The tribe of the old South (which ain’t just confined to the old South) is powerful in its ability to paper over the deepest problems, maintaining the status quo with only the most minor cosmetic changes.
Eliminating our hate flag, if it happens, won’t change a widespread national social and economic system of stealing labor, human rights abuse, marginalization, the maintenance of a labor force kept in poverty, suppression and imprisonment.
And pointing to Dixie’s right-to-work environment and payment of tax abatement bribes to businesses like Google aren’t signs of progress.
“Lured by the South’s call of cheap land and labor and limited regulations, businesses have flocked here from around the world,” reads the Times, hailing rapid change and an allegedly less predatory South. “Small businesses that have exploded into major corporations, most notably Walmart are now throwing their weight around …”
Boy howdy!
Recall, from this blog, the long commemoration of all things Civil War in the national media just a couple months ago, summarized in “Why No Burning of Atlanta Re-enactment?” —
Germany was de-Nazified and rebuilt. And Army General Douglas MacArthur reconstructed Japan, removing its worship of [warlords] and instituting land reform to break up a system dependent on rich owners served by tenant farmers. Emperor Hirohito was not tried as a war criminal. But he was made a figurehead, his status as a deity expunged.
The thought experiment is an obvious one: Construct an alternate history in which the states of the Confederacy went through a similar process. Not one in which an entire mythology built on the imaginary nobility of a lost cause took root, slavery was repackaged through re-branding and immoral legal installations with the cooperation of southern money and industry in the need to maintain a labor force in poverty, of no social status, presumed inferiority and living in fear with no recourse.
Today’s quote, from Ann Coulter, on what is probably a bog standard belief among the dead-enders:
The Confederate flag we’re talking about never flew over an official Confederate building. It was a battle flag. It is to honor Robert E. Lee. And anyone who knows the first thing about military history, knows that there is no greater army that ever took the field than the Confederate Army.
This is what you might call overcompensation from the tribe which, today, is still very aggrieved over defeat long ago.
Anyway, “Pickett’s Charge,” comes to mind. Against a second string Union commander, that was certainly a brilliant tactical stroke.
Without getting into the weeds on military details, I recommend Shelby Foote’s excellent three volume history of the Civil War. Reading it is a serious investment of time but also something of a thorough education. Foote was born in Mississippi.
And from Kleagle Ted Nugent, more expertise on the Lost Cause:
One metro Detroit native who’s been known to sport T-shirts featuring the Confederate flag is “Motor City Madman??? musician Ted Nugent.
But, he said, he wouldn’t raise the flag, or wear it, today.
The Confederate flag, Nugent told WWJ’s Laura Bonnell, did not in any way represent hate in his earlier days as a performer.
“Back when I would wear a Confederate flag on stage — along with an American flag and a POW flag and a ‘Don’t tread on me’ flag — I would be on tour with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and there wasn’t a racist thought to be found,??? Nugent said.
[Colloquially, this is watcha call “a likely story.”]
The issue with the flag, Nugent said, is more about political correctness than anything else.
Nugent said to some the flag is simply about the history of the south, and defended those who defend its continued display.
“I have to acknowledge — I think we all do — there’s an awful lot of information, an awful lot of people out there that believe the stars and bars, the Confederate flag, represents something heroic and something worth standing up for.???
Haven’t had much to say over the past week or so and it should be obvious why.
WhiteManistan, at its best, again horrifically showing the world racism is still very much part of our DNA, that the South still wages the Civil War, and the taint of it is in virtually every aspect of civil life and the economy.
It really isn’t a surprise, now, is it that the party of hate, and the politicians of South Carolina had to be dragged into voicing that the Confederate flag ought to be taken down in Columbia?
From here we can expect more foot-dragging, fingers crossed behind the back, perhaps much stalling and action taken in bad faith. We expect them to be as bad as they are.
WhiteManistan can’t fix itself. The dead-enders will see to it. They have locked up the American federal government and enervated the spirit and psyche so thoroughly the shooting of African-Americans is a normal day’s experience.
America is a place where the phrase, Southern by the Grace of God, has been polished into a vibrant cultural touchstone, a shibboleth that disinfected the Confederacy into a noble cause, a source of pride. It’s a continuing exclamation that Dixie is special, more special than any place else, so special that to be of it is virtuous in itself. But only if you’re the right kind of person, something that’s not going to change even if they’re forced to give up Confederate flags.
It’s slightly heartening when America’s big business has come to the conclusion it’s not good commerce to sell flags and souvenirs of hate, if only for a moment until the skies clear. But we shouldn’t give it too much credit. It’s done only out of a calculation that, for now, it’s just bad overall business.
What will happen in South Carolina, or the other southern states deeply invested in their blighted romanticism? You’d be a fool to be optimistic.
All you can find is this, lifted from a Google copy, one you can’t reach through the cache:
Daniel Bledsoe, a construction worker, said the idea [of taking down the flag] was “kind of like treasonry.??? “ I’m proud of my history,??? Mr. Bledsoe, 22 …
Treasonry. Great word.
Hillary Clinton, being herself on the campaign trail, which is to say not particularly good, three days ago:
“You can’t watch massacre after massacre and not come to the conclusion that, as President Obama said, we must tackle this challenge with urgency and conviction,??? she said. “I lived in Arkansas, I lived in upstate New York, I know that gun ownership is part of the fabric of a lot of law-abiding communities, but I also know that we can have common-sense gun reforms that keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and the violently unstable while respecting responsible gun owners.???
“Race remains a deep fault line in America,??? she said. “We need to be cities, states and a country that’s too busy to hate.???
You understand where the GOP candidates come from. The bigots are theirs, southern by the grace of God, the most loyal base.
But Hillary Clinton lived here, she lived there, she’s lived everywhere. Just like me.
So make “a country that’s too busy to hate.”
It’s just bizarre. The problem with racism in this country is that people, cities and states aren’t busy enough? We’ll just busy ourselves out of the nation’s original sin. When we are sufficiently industrious, it will all disappear.
Who would think that? Who would even think to say it. Who came up with it? A Clinton, it appears. Hillary Clinton is an aircraft carrier of the finest grade of iron pyrite, a disaster.
“It’s an effort to show the public that we are different, and that we’re trying to change the public perception of what militia groups and survival groups and prepper groups are,??? Luntz said.
Some of the people at the Talkeetna gathering make no secret of their negative feelings about the current administration on social media. Facebook posts include anti-taxation and Benghazi links, along with a photo of ranks of Chinese United Nations forces, captioned “Bring it.???
“We could wake up one day and have an electromagnetic pulse detonation over our state and lose all power and communications and the next thing we know is we got aircraft overhead,??? he said. “That’s a stretch. But it is a possibility.???
“One [session] scheduled for Sunday provided tips on defending against armored personnel carriers,” it reads.
While there aren’t many in this particular group, 20 – 25 by the newspaper reading, many, it says, are ex-military men.
There are the usual nice pictures of white guys in full combat gear, running across a field, weapons raised, while staging a commando assault or, perhaps, a counter-attack against invaders.
Continual warfare in the Middle East, a nuclear Iran, electromagnetic-pulse weapons, emerging pathogens, and terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction variously threaten the United States, some with catastrophe on a scale we have not experienced since the Civil War. Nevertheless, these are phenomena that bloom and fade, and that, with redirection and augmentation of resources we possess, we are equipped to face, given the wit and will to do so.
But then the unthinkable happens and a terrorist detonates a smart bomb. You awake to no lights, coffee, computer or refrigeration. Your car will not start and your phone will not call.
This would go on for months.
Today, everything has computer chips and digital makeup that can be destroyed with “smart??? bombs or non-nuclear electromagnetic pulses (NNEMP).
A NNEMP is a device that causes an electronic pulse that can wipe out all digital-based smart technology when activated near a critical digital or electrical device. It can fit in a suitcase or be deployed by a remotely operated drone.
So unthinkable it’s written or talked about in major media a few times each week.
An even more deadly scenario would be an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP. An EMP instantly wipes out all electronics. This means that cars won’t start because of the electronic ignition system; radios, television sets, computers, phones and other communications equipment would be dead; and the rest of the nation’s electrical grid would be down. Imagine that. America would be sent back to the Dark Age, quite literally. All it would take is three to four nuclear detonations in the atmosphere over America.
If you thought the zombie apocalypse was bad, then you should think again. A TV show called “Jericho??? chronicled a devastating nuclear attack on the U.S. and an EMP. This is a possibility if we allow Iran to develop nuclear capabilities.
So why then is our government allowing such a deal to be made?
America needs to wake up before our way of life is gone. An Iran with nuclear capabilities is a threat to the United States and needs to be dealt with before everything we love is destroyed.
If Obama seriously thinks climate change is a more urgent threat to national security than the Islamic State, al Qaida, al Nusra, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Boko Haram, al Shabaab, the Houtis, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Putin in Ukraine or the escalating China-Japan confrontation in the South China Sea, his judgment is so profoundly haywire that Congress should consider invoking the 25th Amendment (that’s the one dealing with presidential disability) and replace him with Joe Biden.
There is a very compelling national security argument for the deployment of solar and wind energy systems and for a much more decentralized electricity production and distribution system without ever uttering the words “climate change.???
Big, centralized power plants and regional scale grids are sitting ducks for enemy attack by terrorism, conventional sabotage, cyber sabotage and attacks with electromagnetic pulse weapons. The last affect whole regions of the country and frog march tens of millions of Americans back into the good old days.
“Climate change is the worst problem facing the world today. We have no more important issue in the world than this issue, period,??? Nevada senior Sen. Harry Reid once said on the floor of the Senate.
At one of Reid’s clean energy confabs, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton opined on climate change, “This is the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face as a nation and a world.
[But what] if the power grid melted down? The water would stop flowing. Fuel pumps at the corner gas station would not work. Banks would close. Communications would be interrupted. No refrigeration.
If the power remained off for months, it is estimated as much as 90 percent of the population of the U.S. might die from starvation, disease and social tumult.
There are a number of things that could actually cause such a scenario — terrorism, solar flare or an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) caused by the detonation of a relatively small nuclear bomb in the atmosphere.
There’s more. But I think these constitute enough inspirational thinking from the heartlands of freedom for today, no?
The purpose of this writing is to encourage as many readers as possible to create their own lifesaving children’s event to counterpunch the embarrassing self-inflicted scourge of political correctness that is on the fast track to further dumb-down more American children with such lies and scams as animal rights, anti-hunting and anti-gun propaganda flooding from the media, our government and academia nationwide.
As we have learned for 25 years, it does indeed take some serious effort and sacrifice, but I can assure you that there is nothing available in the world today that will spike kids’ attention like the discipline of the various shooting sports, the magic of trapping and taxidermy …
I found that men — the vast majority of gun owners are men — may also carry weapons as a reaction to a broader socioeconomic decline.
Frankie, a retired Detroiter, told me that in the 70s he got “a job at General Motors, and they were hiring people off the street with zero education, and they could work for 20 years, and they could make a living. You can’t do that now.”
As men doubt their ability to provide, their desire to protect becomes all the more important. They see carrying a gun as a masculine duty and the gun itself as a vehicle for a hardened kind of care-work — catering for others by shielding them from danger, with the threat of lethal force.
The gun rights platform is not just about guns. It’s also about a crisis of confidence in the American dream. And this is why gun control efforts ignite such intense backlashes. Restrictions are received as a personal affront to men who find in guns a sense of duty, relevance and even dignity.
The constant libertarian assault on the radio, in newspapers, on the television, this drumbeat of anti-government discourse is an old story – but still very important for understanding the anarcho-liberal sensibility. Just tune in to AM radio late on a weekday evening and listen to the anti-government vitriol. It’s sort of wild.
Someone could do an interesting study, Ph.D., in unpacking the cultural history of all this. It is tempting to speculate that deindustrialization, having disempowered and made anxious many huge sections of the working class, opens the way for fantasies of empowerment. The anti-statist, rugged individualist common sense is also always simultaneously a fantasy of empowerment. White men are particularly vulnerable to these fantasies. The classic guy who calls into the batshit crazy, late night, right-wing talk radio show is a middle-aged White man. Listen closely to the rage and you hear fantasies of independence. In this rhetoric, guns and gun rights become an obviously phallic symbol of individual empowerment, agency, self worth, responsibility etc.
We need to drastically restructure the state. We need it mobilized and able to transform the economy.
But most importantly, we have to think about how all of this anti-state ideology is being stirred up with investments from elites.
Delete phrases like “anarcho-liberal sensibility” and it’s a decent encapsulation.
Or, in other words, the tribe and party of Ted Nugent.
Last Thursday, Nugent went on one of his standard pro-gun rants, presenting an illogical comparison as something built on common sense: Swimming pools kill more children than gun accidents. (If you don’t understand why it’s illogical, you’ve no business reading this blog. We haven’t the slightest thing in common.)
As a very young man I ran my town’s swimming pool for two summers and was second-in-command for two more. Ted Nugent is a despicable insult to the good people I worked with.
Without going into details, we occasionally acted quickly and with skill, as lifeguards, to ensure the summer afternoons of young children were safe and never unpleasant, no questions asked. Kids will be kids, you watch over them. And sometimes you fished them out of the water and put them on their towels until they were calmed. You told mom just to keep him or her out of the water for a while.
You lent them an arm so they could pull themselves in and continue playing. Or you stood there on the concrete edge, looking at them, giving them the confidence that just because they’ve suffered a snoot full, you’ve seen it and they’re not in trouble. Because you were there.
And the Pine Grove swimming pool was not a small pond. Half a million gallons with a two-story pump house, exceptional for a town of its size.
What does it have to do with guns?
To see the summer swimming experience fashioned into something worse than gun violence by some very public ninny is beyond hateful. Guns have one function. Killing, putting holes in things. Swimming and water recreation are something for everyone, a pleasure of the human as well as the animal condition.
In Nugent world, might as well write a piece about choking to death on food. Or all the people who die of flu because they aren’t immunized.
All allegedly much worse than accidental death from loose gun handling in the home.
The Big Lie about guns is that innocent kids are being gunned down or are accidentally shooting each other. Compared to drowning, gun-related deaths don’t even register.
The Big Lie is just that – a lie.
Indeed, some kids do die in gun-related deaths, mostly in the president’s old stomping grounds of Chicago. However, very few kids under the age of 10 die or are injured as a result of gun-related accidents.
The vast majority of teenagers who die as a result of guns are involved in gangs. They are punks, thugs and street rats …
Nugent is one of the popular voices of the batshit crazy white guy, now mainstreamed and in control of one political party.
Media Matters immediately pointed out that, as usual, Nugent has no grasp of what he’s ranting about:
According to a project of Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been at least 88 incidents just this year “in which a child 17 or under fired a gun unintentionally and someone was harmed as a result.” In 2013, the group documented at least 100 accidental shooting deaths of children aged 14 or younger. A Mother Jones report that examined the same time period found 84 fatal gun accidents involving children aged 12 and under, 64 of which involved a child pulling the trigger, killing themselves or someone else, which debunks Nugent’s claim that children are not “accidentally shooting each other.”
Indeed, one such shooting captured national headlines when a 5-year-old boy accidentally killed his 2-year-old sister in rural Kentucky with a rifle designed for children.
Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, recently looked at data from 2009 and found that 662 children aged 14 or under were hospitalized after being accidentally shot that year.
There is never a shred of humanity in anything written by Ted Nugent.
If it’s not enough to drag drowning in the summer into an article in defense of gun accidents, the language of Nazi Germany is also employed.
Hitler first wrote about “the big lie” in Mein Kampf. The Nazi leader accused Jews of telling “the big lie” to corrupt “the broad masses,” who he claimed “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie.” The phrase is also associated with tactics used by chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
It’s hard to argue that accidental gun deaths involving children are not worth calling attention to, let alone that covering such tragedies is comparable to Nazi-style propaganda.
Yeah, it’s hard to argue. Still, it doesn’t matter. We live in a country where half of the political spectrum embraces senseless, patently offensive positions with no basis in reality.
On the other side of the coin, many in the not entirely batshit crazy parts of the country really do detest Ted Nugent. This is minor progress.
Liberals, Obama- and Hillary-lovers, Democrats, gun-controlniks, vegans and, one supposes, Jade Helm 15 operatives, beware: Rock musician/bow hunter/gun advocate/tea party favorite Ted Nugent takes the stage May 25 at the Waco Hippodrome in a solo show …
Funny, funny, funny.
The tickets aren’t selling: “About 180 tickets are left for the May 25 concert, including 12 VIP tickets, with about 140 tickets already sold.”
What do you think is the better deal, even in Waco?
A standard two six packs of cheap beer and a steak or Nugent playing the Star-Spangled Banner and telling people how he got to be a “political animal” for the sake of freedom and liberty?
One of the songs of the corporate dictatorship, specifically the toxic vision of Jesus held by the alleged Christians of the GOP and old Dixie.
Jesus fed the poor with loaves and fishes; he liked the lepers, too.
Then he found the land of liberty; America told him what to do!
Wealthiness, just like Godliness, that’s what Jesus taught.
To tide you over, here’s Chris Hedges on the radio from Boston, talking about the moral imperative for revolt, also the title of his new book.
In the name of balance, the station’s host brings in one of the Clinton corporation’s multi-millionaire money flunkies to insist the system still works.
It’s the best part of the interview because it gives Hedges the opening to vigorously rebut the smug and condescending fellow with a raft of unpleasant facts from the first Clinton administration.
Summed up, the Clinton administration and its obsession with triangulation moved the Democratic Party to the center. This resulted in the GOP moving farther and farther to the right, until it became the insane tribe it is today.
Predatory economics. The American gulag, all non-whites and poors given advance ticketing. The biggest military in the world used to destabilize the weakest and most destitute countries in the world. Uncontrollable expansion of the national security infrastructure. Police militarization for the purpose of clampdown on legitimate grievance. Repression of non-violent protest. Exacerbation of rioting through military-style intimidation tactics begetting even more heavy-handed responses. Inability to envision human beings except as soggy meat bags capable of buying useless services and luxury goods. If the soggy meat bag lacks purchasing power, it’s marginalization and/or industrialized prison. Promises of change as propaganda hooked to domestic paralysis and backsliding. Cruel and extraordinary punishments, loss of any ability to make a living and death at the hands of the law as the systemic answer for domestic problems.
I call it “the problems of WhiteManistan,” a beat the New York Times confronts every day.
This week, the United States is at the bottom of the heap in almost all measures of civil life when measured against the other advanced nations of the world.
“On nearly all indicators of mortality, survival and life expectancy, the United States ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries,??? says a report on the nation’s health by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.
What’s most shocking about these statistics is not how unhealthy they show Americans to be, compared with citizens of countries that spend much less on health care and have much less sophisticated medical technology. What is most perplexing is how stunningly fast the United States has lost ground …
Three or four decades ago, the United States was the most prosperous country on earth. It had the mightiest military and the most advanced technologies known to humanity. Today, it’s still the richest, strongest and most inventive. But when it comes to the health, well-being and shared prosperity of its people, the United States has fallen far behind.
Pick almost any measure of social health and cohesion over the last four decades or so, and you will find that the United States took a wrong turn along the way …
What [sets] the United States apart — what made the damage inflicted upon American society so intense — was the nature of its response [to global labor markets that destroyed middle class income gains over the few decades]. Government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together.
The advanced countries of Europe faced the same problems. But they have not destroyed themselves in the manner of the United States.
For the last fifteen years Americans have been told again and again that small bands of piss ant terrorists in the Middle East pose an existential threat to the country. Specifically, white America.
“The bloated incarceration rates and rock-bottom life expectancy, the unraveling families and the stagnant college graduation rates amount to an existential threat to the nation’s future,” reads the Times.
Black Americans, the working poor, have born the brunt of it.
And then there’s Ted Nugent, rock and roll’s kleagle, delivering one classic white person’s response: prison, blows or bullets for all those unwilling and too lazy and or evil, stinky and subhuman to be all they can be.
Be good. Obey the law, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule …
Stay in school and, in spite of our embarrassing overpaid anti-education system, discipline yourself to learn how to talk properly, read, write, add, subtract, multiply and divide. There are simply no opportunities for anyone who fails basic human skills and intelligence. Everyone who has these basic skills combined with a good work ethic have [sic] unlimited opportunities…
Stay clean and sober. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco and garbage food will turn you into a stumbling, stinky zombie. Only stumbling, stinky zombie stoners don’t know this.
So don’t fall for all the whining, lying, excuse mongering and BS’ing that is coming out of Baltimore, Ferguson, the president,
the Democrats, your loser friends, much of the media, and every other crybaby scam artist out there.
