Posted on 07/22/2002 12:30:48 PM PDT by Aurelius
I occasionally get some rather rude e-mail from those with a deep-rooted Yankee mentality in regard to my little web site. Usually the writer informs me, rather contemptuously that my web site is all wet, that it stinks, that the War of Northern Aggression was really fought to preserve slavery, that I am totally in error about Abraham Lincoln, who, in the writer's opinion, is really god, and on it goes. 'Those people' never offer historical argument to back up what they say [they can't] but they are quite accomplished at ridiculing others when they, themselves, don't have a clue about the historical accuracy of anything. No doubt many of them are cultural marxists and don't even realize it. But, then, no one has ever accused those with a Yankee mentality of being over-endowed with discernment. Let me say here, that when I refer to the Yankee mindset, I am not offering a blanket condemnation of all Northern folks, else I would also condemn myself. I know lots of good Northerners who would cringe at being thought of as Yankees, and I know some Southerners who, unfortunately, fit perfectly into the Yankee mold. What I am talking about has no connection whatever with where you were born.
I got a rather nice e-mail recently from a Southern-born Yankee type who crudely informed me that "Lincoln was right and J W. Booth, and R. E. Lee and Jeff Davis and the rest of the gang were murderers who all deserved to be hanged." You can really tell that this character did his homework - what historical insight! He then went on to inform me that he was a white man born in the South but was, "thankfully educated in California." Folks, I submit, that anyone today who is thankful for having been 'educated' in California the way this man seems to have been 'educated' is just not the brightest light in the harbor. He then informed me, in his infinite wisdom that I should 'get a life' beyond my web site and 'grow a brain.' He closed his tirade with the statement that Lincoln was the last of the good Republicans, and his parting salutation was 'Long live Bill Clinton.' Usually I don't bother replying to such sanctimonious drivel, but, in this man's case I made an exception. I e-mailed him back and told him that if people such as he didn't like my web site then I must be doing something right. I suppose I should have ended my reply to him with 'Have a nice day' but, for some unknown reason, I didn't bother to.
This individual is a perfect example of the Yankee mindset - smug, self-satisfied, egotistical, and totally ensconced within a sense of their own perfect rightness in all things and on all issues. Anyone daring to disagree with them has to be berated because 'those people' have got it all figured out - after all, their 'teachers' and 'college professors' dutifully informed them that the war was all about slavery and that Lincoln freed all the slaves, and the 'history' professor wouldn't lie - would he? Lincoln must be more astute than Jesus Christ because, after all, Lincoln came along more recently on the evolutionary scale didn't he?
I have had people that checked out my web site and disagreed with something they saw on it. Often they have contacted me and have been courteous enough to voice their opinions in a civil manner. Others have offered constructive criticism, which was all right, because I took it in the spirit in which it was given. I had a black man once that read one of my articles and took exception to it, stating that he was a Christian. I contacted him back, informing him that I was also a Christian and with Christian charity, I sought to correct the misconception that he had. Once he understood where I was coming from we were able to carry on a dialogue with no bad feeling on either side. Some folks will check out the site and come back with genuine questions about something. That's fine. I answer what I can historically [unlike the Yankees, I don't claim to have all the answers about everything] and I often try to pass these folks on to someone else that knows more than I do.
But there is a certain class of Yankees - often well 'educated' that are just so superior to the rest of us 'great unwashed' that they don't even feel the need to attempt courtesy. They howl about us 'rednecks' and what we write and tell us to 'get a life' yet the sum total of their 'life' seems to be wrapped up in demeaning those who dare to disagree with their vaunted opinions.
A while back, Professor Clyde Wilson wrote an excellent article in Southern Partisan magazine called The Yankee Problem in America. In it Professor Wilson took on such Yankee paragons or 'virtue' as Ted Kennedy, the man who never learned to drive over a bridge straight, and St. Hillary Clinton of 'Cattle Futures' fame. Wilson described such people as smug, self-righteous, above the rules the rest of us live by, and completely convinced that they are right in all things - right enough that they deserve the privilege of telling the rest of us how to live - all for 'our own good' of course [and just maybe for their profit.]
There is no place in the Yankee mindset for grace, courtesy, compassion, consideration of the feelings of others, or for any of those Scriptural virtues that have graced and improved our civilization in the past. The Yankee knows only complete self-righteousness and, in that self-righteousness he exhibits a certain perverse pleasure in seeking to trample on the feelings of those who dare to disagree with his elevated opinions. In most cases, the Yankee understanding of accurate history is about an inch deep, and therefore, he becomes little more than a 'useful idiot' that the cultural Marxist professor that 'educated' him can turn loose on the world for the total benefit of the New World Order.
Now that's funny, cause it seems to me that, exempting your little enclave on the left coast, all the major space flight installations are located in Dixie - the launch site is in Florida, mission control is in Texas, and rocket propulsion testing is in Mississippi.
I wasn't talking about launch sites or testing areas. Jezzzz.
Thanks to LBJ, dimwit.
Walt
What's the good of having spacecraft if you don't use them?
My comment was addressed to your bizarre and baseless portrayal of a purported technological shortcoming in the south versus california. You more or less suggested we've never seen a spacecraft or anything else that is "high tech" and are accordingly amazed by automobiles. I simply note the fact that practically all of NASA's major institutions are located in the south including the launch site and mission control. You can build em all you want but without us they don't fly.
As bad as he may have been, the man wasn't all evil. Then again, you're the one who probably voted for him.
The installation is about 150 miles northwest of Los Angeles California, and is presently operated by Air Force Space Command's 30th Space Wing. Vandenberg AFB is the only military base in the United States from which unmanned government and commercial satellites are launched into polar orbit. It is also the only site from which intercontinental ballistic missiles are test fired into the Pacific Ocean, and splash down at the Kwajalein Atoll within the Marshall Islands.
Sorry to pop your southern bubble
Just a little bit of space lore for you: the launch site is in Florida for geographical reasons, not for any intrinsic southern virtues.
First of all, it's the farthest-south spot in the CONUS (the farther south you go, the Earth's rotation contributes more velocity to the satellite, which increases throw weight for the rocket).
Second, Cape launches go over the ocean, which reduces the danger of debris damage on eastward launches. (Vandenberg AFB is used for high-inclination missions for the same reason: because the launch trajectory goes over water.)
Third, the Cape location allows water transportation of large parts such as Saturn V rocket sections.
As for Johnson and Stennis space centers, the names of the centers tell you exactly why they are where they are. LBJ pulled a lot of strings (and his wife coincidentally bought a lot of land in the area) to ensure that the Manned Spaceflight Center ended up in Houston. It could have been put just about anywhere, and probably should have been at Goddard.
You forgot Marshall SFC at Huntsville, BTW. MSFC is where it is because the Army originally had control of the missile program. They put Von Braun's folks at Redstone Arsenal because they'd decided that missiles were "artillery". And where better to put an artillery range than on a bunch of Alabama swamp land?
So how about FDR getting 70% + of the votes in Dixie four times straight back when blacks weren't even allowed to sit at a lunch counter let alone vote?
The South loves Federal pork more than any other region and FDR was the pork massser.
Right where Jules Verne said it would be 100 years earlier. Geography was the only reason for choosing the Florida coast, for the same reason the French launch from Guyana --- even closer to the equator. A politically positive side of the Space Program is that it did fill central Florida up with Republican "Damnyankee" engineers (including a number of my relatives) who helped to break the 100-year lock the Rats had on Florida politics.
Why don't you mention the influx of "damnyankee" Republicans moving into the South with funny names like Gingrich? The old Southern Democrat congress-critters-for-life got all the big defence and space projects located in their states, but along with those pork-dollars came a lot of soldiers, saliors, and engineers and such from the North who would vote Republican.
It's true that a few Southern states voted for Goldwater in 1964, but let's be honest about why. It was only because of his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, not because he was a small government conservative. They still wanted pork, they just didn't want to eat it at the same table as blacks.
Aside from your efforts to simply slam the South. I have mentioned on this forum a number of times that here in Nashville that the midwestern transplants tend to be more fiscally conservative than the local old timey Dems. The La La Landers we get here from Kalifornia are nearly all semi-Commies and at the vanguard of my enemies in the culture war..
Now let's take My evil homestate of Mississippi, there has hardly been any Yankee (other than black Yankees returning home) migration yet Republicans win nearly all state wide elections and have since the mid 70s after the old Dems ..Eastland and Stennis moved on. I suppose that too is because of racism...nothing to do with ideology aside from race. Race is a factor...it's factor everywhere but there are other issues as well...culture and taxation for instance.
BTw, I don't think Gingrich is a funny name. He was a decent leader but his personal life left him wide open to our enemies in the media.
Your attempt to deny that blacks in the South are largely responsible for Dems getting elcted these days due to their high population numbers is simply wishful thinking. The Deep South is the heaviest concentration of blacks in this country as a percentage of total population and they vote overwhlemingly Dem. They also control nearly all metro governments in the Deep South and their policies have had their effect.
It certainly took them long enough. And it's pretty much evidence that these essentialist theories of there being some particular "Yankee" character or some "Southern" set of virtues or ideas are wrong. The opposition is constant. North and South or New England and the Southeast tend to take opposite positions on the political spectrum. But those actual positions taken aren't constant over time. In the days of Bryan or Wilson a representative from Georgia or Oklahoma or Arkansas would generally have been more radical and less well inclined towards capitalism than one from Massachusetts or Vermont. Things have changed as regional and national dynamics have changed, and they may well change again, though the tension between Northeast and Southeast will probably remain as long as the country does.
If you look back to the 17th century, the first Puritans were by and large the middle classes, craftsmen, mechanics, farmers and small landholders resentful of the rich. There have been criticisms of this view, but it still holds up in many ways. These were the people who settled New England. The cavaliers who settled Virginia were the other side. One could trace the present day Yankee-Rebel animosities back to those days.
What's interesting is that the Southern backcountry Celts took up the battle. To be sure, they had reason to hate or dislike Cromwell's Puritans, but little reason to love the Cavalier squirarchy of the Tidewater or lowland slaveowners. So there's always a dichotomy in anti-Yankee rants like the one that set off this discussion. They begin with the backcountry's antipathy towards the haughty, egotistical, smug, Northerners and Easterners, but often end in a really contemptuous looking down one's nose at Yankee upstarts. That's because the cavalier-highlander opposition squints through the North-South one. Secede and the South has its own inborn sectional-ethnic-class conflict waiting for the next generation of propagandists.
The same tension between high and low is also visible in the New England Tradition. For generations, the Highlanders of Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire had little love lost for Boston's wealthy Unitarians, though both voted heavily Republican. What's happened in New England since 1960 has been as much the end of old New England as any continuing evolution of the Yankee ethos. Except for the occasional Weld or Jeffords the voice of New England in today's politics is anything but "Yankee" in the sense of Anglo-Saxon Protestant, let alone Puritan: Kennedy, Leahy, Dodd, Kerry (O.K. Kerry's half Yankee, but all the more a deviant for his mixed origins).
But if you are looking for that Puritan spirit that inspired generations of Englanders and New Englanders, you'll find something of it in the evangelicals of the South, and much of it in the Mormons of Utah, where the cousins of New England and New York Yankees and Minnesota Scandinavians pursue a very different politics from those who stayed East.
The same sort of long-standing oppositions are also visible in other parts of the world. Englishmen and Frenchmen, Frenchmen and Germans will never be mistaken for one another. But the Frenchman of 1814 or 1840 was warlike and bullying. The German of those years was sweet-tempered, ineffectual and devoted to philosophy and music. A century later in 1914 or 1940 the countries had switched characters. The Englishman of 1870 or 1880 could look down on the Frenchman who still hadn't come to grips with modernity and the political, technological and economic problems of the day. Many a Frenchman in 1970 or 1980 looked down on his English contemporary for exactly the same reason. The wise Englishman, Frenchman or German understands how things change even as they stay the same. It's the fools who promoted wars on the basis of immutable national characters.
Rather than keep promoting sectional conflict and animosities, we might recognize that at different times different regions or classes or groups might promote or attack liberty, act responsibly or irresponsibly and help or hurt the republic. Surely it takes more energy to go on fighting what one takes to be a hundred, or two hundred or four hundred years' war than to work with people from different regions in the present day.
But there is something of a quirky revenge in this revival of confederatism. For a generation, people have told libertarians not to be so narrow, dogmatic, ideological or rationalistic, and to respect institutions and traditions more. Now some of them are far less dogmatic, ideological and rationalistic about libertarianism, and have come to respect a tradition, though the one they've latched on to is surprising, and far from libertarian in the end.
I don't know much about Boston, but let's again be honest. The schools in Boston were not segregated the way schools in the South were. No black kids were denied admission to a school in his neighborhood because of his race. That is exactly what happened in most of Dixie. Those kids in Little Rock in the 50s lived a few blocks from the school but were denied admission because of their race. That did not happen in any northern city that I am aware of. Boston's neighborhoods like many northern cities, where highly ethnic and 'self-segregated'. The neighborhood schools reflected those housing patterns. The 'fights' in Boston were when a Federal judge decided to bus kids past their neighborhood school across town to enforce an artificial racial quota plan. It had nothing to do with unequal access to education. The same thing happened in most Northern cities even in cities like Pittsburgh where there was no such thing as an all-white or all black school. You went to the school in your district --- no exceptions!
Federal judges (LBJ and Carter appointees) suddenly decided that every school should reflect the racial percentages of the entire district and neighborhood schools were destroyed while millions were wasted on transportation that could have gone to education. What were once outstanding public schools for all children, black and white, have been turned into nothing but toys for Federal judges. But what got that ugly ball rolling was Southern governments passing laws that denied government services to people because of race. You can't wrap yourself in the constitution with one hand while defending southern governments who were violating the very spirit of that constitution with the other.
The South from which I was spawned...Mississippi...is aside from the coast...almost all Scots/Irish and English. The geneology behind class distinctions amongst whites has been diluted markedly since antebellum days. In those days from what I've read, the gentry would have no doubt been lacking roundheads, yet the transplanted Scots hence Irish who came here in droves in Cromwell's aftermath would appear to have let their resentment of Yankee do-goodery overide lingering hostility to the Restorers . One could even today draw similar observations. Good thing too...at least for these threads on this forum. LOL
I suppose the Southies in Boston welcomed all those black children with open arms and hugs and kisses. Why must Yankee do-gooders always ride such lofty steeds?
Problem is this in a nutshell. You Yankees and all your wonderful altruism is so shallow and ignorant. Most of you guys know very little about race. You rarely have to confront the issue. Folks in the deep South deal with it daily and have since the cotton gin was invented. Unless you are black (can't remember) or live in the South Bronx or the like, you are simply breast beating swelling with all that virtue garbage that sort of goes back to X's comments about Yankee puritan stock.
My daughters (by my ex)live in Sudbury Mass. The only blacks they EVER see in person are when they go into Boston proper(Newberry st) to shop or the handful they see at their school who are bused in if they qualify grade-wise. In such a sterile environment like most Yankees live in race-wise, it's easy for them to make blanket judgment and think they know it all.
I lived in Manhattan for 6 years as my home base. The poor blacks there did not seem to me to have it any better than poor blacks down home and they were a lot more pissed off at whitey. Fix your own mess first and then buzz me.
I was born and raised in an integrated blue-collar neighborhood, had black friends and playmates from my earliest memories, went to school with them from 1st grade on, played ball with them, went through scouts with them, have black neighbors in my suburban neighborhood from the day the plan was built, work with them every day and even hang out in a local bar that has black regulars --- so take your stereotype of us damnyankees, mix it with some grits and put it on the shelf with your “South will rise again” myths.
BTW. I don’t have a damn altruistic bone in my body. I do have a deep and abiding respect for the Constitution of the United States, and what the south did to blacks through the Jim Crow century was inexcusable. It doesn’t matter one iota if you, I, or those folks in Boston love, hate, or or totally indifferent to blacks. Those are private decisions, which have no impact on other people as long as the law is respected. But no government, Federal, state or local, has the Constitution right to discriminate against citizens because of race and that is precisely what Jim Crow was --- legally mandated segregation and it was rightly ruled to be Unconstitutional. That politicians in the south usurped the honorable title of “Conservative” while pandering to racial fear and hatred is the reason that blacks vote 90% Rat today. Government discrimination against any citizen is not a states rights issue. Even though the segregationists like Fullbright and Gore of the 50s and 60s were all big-government socialist Democrats, the conservative label they usurped by invoking “states rights” costs real conservatives the support we deserve from black Americans. On most issues, blacks will agree with us, most of the time. But the “Conservative” label makes the run away, and I can’t really blame them.
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