Posted on 06/26/2007 5:17:28 PM PDT by Mamzelle
Over the past months of this nightmare of immigration scofflawry, listening to the rhetoric from the aristocratic Republican elites--I’ve been carried back to the Magnolia Melodramas I enjoyed reading as a teenager. Gwen Bristow’s “Plantation Trilogy”; Frank Yerby’s “The Foxes of Harrow” and the magnificent mother of them all--Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With The Wind.”
George Bush once said, “I’m not a southerner, I’m a southwesterner.” He was trying to distance himself from the south and the taint of racism, a “compassionate” insult to every southerner who voted for him. But he has every resemblence to the linen-suited julep-drinking Massa of the Old South.
And the dynamic of the Elites verses Middle-class Conservatives is exactly like the plantation owner and his nearest inelegant neighbors...White Trash. Scots-Irish subsistence farmers couldn’t afford to the leisured fineries of the Planter Class because they were trying to eke out an existence in competition with the institution of slavery.
Remember the characters of the Slatterys and the Macintoshes, Gerald and Scarlett O’Hara’s WT neighbors? Not only did the O’Haras hold them in contempt for being so hardscrabble, tacky and rough-textured, but the slaves themselves of the plantations held themselves in higher esteem than “po’ whites.”
And the Massa with the Big Heart dearly loved his servants, loved condescending to them--What treasures! Just like members of the family! Not that he set them free, or ate at the same table. There are limits to paternalism and noblesse oblige. But Massa and Missus were unfailingly thankful that Mammy and Pork picked up Scotty’s poop off the Big House lawn.
The irony--it’s the Southern middle class that makes up a lot of the soldiers who trusted him enough to serve in Iraq.
George Bush thinks he can afford to openly display the contempt he has always felt for Joe Redneck...er...Sixpack. His chief overseer, Tony Snow, let us in on the secret in the wee hours after election day. He can now concentrate on indulging his oozing childhood sentimentality by handing his house servants a deed to America.
I’m reminded of another scene from Gone With The Wind--Scarlett was being lectured by an elderly matriarch about Trash. “And when you’re done with them--kick them away and do it thoroughly, because Trash clinging to your coattails can ruin you.”
I have entered into many discussions about illegal immigration with a comment--housework and yardwork are political. This is a class issue between overlord elites who can’t conceive of a life spent actually cleaning up after themselves. They break the laws, then have to justify the transgression by accusing the law of being bad. That’s why they become insulting and defensive when requested to obey the law.
I’m done with Bush. I don’t trust him--or any member of his Indolent family.
100,000 Confederate Texans say otherwise. Hood's Texans suffered tremendously at Franklin and Sharpspburg - that was about as brutal as you can get. Franklin ended with six Confederate generals killed.
The Union did not burn a trail through Austin, but there were port conflicts on the Gulf and fighting in the Southwest Mexican border to stop the trade with Mexico. The big armies did not come to Texas, but there was fighting and hardship for resources.
Not sure what you mean by that comment, but Texans were a major factor in the Army of Tennessee in the Western theater and the slow retreat back to Atlanta.
Nothing good to say too or about folks who spew such about southerners.... They are ignorant of history, tradition and facts when they do so.
Bush’s insults are just more BS on his selling America out with this hispandering BS regarding illegals. I voted for the POS and am ashamed to say so these days......
I don't know about Bush's accent. I do know that he can turn it on and off. I read that he lost his first election to a Texas aggie and took from that the idea that Yale was not his strongest qualification in voters' minds.
Accepting that we have classes here in the US and telling people that they are in some way stuck in their particular class are two very different things. I would never make the assumption nobody is capable of rising above their current "station," either socially, financially or other--nor would I assume the impossibility of the powerful falling from grace. I believe that the possibility of mobility within the classes is what sets us apart from other societies. I believe it is one of our country's greatest strengths. I believe it is why immigrants flood our borders from every nation on the planet, and comparatively few clamor to leave. Does that mean our class system is always 100% fair? Is it ever taken advantage of by the powerful? No and yes. But it is a fact. As I stated, as long as humans are social creatures, we will have classes.
Additionally, it is true that when one feels chained to their particular class he is likely to become depressed, desperate, even violent. My experience, living in an inner city since 1993, has shown me that the urge to rise above is far more common than the acceptance of chains.
In the United States, we have a class system "where social rank is defined in terms of wealth and income. There is movement between the classes. This system is an open system and there is social mobility. (Understanding Sociology, Basirico, Cashion, Eshleman, Barlow and Holley)." We do not have a "Caste System", which is given to a person at birth and is a closed system.
About the only place you'll find an almost classless system is in Hunting-and-Gathering societies where there are usually less than 50 people total.
I don’t agree, and I don’t think that is meaningful, mosty because one person can be in so many different income groups in the course of his lifetime. There are also some people who earn respect in other ways while there are others who have a lot of money and no rank. More importantly, there is no system for allocating or recognizing rank. Listen to the questions when pols talk about taxing the rich. First question is what do they mean?
The term you are looking for when a person who has alot of respect, such as honor and prestige excluding money is "social status". Preachers and teachers can fit into this category. "Social class" is based on "wealth, the power one receives with that wealth and the life chances that one has to accumulate wealth. Socio-economic status is a concept to assess status, depending on a person's income, education, and occupation (Understanding Sociology)."
We also have other terms, white collar worker and blue collar worker come to mind.
I'd say there is a system in place for recognizing rank and status.
I studied sociology before the Marxists took over the universities. I had a colleague once who shared this joke. He said, I think it is interesting that your department chair is a sociologist. Sociology is the elaboration of the obvious. That particular sociologist didn't know how to figure a percentage, by the way. There are different schools of thought in sociology and the discipline commands little respect.
I believe you could take almost any college Sociology book and find what I told you in the above post.
Mamzelle ... a realy well written rant. Unfortunately, I find myself agreeing with so much of what you wrote. I have been a hugh ‘W” fan since before the ‘00 primaries and feel bitterly disappointed with his stance on the immigration issue.
Especially disappointing is the length to which he and his Administration went to try to get it thru .. too bad they didn’d expend as much energy or political capital on social security reform.
STILL, given the ‘00 and ‘04 options, I am glad he and not Gore or Kerry is in the Oval office. And I am grateful that when 9/11/01 came, he was in the White House and not Gore. I hate to see his blowing the support of us po’whites on this single issue.
AMEN AMEN AMEN!! Look up Turtle Creek in the Texas History encyclopedia online to get a GOOD bead on just how the Anglo settlers tried to work within the agreements they made with Mexico and how Santa Ana p*ss*d it all away by decieving the Tejanos and Mexicans who voted him into office. Threw away the hard fought Mexican constitution and said the Mexicans werent ready for a constitutional government, that he was the Big Daddy whether they wanted him or not...went so far as to call himself the Napoleon of the West.
and at the risk of starting an Intraregional War in Texas - what gives Dallas the right to say they represent All Things Texas? Aside from that silly little night-time soap opera back in the 80s? Fort Worth is more deserving of the definition, not that business district named after a business man. Yet everyone from Dallas says *they* are the Southern wing of Texas. HA! They need to come to Richmond, settled by Virginians and talk to some of the old guard here. IF YOU ARENT OLD THREE HUNDRED, YOU'RE JUST ANOTHER COWBOY/FARMER. Trust me...I grew up with this. And there were PLENTY of plantations down here...but youre talking swampland, so preservation is virtually nil. If its not cleaned out on a regular basis, vegetation, mold and wind and rain sweep it clean away. But you just try and tell anyone who knows Lake Jackson they dont have plantations. There was an archaeological dig some 10 yrs back on the Jackson plantation - they found out a lot of information about the slaves that lived there. Very interesting stuff.
As a Houstonian I say THIS area is the where the heart of Southernhood resides...not that little old prairie town that got its name splashed all over Hollywood.
/signing off - defending my part of Texas...
America does not belong to George Bush--it is not his to give away on a mad whim. That he would even try--and try with every cent of his political capitol--raises a lot of doubts among the Iraq fence-sitters.
There are a lot of us who were very dubious about invading Iraq, but went along out of faith and trust. I'm not so much anti-war as I am anti-nationbuilding and anti-hegemony. In a word, not a utopian.
He hasn't a clue about what it means to be an American.
Tell me Galveston is Western, for crying out loud.
Give me Texans in a fight any day of the week!
It was over before it started.
Did Bush visit the Senate or did the Senators visit the White House?
Bush is taking the heat because he's the one who brought the situation to the point it is today.
In 2001, Bush formed the New Alliance Task Force, which, among other things, ordered the FDIC to relax the banking rules that allowed Mexican illegal aliens to obtain US bank accounts, auto and home loans using nothing more than a Matricular Consular card for ID.
In 2004, he ordered the INS to stop all interior enforcement.
In 2004, his appointed SSA commissioner signed the Social Security Totalization Agreement with Mexico that would allow Mexican illegal aliens to collect US Social Security benefits for themselves and their families back home in Mexico.
In 2007, he signed into law the authorization and funding to build a fence between Mexico and the US, then allowed Skelator to stop it.
Just last week, he visited the Senate to revive the bill that would legalize 20+ million Mexican illegal aliens already here and countless more who would come here (through Bush's porous borders) and lie to obtain Z visas.
If Bush is taking heat over this, then he deserves every degree of it.
Most people here are opposed to socialism, communism, and class warfare. They don't understand that adopting the terminology of class is opening the door to that. Read Sociology in Wikipedia if you think I am exaggerating. I believe that it is also explicitly unconstitutional, (I think the constitution bans all titles) though I have not had a chance to look that up.
Before 1964 certainly black Americans constituted a separate class. That is as far as I will go. Calling arbitary income groups classes os not only wrong, it is subversive.
Most people have enough intuition to know what is meant by "class"--a couple of days ago, when a malicious Chris Matthews managed to stage a rude treatment of Ann Coulter, the crowd fussed and Matthews said, "Hey, is this Deliverance?"
Now, the non-sociology teachers among us know that he was calling the audience Poor White Trash, or rednecks, or uncultered bumpkins, but we all got the point pretty quick. It was a class insult from someone who obviously and mistakenly thinks he is socially/culturally/morally ascendent. The whole Deliverance story was a kind of class warfare, a confrontation between two ways of life in America.
It's true that Americans don't wear caste marks on their foreheads, which is something you seem to be insisting to allow for the existence of classes--but there are all kinds of degrees of class and class consciousness. Dare I say "nuance"--a word I've also come to hate by the misuse by liberals. By denying this, you certainly take a lot that is interesting away from the study of society. Veblen, Epstein (not a phD, but a darn good sociologist), even that simpy Brooks guy on the NYTs.
There'd be no Wharton, no Tom Wolfe, no Magaret Mitchell--without the consciousness of class.
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