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.
But there would be America. Which is more immportant to you? Chris Matthews likes to put on airs, but that is all it is.
I agree that we misuse the term liberal. Moonbat works for me.
Oh, where is that bunny with a pancake on his head?
Overlooking the patronizing use of "y'all" in your reply, as a matter of fact, he wasn't correcting a mistake, he was running from a fight with the NAACP, which wanted to stereotype him as a string-tie, Colonel Sanders planter and/or pickup-truck-driving Negro-dragger.
Gary Bledsoe of the Texas NAACP tried to pick a fight with Bush in 2000 about a couple of bronze plaques on public buildings that had been erected (in one case at least) with funds left over from the Confederate veterans' relief funds (the ones usually appropriated for e.g. artificial limbs -- Mississippi was spending 20% of their budget in the 1870's that way). Bledsoe wanted to play bloody-shirt politics, and so Bush redefined himself as a "southwesterner" not a Southerner, n/w/s that Crawford is quite securely located in the part of the State that, fully settled and populated by then, seceded from the Union in 1860.
If he had wanted out from under the hostile and pejorative assignment of Southernness, he could have claimed that he was a Connecticut Yankee with roots in Kennebunkport, Maine, instead -- but he didn't. Instead, he threw over the millions of other Texans who are Southerners, and disowned them by trying to invent a new distinction without a difference, of a "southwestern" white Texan who somehow isn't "Southern". Nice work if you can get it.
In essence he said, "no, no -- of course, yes there are millions of other white Texans over there who are a bunch of racist, knuckledragging crackerheads -- but I'm not one of them; I'm southwestern, not a crackerhead like them!" Which is a nice way to stand up for your neighbors, something that people in the upper reaches of the Republican party seem particularly good at not doing whenever the 'Rats decide they want to play ugly.
Loyalty works both ways, Bob.
To show a substantial difference between the circumstances, worldviews, and prospects of two different social groups is not necessarily freighted with disdain. It is also just the opposite of ignorance, but the product of observation and application of one's native intelligence.
I really disagree with your statement.
As for the differences between lower-income freehold farmers -- Jefferson's yeomanry -- and the Tidewater planter aristocracy of the Federal period, whole forests have rendered up their cellulose to historians who have busied themselves pointing out the salience of these group differences to American history and politics both then and later.
Yes. And it was still going on today, if you caught Fox's Beltway Boys. Mort and Fred were seething, fuming--almost as if they were angry men, or something--using the new "n" word (nativist) to characterize the CLASS (yep, CLASS) of folks they also described as "Right Wing Talk Radio Types."
No, I don't take cable.
Mort and Fred were seething, fuming--almost as if they were angry men, or something--using the new "n" word (nativist) to characterize the CLASS (yep, CLASS) of folks they also described as "Right Wing Talk Radio Types."
I assume you mean Morton Kondracke and Fred Barnes. Freddie's formerly Wall Street Journal (may still be there) and drank the OBL Kool-Aid years ago there. Robert Bartley was in the habit, before 9/11, of writing editorials that demanded that the GOP add a plank to the party platform that would read something like, "The Constitution of the United States shall be amended to read, 'There shall be open borders.'" That turned me off the WSJ. If there were a brain drain and people were leaving the States in droves for employment elsewhere, they'd change their tune. What they really want the Constitution to read is, "Wages shall be in the sole discretion of employers." We've already seen the appearance of negative wages in the form of "tipping out", which is common in the restaurant business. I don't think you could get the Wall Street Journal to condemn slavery -- as long as you called it something else.
“Even Jimmah Cahtar did not do our country this much harm! “
O RLY?
Simply speaking the truth plainly and clearly is neither vanity nor a rant..
W
While it is true that that North and North East Texas were settled by people from the upper South, the Sothern parts of the state were primarily from the Lower South.
Where you from, Boy?
"Of all the complaints you could make about the man, this is perhaps one of the silliest.
You've got that right!
Sorry, Aunt Jemima is hiding in the closet. She’s not PC, so there will be no more pancakes for bunnies. :)
George W. Bush's first opponent was Kent Hance, an alumnus of Texas Tech, an entirely different university than Texas A&M but one in which West Texans take a lot of pride. Like George Wallace, who was defeated in his first bid for the Alabama governorship because he was a moderate on racial matters and thereafter decided never to be "out-n______ed" again, the younger Bush came to realize that the stigma of his family's Eastern roots had to be overcome if he were to succeed in statewide politics.
Good rant. Valid points. Bush has used what little political capital he may have gained from winning the 2004 election, and is now mired himself (much like his daddy did) in a huge political deficit bordering on bankruptcy. His actions re: illegal aliens proves that elitism is alive and well in both political parties. We the people must remove this behavior from our government and replace it with leaders that represent the conservative will of the people.
Boy do you have to stretch anything he says to find an insult??
Pray for W and Our Troops
I have to agree with you. It was a silly complaint. I am a native Texan and we don't really consider ourselves Southerners. We are Texans first and foremost. And Texas does make up a large part of the US southwest so I don't see the problem with what Bush said.
I liked this so much I'm stealing it. There's a good thread started on "The Selfishness of the Chamber of Commerce."
I just got back from the Alamo this evening. I picked my kids up from their grandparents is Mason and we went to San Antonio to the Alamo. My son is six so I figured he would appreciate it. Maybe I will post some pics.
However accurate that might be, I do not believe that this factored into the President’s statement. I find it extremely offensive that his statement would be twisted for political gain.
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