience for the young scholar. And it's stayed with him. There is nothing quite so illuminating as the sudden dawning of self-understanding. The result was John Shelton Reed's more-relevant-than-ever classic, The Enduring South.

W. J. Cash had made a similar discovery many years before in his The Mind of the South, in which he described the South as "not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it."

So I really wouldn't be too concerned about all those insidious ethnic groups determined to hold on to their manners and customs and cuisine. They're us, y'all, each in their own way.

But to understand that, sir, you'd have to have the one transcendent, indefatigable, absolutely saving, dang-near spiritual quality so missing from your swing-out-in-all-directions-till-you-destroy-yourself letter. Namely, a sense of humor.

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To be an immigrant does not the individual have to go to a place after one is born.

Now seems to me that everyone born as a citizen was given a promise. Those who after they are born and travel from another place, becomes naturalized are given that promise as well.

Talk about needing a psycoanalyst. Not one law has been passed requires that once a citizen always a citizen.

The need to replace the "CREATOR" who GAVE RIGHTS and BLESSINGS "IF" by those on the side of "EVIL", cause they believe that they are gods (phase of evolution - new age) is what is most damaging to this nation.

But hey this nation elected the likes of bj and hillary clinton for two terms. Their policy of "EQUALIZE ALL NATIONS" placed so many holes in this nations best interest, that immigration by illegals gets least attention.

Now these lying liberals know darn well that by their open door policy to illegals allowing millions in that they are waiting for the Republicans to take a stand.

You think their games up to now have been out of bounds you just wait, what they will pull if the Republicans take a stand, all hell will break out.

They knew darn well they could stop a Hispanic from being a judge and there would be no pay back. They the lying liberals have made their position quite clear, they hate the Constitution and any and all who follow it.

"Bless your heart,
Inky Wretch"

Typically of all left-wing anti-American radical extremists - he COWARDLY omits his name!

Interestingly enough, the Dem-Gaz (leftist rag usually) required full REAL names & addresses and supposedly refuses to print anything under a false name.

Why was this yankee liberal allowed this vile spewing?

It seems to me that this column is written by Paul Greenberg to someone unnamed who wrote to the paper. Conveniently he does not reprint the letter although he praises its brevity. He only gives us his very biased opinion of it.

I think the gist of it is that Greenberg resents that some refuse to join the Communist revolution going on in this country.

steplock wrote: "Bless your heart, Inky Wretch" Typically of all left-wing anti-American radical extremists - he COWARDLY omits his name! Interestingly enough, the Dem-Gaz (leftist rag usually) required full REAL names & addresses and supposedly refuses to print anything under a false name. Why was this yankee liberal allowed this vile spewing?

Inky Wretch is Paul greenberg's nom de plume when responding to letters which he receives.

I clearly credited Greenberg as the author in the source credits just below the headline above.

Furthermore, Greenberg is a card-carrying Southerner born and bred.

He just doesn't have any use for neo-Confederate goofballs.

Josef Stalin wrote: Greenberg, a card carrying Southerner? Another fraud in a long line. With that marxist bias, you guys should work for the NY Times, if you don't already. Greenberg is about as a southern name as Karl Marx or Lenin. His grandfather was probably involved with the original Bolsheviks. If anything, this marxist and his ilk are known as scalawags (aka carpetbaggeing traitors) to real Southerners. Why do you hate our Constitution so much?

Judging by your posts I'm inclined to think that Greenberg has a pretty good handle on the neo-Confederate mentality and its varioius and sundry pathologies.

If anything, this marxist and his ilk are known as scalawags (aka carpetbaggeing traitors) to real Southerners. scalawags (aka carpetbaggeing traitors) to real Southerners.

For the record, a scalawag can't be a carpetbagger. Scalawags were native Southerners who cozied up to the occupying government of Reconstruction for political and personal advantage, and carpetbaggers were non-Southerners who came down South during Reconstruction to make a pile of cash by picking the bones of the natives.

Here's another Greenberg quote which will probably send your blood pressure up a few points even though it happens to be perfectly true:

“Both Arabdom and the Old South are remnants of once great civilizations with flaws that doomed them to defeat. The blinder partisans of each look back with a nostalgia that clouds their vision. Their love for an imagined past that is now beyond re-creating prevents them from seizing the present, and fashioning the future. They prefer their imaginary world of slogans and fixations, though it is only imaginary, to the possibilities of a new start in reality — because reality requires compromise.” – “The Arab Tragedy: A mistake becomes a tradition”, (The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial, July 18, 2000)

"Here's another Greenberg quote which will probably send your blood pressure up a few points even though it happens to be perfectly true: "

“Both Arabdom and the Old South are remnants of once great civilizations with flaws that doomed them to defeat. The blinder partisans of each look back with a nostalgia that clouds their vision. Their love for an imagined past that is now beyond re-creating prevents them from seizing the present, and fashioning the future. They prefer their imaginary world of slogans and fixations, though it is only imaginary, to the possibilities of a new start in reality — because reality requires compromise.”

How's this for reality, boy:

Just stay up in that Marxist blue-zone where you belong.

Godebert wrote: Just stay up in that Marxist blue-zone where you belong.

So what's your pleasure Bubba?

Do you want the old Confederacy to secede again to break up the U.S. once and for all?

Just what is your prescription for the future other than ranting against Yankees?

"Do you want the old Confederacy to secede again to break up the U.S. once and for all? Just what is your prescription for the future other than ranting against Yankees?"

I would prefer that you socialist blue-zone democraps attempt to secede this time. We'll keep the Stars & Stripes and the Constitution. Ya'll can keep your Kennedys, Schumers and Klintons.

Godebert wrote: I would prefer that you socialist blue-zone democraps attempt to secede this time. We'll keep the Stars & Stripes and the Constitution. Ya'll can keep your Kennedys, Schumers and Klintons.

1.– You're blathering.

2. – You're confirming the point Greenberg is making in the article.

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