I think that just about says it all.

The North may have won the Civil War, but a lot of the crap the South fought for still unfortunately seeped into the nation’s consciousness.

I think you are right about the aversion to thinking about the intimacy of the slavery problem, it’s incredibly upsetting to imagine using someone you love that way. I mean, love is probably not the right word here, slavery and loving being pretty far apart, but clearly there were these one sided emotional relationships set up to serve only one person’s needs, and that’s just a nasty, nasty piece of work.

http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2009/06/civil-war-was-about-slavery.html

There’s no sugar coating that fact, but the Southern apologists keep trying.

This is from the March 21, 1861 Savannah, GA speech of Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy.

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Kind of makes it clear what type of nation Confederate soldiers gave their lives fighting for and it’s easy to see why the Confederate battle flag was appropriated as a symbol for the Klan and die hard segregationists..

I also point out that Nazi Germany’s flag doesn’t fly over German soil any more, and neither does the rising sun with rays flag the Japanese used during World War II.

The South lost the Civil War, but unfortunately the United States is still dealing with the poisonous aftermath almost 150 years later of the destructive ideas they pimped on behalf of the slaveowners.

You can see this in the South, which is primarily right-to-work, I think, with how people’s anxieties about job security are displaced onto illegal immigrants who are “stealing” jobs that “rightfully” belong to white people. The anxiety should be directed at the bosses, but, for a lot of cultural reasons, it can’t be.

Cultural reasons??!

The entire point of “Right To Work” laws is that the workers are subject to arbitrary firing, at any time, for any cause, with no recourse.

In a ‘one-factory’ town speaking out against the bosses is a one way ticket to starvation.

This is the tenthers cherished dreams of 50 little tyrannies, forced on this country by slaveholders in 1787, writ large.

It’s no surprise that the swath of ‘no-rights-for-workers’ states closely aligns with the confederacy…the entrenched power stuctures in those states is still battling to keep their slaves down on the farm.

This is a power structure that’s been maintained by the threat and frequent use of violence and intimidation for centuries.

That’s not culture…it’s tyranny.

But how could it be spoken in a region where grown people still call their fathers “Daddy”?

This, and a note that a large subset of “what cannot be spoken” is a “what cannot be thought”. The south is rife with thought police armored in righteousness and armed with white privilege and the tradition of dominance.

I think the reason some people choose to focus their anger on illegal immigrants is because its easier to target them and possibly do harm to them than it is to target their ex or possibly future employers.

A lot of people who were strong supporters of Bush in southern regions were poor and did not attain very high education levels. There were suffering and were justifiably frustrated about the economy, the war, and all of our country’s problems but projected their anger at Bush, his policies and its consequences on groups of people who were equally and justifiably upset about and at the same things who had nothing to do with causing the problems.

This is why he’s so uppity; obviously, he didn’t get the memo from daddy. His daddy wasn’t southern.

It’s like a rumbling underneath the surface, particularly evident in the focus on Kenya… the whole gestalt seems like anger that he avoided the race-crucible that is the fabric of American history. The (white) south sees this as some kind of fundamental disrespect, sorta like bypassing the center of town for the suburbs, if you will.

Obama drove past them, and they are pissed about it. Ignore us? No you won’t, watch this…

Just some ideas. What do you think?