Is the South "Dumb"

[Stephen Fox]

Read the Packer article linked in the first line of the Garry Wills article here in the New York Review of Books. With William Thornton and myself keep in mind Marshall Frady, Baptist preacher's son, last article was in the NY Rev Books.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/20 ... b-america/

[ET]

Typical, condescending, arrogant, elist

Woe be us po' ole Suthern folk who don't wanna live on Massa Barack's govmint plantation...we jist two dumb to nose betta. Iffin we jist could figure out dat we b a voti' again' our own inrest we b sew much more betta off. Sho nuff.



A great article by a member of the Borg collective. Same basic mentality that the Borg took towards humans.

[Sandy]

Use of the term "dumb" doesn't help make the point, though in some circles it may be considered fair, given the language many Southern conservatives have used to describe those who have now decisively elected Barack Obama twice.

Other than perhaps putting some things in different terms, he's right.

[ET]

He's right.....ONLY if you accept the following:

1) Obamacare will improve health care
2) the strings attached with accepting money for a fancy new choo-choo train is a good deal - or needed or even a wise use of tax money
3) you want to take money for the expansion for Medicare without knowing the rules - yet unwritten - for how the feds will dictate its use
4) you accept that man has some measurable, significant impact to changing weather patterns

However, the Mancrush Line of the Year should be this one: "That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe"? Other than this teleprompter reading skills, ability to blame Bush for his failures and trillion dollar deficits, what in the world has Obama done to warrant "awe"? ROTFL.

[Sandy]

However, the Mancrush Line of the Year should be this one: "That a black should have not merely rights but prominence, authority, and even awe"? Other than this teleprompter reading skills, ability to blame Bush for his failures and trillion dollar deficits, what in the world has Obama done to warrant "awe"? ROTFL.

He made you hotly angry enough to spew vitriol. That's warranted some awe, in addition to providing evidence to prove the author's contention.

I've never heard the President blame Bush for anything. He points out the reality, in a factual way, that the previous president left him one of the biggest economic messes in American history. That is true. Bush left a stock market that had plunged almost 50%, and an unemployment rate of 10%, with the residual "not looking for work anymore" adding another 5% to that. Since everything bottomed out, the President has presided over economic growth, including an unanticipated and surprisingly rapid stock market recovery. Unless you want to term increasing economic numbers as "failure," the President hasn't blamed Bush for anything that's happened in his first term.

When President Obama was first elected, I really didn't buy into the statements about resentment being the result of his race, and criticism of him being the result of racism, but as time passes, and more of this sort of thing surfaces, I believe that a significant portion of the resentment and opposition that surfaces is very much related to both prejudice and racism. Stuff I see posted on Facebook, the absolute baloney spouted by both Romney and Ryan about the "47%" or the "takers vs. makers" crap, all shows more than just political opposition. There are a lot of people who just can't stomach a successful black man, or a successful woman regardless of what race she is. And its not just in the South, though it seems there is more of it there.

[Stephen Fox]

If Either Sandy or Ed Thompson read the article, and had the presence of mind to click over to the George Packer article in the New Yorker that referenced GAffney S.C.'s W J Cash a good bit.

[Bruce Gourley]

I grew up in the Deep South. Wills speaks a lot of truth. In the eyes of many unreconstructed Confederates these many generations after the fall of the South, the absolutely worst thing in the world would be ...

... for a black man to become president of the United States. And a damned Democrat to boot.

White Southerners (including Southern Baptists) called Abraham Lincoln "the black president" upon his election in 1860, and then the Deep South (governed by planters) promptly withdrew from the United States in order to, in their own words (over and over and over), protect and forever preserve the God-ordained institution of African slavery.

The election (twice!) of a black president has indeed brought the worst out of many white Southerners, vividly expressed in the Tea Party, and (often) even more vividly in private. And politically, it has brought America back to where it was in the Civil War era: a white coalition (Republicans in our modern era) in the South barricading itself against liberalism and non-whites -- at this moment, exactly one white Democratic congressman remains in the Deep South (and more analysis) in an ocean of white Republicans.

The one thing that may be able to move the Deep South past its past is immigration: when whites become a minority in the Deep South (a destiny that white Republicans have fought tooth and nail by trying to run out immigrants and disenfranchise the minority vote), perhaps a new chapter will unfold. And if the white Republican Party continues down the road they are headed, they may not be around to witness the transformation.

I say none of this with gladness.

[Stephen Fox]

Bruce:

I hope you clicked on the link to the Packer essay in Wills piece. You will enjoy the references to WJ Cash There.

Case in point to your assertions, and an interesting one at that will be how Southern Baptist Senator Lindsay Graham navigates his Tea Party base in his Senate bid in 2014. He begged the question yesterday in his grandstanding Chuck Hagel, conveniently showing ignorace of David Remnick Jan 21 New Yorker piece on how Israel is fast fleeing a democracy to become a "Jewish state."

The Tea Party in many ways is product of the Fundy takeover of the SBC. Upstate S.C. is great petri dish for that assertion. James Deloach as assistant to Ed Young at FBC Columbia, then 2nd Houston is perfect example; Deloach of Grace Halsell's Prophecy and Politics; Deloach who chaired if not mistaken the trustee ouster of his former classmate Randally Lolley at SEBTS.

I would hope by now as a leading Baptist historian you would have committed to memory what Bill Friday told Cecil Sherman in the late 80's!

[Stephen Fox]

pROUd grad of JSU in Bama where the football field is named for his father

http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/201 ... _bubb.html

[Haruo]

In the public grade schools of rural Texas in the 1890s, my grandmother Emmye Anne Boone was taught the rhyme

Jeff Davis rides a white horse,
Abe Lincoln rides a mule.
Jeff Davis is a white man,
Abe Lincoln is a fool.

I don't think such stuff just dies a natural death if not opposed.