The Secesh category archive
Life on the Inside Is Hard 0
The Bundy Bund have discovered that jail is restricted. A snippet from the story at TPM:
Yeah, Bundy wants his gundy back.
Apparently, the Bundy Bund believed that they could take over a Federal Nature Preserve, trash the premises, terrorize the town, and just walk away, Renee, or ride off into the sunset, or something else ending in “get off scot free.”
These fellows must think that John Wayne movies are historical documents, much as the aliens in Galaxy Quest believed in Star Trek.
In other news of the Bundy Bund, legal stuff is taking place.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
Who knew that the CSA has a New Jersey brigade?
The Dispossessed 5
Werner Herzog’s Bear ain’t buying the hype. He’s fed up with the
Since the first black captives were sold off the boat in the English colonies in 1619, racism and economics have been mixed.
Chattel slavery was an economic system in which a few gained wealth from the forced labor of others. Racism is a legal-social-political construct developed largely in the late 1600s in Virginia to justify that servitude as something that was “meant to be.”
The two are consequently intertwined, even as they differ in kind.
Racism has been a powerful tool to control not only black and brown people, but also poor white people, a misdirection play to get them to look away, look away, look away from political economy. As Lyndon Johnson said,
Mr. Bear is quite correct. That many of Trump’s supporters may be economically disadvantaged, as well as racist, does not make them or him any less racist. It does, nevertheless, provide cover for media to ignore the racism.
Indeed, media in the United States are adept at not seeing racism, even when the “whites only” and “colored only” signs stare them in the face. One needs look no further back than Andy Griffith’s gentle, mythical Mayberry to see this: A Piedmont North Carolina town with no, nada, zilch, not one black person.*
There are persons running for President who speak capably and knowledgeably about political economy (you and I may or may not agree with their conclusions, but they speak neither from nor to ignorance).
Donald Trump, serial con artist and recidivist bankrupt, is not one of them.
(Follow the link for the rest of Mr. Bear’s post.)
__________________
*It just occurred to me to wonder, was Mayberry a sundown town?
The Gathering of the Klans 0
Know them by the company they keep.
Variety Homogeneity Vacationland
0
At the Raleigh News & Observer, Jai Kumar, immigrant son of immigrant parents currently attending graduate school at UNC, cuts to the essence of North Carolina’s wingnuttery. A snippet:
Read the rest.
Backfire, the Law Doesn’t Apply to Me Dept. 0
The best-laid plans of mice and militants gang aft agley.
He had expected the government to issue an eviction or ejection claim instead of arresting and indicting the occupiers on federal charges in criminal court.
The oddest bit in the story is this (emphasis added):
His (Ammon Bundy’s–ed.) lawyers assert that Bundy isn’t a member of any militia, isn’t an extremist and doesn’t hold anti-government views — underlining each contention in bold type in their 33-page motion and memorandum filled with lengthy footnotes. (The story goes on to recite wingnut babble about “Fed-rul overreach.”)
I can’t speak to the bit about “militia” (I suspect this boils down to “not having a membership card”), but, as regards the other two contentions, I fear actions doth drowneth out words.
The sky-is-purple level chutzpah, though, merits admiration.
Afterthought:
I am nonplussed at the ability of wingnuts to convince themselves that carrying miniature copies of the Constitution of the United States of America in their shirt pockets, to be whipped out and misinterpreted at the slightest provocation, magickally mystickally morphs sedition into patriotism.
There’s no delusion like self-delusion.
It’s the best delusion there is.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
One more time: The next time you hear someone lamenting the “Lost Cause,” ask, “What, exactly, was the cause that was lost?”
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
The Charlotte Observer’s Taylor Batten looks at a champion of North Carolina’s “It’s Okay To Hate the Gay” law and realizes he’s seen it all before. A nugget:
Now (state senator Buck–ed.) Newton, who is running to be North Carolina’s attorney general, bellows about “how hard we must fight to keep our state straight.” He invokes the threat that those who oppose state-sanctioned discrimination against gays will “expose our wives and our sisters and our children to the sexual predators in the bathrooms.” He says that “the folks that wave the rainbow flags” need to get used to “the way things have always been in this state.” Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
Read the rest.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
Jackie does a capsule history of the Republican southern strategy and, along the way, she decodes de code.
Still Rising Again after All These Years 0
Shorter John Cole: General Sherman was correct.
Southern Hospitality 0
I think I’ve told this story before, but it’s still relevant.
My Daddy had a friend* who was a high school science teacher and coach (yes, a high school coach who was smart enough to teach science–who woulda thunk?) and later school superintendent. During the late 60s he was amongst a delegation to an educators convention in New Orleans. They decided to carpool to New Orleans.
Remember, this was during the Civil Rights campaigns of the mid-last century.
Later, he told my father that the trip was fine, except that, when they got to Mississippi, the atmosphere was so hostile that they felt as if they had to adopt fake Southern accents, despite being white Southerners from a Jim Crow state and already having Southern accents.
___________________
*My first baseball glove was a hand-me-down from him. He was a good and decent person, a person of integrity.
