Rude, Crude Yankees = Good Useful Idiots

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.

You have a point that "residential segregation" has been greater in the North than in the South. The Black population was smaller and more peripheral, so it was easier to "contain" it in various neighborhoods. Especially so, since other ethnic groups, -- Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews -- seemed to have their own turf. The other side of the coin is that legal segregation was greater in the South.

But talk of the Boston busing conflict has a musty air not so far different from Civil War and nullification chatter. It must have made a major impression in the 1970s on those who'd lived through the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s, but it produces more of an "of course" or a "ho hum" reaction today. I don't know if the Richmond and Charlotte busing conflicts of the same era produced violence, but they certainly produced ill-feeling. Today, we see those conflicts more in a national light.

Is there any popular perception that racial tensions and hostility are less in the North than in the South? I'd say now that the popular perception is the opposite. The feeling is that Blacks have more of a stake and have taken more of a role or a place in the South than in the polyglot, impersonal North. This perception doesn't translate into a tolerance for slaveowners and segregationists, though. The idea of some seems to be that we have to keep discovering Northern vices in order to excuse Southern ones, but most Americans today see them as different aspects of the same American problems.

It does seem to be the case that in a city like Boston or Philadelphia the races are more separated, but are contemporary residential patterns in metropolitan Atlanta or Houston or Charlotte or Richmond really so different from those in the North? I don't know. My guess, though is that what gets attacked as "Northern" patterns of racial distribution is more like the modern suburban norm. One can certainly deplore that pattern if one wishes, but I get the feeling that the differences between the modern or post-modern, industrial or post-industrial North and South are more marginal than significant.

I suppose one can say that Boston or Detroit or Philadelphia are colder and more hostile than Southern cities if one wishes, but this perception will be tested and strained by current developments: the growth of sunbelt cities, gated communites and immigrant populations in the South.

Yankees and Southerners will be clashing culturally for quite some time to come and you guys will always think you are morally superior and we will think you are not.

I have never said such a thing and don't see myself as morally superior or southerners as being lacking. This is about politics and this Yankee vs. Rebel thing is politics and it is important that history be accurately depicted. Jim Crow was wrong for any number of reasons, but the most important being that it was against the premise of this nation --- that all men are created equal. Pretending that all the problems that we face today are the result of meddling "Yankee" politicians is pure balony. The whiplash we face now on Civil Rights and liberties and the resultant power usurped by leftist courts is the result of 100 years of Southern politicians abusing the Constitution and ignoring fundamental liberties. The pendulum has swung far to the other side. That abuse gave conservatism an undeserved bad name, and defending it or excusing it does nothing to change the situation for the future. It only polarizes the situation to the benefit of the left. Like it or not, the Rebel flag became a symbol of Jim Crow. The “Yankees” didn’t do that. It was pandering Democrat big-government southern politicians in the 50s and 60s who wrapped themselves in it as a “middle finger” to the courts and the rest of the nation. That flag doesn’t bother me one way or another, but many millions of people took grubby pols like George Wallace, Orval Faubus and Lestor Maddox serious. They think that flag stands for segregation. That’s not my fault, but it is reality and the NAACP will play it for all it’s worth.

Lockheed Martin missiles & space Operations, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., has successfully built and orbited more than 875 spacecraft for military, civil government and international commercial markets. The company's satellite systems are revolutionizing global communications, delivering extensive and timely weather information, exploring the universe and furnishing new data for thousands of scientists studying our Earth environment.

That's nice but irrelevant and demonstrates you are STILL missing the point. You implied that the south was composed of technologically backwards who had never seen a space flight and therefore were fascinated by cars.

The heavy presence of the space program, which is almost exclusively located in the south, suggests very strongly otherwise.

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.

Really? Cause the most conservative Republican area of Florida, at least as it stands today, appears to be in the Panhandle. While the yankees you speak of potentially contribute to GOP victories there, the benefit they give is more than offset by the much larger and more vocal contingent of left wing democrat yankee socialist retirees occupying the regions around Palm Beach County.

Why are you so obsessed with us?

LOL. I could care less about your "heritage". It means about as much to me as some of the local Slovac, Greek, Hungarian or other ethnic heritage feasts in my area --- nothing. (Well the Greeks do have good food at theirs, but the music sucks.)

But I do care about the future of the conservative movement in this country and when I see one 'aggrieved" group claiming that conservatism must include an attachment to a defunct system that disenfranchised millions of my fellow citizens --- I care a whole hell of a lot about setting the record straight.

Of course talk of Boston or the NYC draft riots is musty. So is going on and on about Jim Crow. Where one lives in the South is today based primarily on wealth. The South simply has more blacks and many are poor and they tend to live in clusters big and small. Here in Nashville where blacks are 20% of the city proper and 8% of metro which is small by Southern standards, blacks and whites in the lower economic strata are more and more living in the same environs and unfortunately adopting the lesser desirable traits of each other. I guess you could call that progress.

Likewise, wealthier blacks may live wherever they wish. It is only an issue here or elsewhere including the North when an area is in decline and poorer minorities move in. It's not a good sign for property values. That's just a fact. My hometown (Jackson)has turned into an East St Louis clone over the past 20 years and it's only going to get worse.

I think that racial distribution in housing today has little to do with race. It's just about money. Folks do usually wish to hang with their own kind the world over but I haven't seen any overt attempts at that in a long time around here. A real estate broker would have to be nuts to openly discriminate or discriminate in a subtle pattern in homeselling around here. Even the hint of it can ruin you. Now a number of brokers have been accused of white flight provocation in Deep South cities where declining home values in certain areas are ripe for this. They sell the black family's home moving "up" from the current ghetto, then they sell the white folks fleeeing from the declining old neighborhood which is soon to be ghetto-ized, and then they get to sell the whites their new home in the burbs. It's an opportunistic cycle. Here in Nashville, that is rarely an issue. It's more in the opposite direction were gentrification is overtaking decayed neighborhoods. They are so desperate in some areas, they will even gentrify and encircle a set of projects that was once deemed to be in an appropriate lower income area in which to place projects. Pockets of entrenched poverty in a sea of prosperity. It's nutty. Reminds me of when fancy co-ops started in Alphabet City in NYC.

Oddly, the Jackson busing alluded to caused no civil unrest but it sure prompted a surge in private schools which continues today.

I hope your efforts are rewarded....maybe some kind of "setting the record straight" prize.

I'm sure glad I don't feel the same compunction to set the Yankee "record straight". I only respond to you and Huck , and Non Seq and Walt and Pitt and Ravingson Lunatic and Mortin Sult (or whatever he is this week) when I feel compelled to defend against your inaccuracies in attempting to "set the record straight" for the benefit of the conservative movement.

Otherwise like you I could give a sh!te.

Throwing a few satellites into orbit hardly compares with actual manned space missions. Everybody throws satellites into orbit these days. Heck, France and the Euros frequently do it from places in the third world!

Hey lumberhead, I was responding to post # 57. Another southern boy was shooting off his mouth saying California wasn't nothing and that the south makes stock cars and other bull $hit.

Then you decided to argue with me about the west coast contributions to aerospace when I told him that I was more impressed with spacecraft traveling at 27 miles a second, than freaking cars going around in circles at 180 mph.

Only a fool or an idiot would attempt to debate California's major, cutting edge, leading contributions to aerospace, satellite developments, mans fist trip the lunar surface etc. etc etc. LOL! And you attempted to do just this. Hehehe....

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.

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

I could list 10 other companies that are the worlds biggest, heavy hitters in cutting edge aerospace and spacecraft design technology, that are right in in California, but I wont waste any more time with you.

You obviously bit off more than you can chew, and it's making you look rather foolish.

Considering the southern location of the space program's major institutions, that is simply not true. Got it?

No, I don't "got it." You're claiming that because the space program has sites in the South, that the South is not technologically backward. That's no different from claiming that the South is intellectually advanced precisely because it has space centers. If that were so, Guyana would a technological powerhouse because Ariane launches from there.

In reality, the mere location of a space center in the south has nothing to do with the question either way. The mere presence of buildings and wires don't tell us a thing about Southerners' technical savvy.

Remember, the sites themselves were selected either for purely technical reasons (KSC), military jurisdiction (MSFC), or political patronage (JSC). And the fact that they're there simply means that people will have to move to the South in order to work those sorts of projects; and that Southerners will have a chance to work there without moving. There was nothing explicitly "Southern" that made these the inevitable locations.

Still, let us grant your point for the sake of argument -- that the South is technologically up-to-par because it has space centers.

But if we grant your point, it's actually quite damaging to your underlying position: most of the really serious space stuff occurs almost entirely outside of the South:

* Rockets are built in Colorado, California, and Utah
* Satellites are built in Colorado, California, and Arizona
* Most of the really serious space missions are controlled from Maryland, California, and Colorado

So if the presence of space centers is an indication of technological prowess, the fact that the manufacture and control of serious programs occurs almost entirely outside the South has to indicate that the South has no ability to support such things.

The real question -- which is not addressed by this discussion -- is whether the old Southern culture lent itself to the sort of technological prowess you've claimed it has. That's harder to answer, but it is true that the ante-bellum South had very little in the way of an industrial base. This suggests that Southern culture was not particularly engaged -- and probably disinterested -- with the accumulation of technological knowledge, which is vital to the creation of an industrial base.

The real question -- which is not addressed by this discussion -- is whether the old Southern culture lent itself to the sort of technological prowess you've claimed it has.

Uhhhh........the first coke machines were made in Chattanooga, Tennessee. HOWZAT for technological prowess?! ;-)

They are building the F-22 at Martin Marietta here in Atlanta at the same location they built B-29's in 1944-45.

This kind of carping is all kind of wacky. Certainly the feds decided where a lot of these facilities would go. It's nothing to do with native intellectual prowess or anything like that. This wierd seque is driven, as so many are, by southern defensiveness.

Walt

Washington would never have tried to keep a state from seceding with force, and Madison wouldn't have either.

http://jamesostrowski.com/secession.html

"In fact, the Constitutional Convention considered and rejected a provision that would have authorized the use of Union force against a recalcitrant state. On May 31, 1787, the Convention considered adding to the powers of Congress the right: "to call forth the force of the union against any member of the union, failing to fulfil its duty under the articles thereof."29 The clause was rejected after James Madison spoke against it:

"A Union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State, would look more like a declaration of war, than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound." - James Madison

George Washington, of course, was President of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, that adopted this stance that Madison articulated so well.

Lincoln's audacious savagery would have appalled them both. But again, I wish Lincoln had lived after the war, to check the radical republicans' annihilation of the States.

Washington, of course, also owned slaves, but he was not malevolent to them. That's the real objection all you radical neo-abolitionists have, when you get right down to it: Malevolence toward the slaves. Not simply slavery per se. We've got Slavery. Still. It's imposed by the US Tax code, but since beatings and castrations aren't witnessed in that institution, it just goes on and on and on - the unjust taking of the fruit of one's labor. How little things really change. Be it state or federal governments - they always get around to levying unjust burdens (like requiring you to decipher a 15 million page tax code, if you make more than the average, and have a desire to obey the tax law and pay the minimum required) and take property without compensation. It gets worse and worse until the next revolution, when the big State has to be overthrown/disolved because its power has become too concentrated. You'll forgive me if I yawn at your beloved American Union government's obliteration of my beloved American States.

Washington would never have tried to keep a state from seceding with force, and Madison wouldn't have either.

Hard to square that with GW's calling for an "immovable attachment" to the national union. It's also hard to square with the Militia Act of 1792, passed at his request, with the wording that he wanted, that required that United States law operate in all the states.

As for Madison:

"The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemies to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one, as the serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise."

-James Madison, 1834

I don't find your statement well supported in the record.

Walt

If disenfranchisement bothers you, you must be extremely bothered by the Squalid 14th Amendment, which was imposed on the States unconstitutionally:

"Section. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Section. 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." -- the illegally ratified 14th Amendment, emphasis added.

In other words - "We the Congress can define you out of the electorate by calling you a rebel, and don't have to count you in the census if we don't want to, and We the Congress can keep your state from being able to re-elect you to our club up here in Washington, if we don't like the way you thought about the Union Party, before the war. We the Congress have saved the Union in this way. How do you like our new Union? Better than the old Union we saved? We had to modify that "liberty of conscience" stuff the Founders were so hung up on. But - you'll see how much more wisdom we yankeeradicals have than they did."

Reconstruction was a failure.

I'm beginning to understand the complex and sophisticated neo-yankee radical's philosophy of life:

White southern disenfranchisement - good!

Black southern disenfranchisement - bad!

But hey - wasn't that the mantra of the gore campaign down in Florida a couple years ago?

I don't find your statement well supported in the record.

Oh. well then allow me to repost the record:

http://jamesostrowski.com/secession.html

Madison seems pretty clear, and in the record. Maybe you just don't like the record.

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