The Palpable Ugliness of the Predominant Culture of the American South [updated]
Update appended.
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You may have seen this photo before. It was taken last August at the scene of a dog fighting raid, and it has been used in ASPCA advertisements all around the Internet and on TV. It can be hard to look at—a small, vulnerable puppy tied to a heavy chain, alone and cowering in fear. With just the quick snap of a camera, this single moment captured so much about the fatal sport of dog fighting, and this puppy became the face of abused animals everywhere.
That puppy’s name is Timmy, and he was one of 367 dogs rescued from a multi-state dog fighting ring that spanned Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Texas. After the raid, Timmy and the other dogs were taken to a temporary shelter where ASPCA responders gave them medical examinations, behavioral assessments, and the care and love they had previously been denied.
But Timmy’s story doesn’t end there. This sweet puppy was placed in foster homes that helped train him to become a well-adjusted pet. His final foster parents, Brian and Nadine DeCicco, just couldn’t give the little pup up and adopted him this past May. “We didn’t have any concerns about bringing a dog who had been associated with fighting into our home,” says Brian. “We’ve both had dogs our whole lives and know that they can reflect the way they are treated. Both of our previous dogs were pit mixes and they are just so unbelievably affectionate.”
— The Face of Dog Fighting Gets the Life He Deserves, ASPCA website, Jul. 24
The article goes on to describe Timmy’s idyllic life with the DeCiccos, who live in Maryland.
Which brings me to the reason for this post, which is to ask rhetorically: Why, so very, very, very often, are news stories about brutality toward animals about incidents in a Southern state or in Texas?
Not all are, of course. And certainly the Southern states have no American monopoly on brutality, including by local or state government employees; institutional brutality by state, local and federal officials (including, most certainly, judges) and rank-and-file employees who play some role in the criminal or civil justice system is a deeply institutionalized American characteristic—one that distinguishes (so to speak) this country from most other Western societies.
But I don’t think it’s possible to deny in good faith the predominance—the almost thorough permeation—of a culture of abiding meanness and overt brutality in so much of the South and Southwest. And although it has spread now well beyond those regions, courtesy of the Conservative Movement in general and the Conservative Legal Movement in particular, there is still a difference in breadth if not in kind.
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*UPDATE: I posted the following comment—the 35th comment in the thread—in response to the varied opinions expressed by the commenters:
I don’t think it’s genetic or, for that matter, ethnic–other than that British and Scottish ethnics have never been a disfavored ethnic minority in this country, which I think may play a psychological/political/cultural role. I think that, at its essence, the brutal aspect evident in much of the American South’s predominant culture is a result of the centuries’-long, deep ideological belief that is at the heart of the “states’ rights” mantra: that the states are entitled to create and protect the right of individual members of favored groups, and of state and local governments themselves, to do, really, anything, however horrible, to non-members of the favored groups. The centuries’-long defense of slavery in the guise of “states’ rights” is at the core of the brutality, and also is the theoretical root of the current Conservative Legal Movement’s neo-federalism.
That was my intended point in this can-of-worms post.
Yes, freedom! Liberty!
7/27 at 5:47 p.m.
There was a map I saw of immigration patterns in this country and throughout Appalachia then curving west through the south to Oklahoma, there was a heavy influx of Scottish and Irish immigrants. The map went on to reflect a similar concentration of GOP voting and white poverty. I am not going to suggest that there is any genetic issue here, but my understanding is that both the Scottish and Irish immigrants would have come from a pretty rigid clan based societal organization and if they ended up in an urban area a lot of that organization would have broken down. In more rural areas it would have persisted it and been more resistant to change. Of course today the entire country is pretty urbanized, but it takes generations to change culture. Then too if you had a history of treating human beings brutally, treating dogs that way is a step up.
I have wondered the same. I think that frost-free winters might, oddly, have something to do with it, though I am not sure why. But also there must be an element of self selection, that certain kinds of people either enjoy, or cannot tolerate, such a milieu, and some people can or cannot judge the community they were raised in and find it either normal, or defective. Those that can stay will differ dramatically from those who can’t abide it.
I also wonder, when the northern states have better social services, less violence, less prejudice, and more jobs, why poor southerners haven’t migrated north en masse?
As for the origin of the brutality, can we reasonably trace it to America’s original sin, several centuries of racialized slavery? If a culture has become skilled at denying the suffering of a whole class of human beings, it should be a snap to deny the suffering of all other living creatures.
Noni
This is one of the most hatefully biased essays I have read in a long time. I was born in Chicago, but have lived in the South for more than 34 years. I can attest to this: Southerners have beautiful manners. Many are devoted to their churches. Individuals, churches and businesses are involved in organizing all kinds of civic and philanthropic activities. We have some of the finest colleges and universities in the nation — Davidson, Duke, UNC, Wake Forest, UVA, Washington and Lee, Swanee.
Because of the weather, many people are devoted to raising horses and dogs. We have four different animal shelters in my town, each lavished with the love and attention of volunteers. The reason that dog fighting is more evident in the South is because it is more visible. It is very difficult to have a dog fight outside in 20 degree below zero weather.
If I lived in Chicago now, I would be ready to lynch Rahm Emmanuel for his inability to bring safety and peace to the Southside of Chicago where I grew up. My family has lived in Chicago since the mid 1880’s. I am disgusted by the violence , the inability to substitute families for gangs, the deplorable public education system. I attended a Chicago public high school, fully integrated, with honors and remedial classes and they were the happiest three years of my life. I doubt that many young people in Chicago today have such a happy experience. It is tragedy.
I understand your concern for abused animals, which I share. But at the moment, I am more concerned about the abused children of Chicago.
We should not overlook the 19th century Native American genocide as one of the possible sources for the engrained qualities of cruelty and ugliness we see in some regions of our country. Andrew Jackson started when he exiled the Cherokee nation from Georgia, Tennesee and the Carolinas. The result of the Trail of Tears is well known as is the result of the wars against the Sioux Nation, the Western tribes and finally the wars against the Comanche and Apache in the SW.
For sheer perversity, consider the US Army’s persistent campaigns against the Seminole and Creek people in South Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. These dragged on for years until Osceola, the Seminole’s chief, was finally captured and killed. His captors cut off his head and preserved it in a jar of formaldehyde. Until the 1940’s or ’50’s, the head was on display in a pharmacy in Saint Augustine, IIRC. (I’ll check and post any corrections needed–it could have been Daytona Beach instead of Augustine.) I’m going here on what they taught me in school in Miami back when it was pronounced “Meye-Ah-Muh.”
I support my town’s Humane Society and know what happens here to dogs who can’t fight. My dog was thrown out of a car window as a tiny puppy onto the median strip of US 90 in Tallahassee. She has a docked tail and is what is known as a Boxer-Terrier mix. These dogs are bred either to fight or to guard junk yards or warehouses.
She’s 11 now. I don’t mind a little barking and I assure you, she doesn’t ever never run off leash. It may be harder to explain the hardness and cruelty we see in our culture than to look only in one region. Jus’ sayin. NancyO
beverly
i probably dislike the dog fighters even more than you do (i have a violent temper). But I think you should have thought twice before using it as an excuse to generalize about “the South.”
I lived in the South for many years and can bad mouth it with the best of them. But it doesn’t take much thought for me to remember I have run into ignorance and cruelty in every corner of the United States, at every income and education level, and if I can believe ANYTHING I read in the papers, I could find it in every corner of the world, in every corner of history.
The project of civilizing ourselves has been a long time building. We don’t help it by over generalizing… an activity that used to be called ‘prejudice’.
hmm, my experience world wide is that humans are vicious creatures
fundamentally vicious
unless schooled from a young age not to be and subsequently lucky enough to live free from persecution
if you don’t have your fair share of vicious genes
you’re doomed to exit the gene pool
p
Illinois has more than it’s fair share of dogfighting.
Also lived in Oklahoma for several years and the shocking thing about Oklahoma for me was that people were genuinely nice. In the South people will say terrible things behind people’s back, always with a “bless their heart,” but in Oklahoma when someone smiles and says hello or shakes your hand, every single person that I met who did that was being genuine about it. It freaked me out until I got used to it.
My understanding is that many of the people in Utah are similar, they’re just nice people.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a contingent of very confused “south will rise again” types there, who don’t seem to know which side they were on in the civil war (first hint, their ancestors almost certainly weren’t in the United States yet, because the land rushes didn’t happen until the 1880s and 1890s, second it wasn’t a state yet, third the tribes of Oklahoma were split on the issue and sent troops to fight on both sides of the war)….
J:
Never saw it there; but, I am sure it happens and in other places as well. Football player Vick was charged with it in what state I am not sure. Besides animal abuse, OK is #2 for capital punishment.
Beverly,
I generally agree with most of your writings and articles on AB and as a Southerner who worked in a workplace where 80% of 8,000 people were from up North I was exposed to more prejudiced and meanness from them than I ever grew up with in the rural GA I still call home. I am disgusted with the downright anger and resentment toward poor people in this country and frankly there is no excuse for cruelty toward animals or people for that matter. I read AB because of economics however and furthermore stereotyping people serves no purpose. The root cause of the problems, all interrelated, are the gutting of public education and the intentional and systematic extraction of wealth and destruction of the working/middle class of this planet.
This post says more about Ms. Mann than animal cruelty. But, she raises an interesting question. How can we geographically quantify animal abuse? Check out the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s 2013 report. http://aldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013-United-States-Animal-Protection-Laws-Rankings.pdf
Terry, to my knowledge (although I’m no expert on it), the Scots in Scotland and the Irish in Ireland don’t have a particular history of gratuitous brutishness. (The ethnic wars in Northern Ireland, including the late 20th Century ones, were horrific, but war always is.) And Appalachia itself doesn’t seem to be at the heart of the Southern-culture ugliness.
I agree with you, Noni, that it what underlies it is slavery—not just its more than two centuries of existence but also its forced end, and the enduring pining for the lost Confederacy, which is, at heart, what neo-federalism (whether advanced by actual Southerners or instead by five Northerner Supreme Court justices) is really about. I don’t think, though, that this culture denies the suffering of the slaves; I think it thrives on the very idea of brutality. Another term for the states’-rights brand of “freedom” is brutality, especially by state and local government officers and employees, most certainly including judges. (Both state and federal judges casually take extraordinary liberties with their powers of office, including actual criminality such as falsifying colleagues’ names on court orders because there is nothing that stops them from it. Yes, really—as in, strong enough evidence of it to have caused an initial FBI inquiry in the early 2000s, aborted because of the (understandable) decision by John Ashcroft to gut the Public Integrity units of FBI offices in order to transfer monetary resources and agents, including the one who had opened the investigation I’m speaking of and was transferred to a different region of the country, to terrorism. And such as secretly issuing purported orders dismissing litigation by quietly slipping a docket entry of the dismissal order into an internal court clerk’s office database. The former concerned a federal judge, the latter a state judge in a Western state in which ex parte, off-the-record communications between judges and “in-crowd” lawyers in civil cases are commonplace as part of the legal-crowd culture.)
The Supreme Court, coupled with a judicial-free-for-all culture that, courtesy of the Conservative Legal Movement, has become not merely acceptable but instead actually the “in” thing to do has effectively eliminated all avenues of legal recourse for even the most fundamental of constitutional and human removed rights violations. Largely, this is via a series of court-fabricated, extremely-malleable-to-suit-the-needs-of-the-moment legal doctrines and jurisdictional-statute interpretations that amount to a rewriting of the particular statute, except of course those of the type that the Reagan-era right held (holds) dear or invented. But it’s also a result of a now-deeply imbedded judicial coda of condescension and demeaning abuse toward pretty much anyone who isn’t wealthy enough to retain $1,000/hr. counselor or is lucky enough to be represented by some high-profile rightwing law group or lawyer. And the Supreme Court justices are aggressively active practitioners of what, it is clear by now, is a policy. The legal system in this country, unlike the legal systems in most of the Western world, is exactly like political system in this country—which, unlike any other democracy in the world, is the property of the “in” crowd.
In light of most of the other comments here, it seems that I was wrong that it’s possible to deny in good faith the predominance—the almost thorough permeation—of a culture of abiding meanness and overt brutality in so much of the South and Southwest. But I will note that my post was about aspects of a prevailing culture in Southern states and in Texas, not about the mores of the Country Club or Rotary Club set, and that my post explicitly did not claim that pockets of that type of culture don’t exist in other regions; large pockets within cities and states elsewhere certainly do, the current AG-gag-statutes are an invention of the Plains states, and Paul Ryan is from Wisconsin. Nor did my post say there aren’t large numbers of decent people in the South, including the rural South, who wouldn’t be caught dead deliberately hurting a dog or cat. Having spent a good deal of time this past year in a college town in the semi-rural South myself (northern Florida), I know for a fact that there are many, many gentle-natured people who have Southern (northern Florida) accents.
But the fact remains that an in-your-face Gadsden Flag/Confederate Flag culture does predominate, as evidenced by the politics and laws of these areas. And it does seem to carry over, by some, to the treatment of animals.
Just wondering, Little John: What exactly does it say about Ms. Mann–as opposed to what it says about animal cruelty?
Beverly
not speaking for little John: it says that Ms Mann overgeneralizes to the point of what we would call racism if she were talking about black people instead of about southern white people.
you, Ms Mann, could do a good service for your country…if anyone would listen to you… pointing out the abuses of the current Judicial Regime. But you don’t do yourself, your country, or your cause any good by stereotyping the south and making enemies of half your readers.
As for the country club and rotaries… and genteel college faculties… don’t wanna look too deep there or you might find cruelty and ignorance disguised as good manners and sophistication. But not all of them of course.
Thank you Dale, that’s a good general synopsis of my thoughts. Beverly, this post just illustrates that seemingly well informed, articulate and I assume, educated people have the same types of prejudices and biases that you unjustly ascribe to Southerners.
Actually, Dale, my reference to the Country Club or Rotary Club set was intended as a response to Virginia Scanlan, who seemed to be discussing, mainly, them.
In Michigan, you do see quite a few pickup trucks with the Confederate flag on them and such, mostly in the semi-rural areas. So you’re right that I shouldn’t attribute that culture exclusively to the South. Then again, I didn’t attribute that culture exclusively to the South. But it’s certainly a key factor in the South’s politics. Really, Dale, Little John, et al, can you deny that?
Bev:
Right you are about bigots, racists, and xenophobes and they hate me as I smoke them out. It is funny how logic and fact overpower supposition, conjecture and innuendo. One only has to read the Livingston Daily to get a feel for how bad Michigan really is. They are afraid of children from Central America bringing disease, famine and pestilence. The cost of which eliminating is unbearable. They condemn Detroit proper even though if was wall off by Bradley versus Milliken which had a greater impact on America than Marquette Nat. Bank of Minneapolis v. First of Omaha Service Corp.
Of course, we suffer from the Taylor-tucky immigration from the South when automotive held sway over the nation. I suspect someone will take a shot at me over time as I invest in their bigotry.
From Wikipedia, about Michael Vick, who Run mentioned:
“A search warrant executed on April 25, 2007 as part of a drug investigation of Vick’s cousin Davon Boddie led to discovery of evidence of unlawful dog fighting activities at a property owned by Vick in rural Surry County in southeastern Virginia, with extensive facilities for the activity. Media attention quickly grew as state officials investigated, soon joined by federal authorities. As separate state and federal investigations progressed, more details emerged about an interstate dog-fighting ring that involved drugs and gambling. Gruesome details of abuse, torture and execution of under-performing dogs galvanized animal rights activists and expressions of public outrage. Vick and several others were indicted on federal and Virginia state felony charges related to the operation.”
I recall that Vick later said it had not occurred to him that there was something wrong with what they were doing.
Coberly,stop emoting (and furthermore, privileging your feelings over everyone else’s). Beverly criticized the culture, not the people, and you are either unable to comprehend simple sentences or are pretending to so you can attack someone who dares to describe a failing of the South.
That being said, look up the Borderer culture of Scotland. How it affected the South is the subject of “Albion’s Seed”. The book more or less gets it right, IMHO. And yes, Coberly, you are an example of how someone from the Borderer tribe behaves as a matter of course.
Scent:
Welcome back. I have not seen you around these parts since Bruce and Dales SS series. And I agree with you if people read the text of Bev’s post she does make an apology of sorts within.
Mr. Vick’s career as a pro football player has resumed more or less where it left off. Apparently, his current employers didn’t think anything of hiring someone who tortured and killed dogs in truly appalling ways. At the time, I was surprised about that. If you read the DSM’s sections regarding personality disorders, you come across descriptions of behaviors very similar to these in regard to people who subsequently go on to become serial killers and other kinds of sociopaths. One way or another, however, his services were valuable enough that his employers were willing to ignore Vick’s previous troubling activities.
Is it so surprising then, that people everywhere in this country tolerate bigotry of every kind if what they hear makes them feel righteous and patriotic? One thing for sure, the quality of public education here in my little GA town is incredibly bad. For that matter, the quality of private school education is no better–it just has more Bible verses to memorize. People are poor here and no one gives it a thought. Might have something to do with the lack of education and opportunity. And that might explain the whole thing. NancyO
Bev I think you’re saying that racism is a key part of southern politics. I disagree. I believe the racism charge is just an intellectually lazy excuse we use to explain the south’s stubborn support for the GOP since the 1970’s. I think the reasons for that voting pattern is much more complex and those reasons chiefly revolve around authority, paternalism and economics.
On the animal abuse front check out http://www.pet-abuse.com. Great statistics that you can segregate geographically.
Nancy-Yes! If you look at animal abuse statistics you’ll find that many of those incidents are conjoined with domestic violence incidents.
Smell of violets
i guess you are an example of what i said about ignorance being found in all corners of the world.
a very literal reading of Beverly would get her off the hook. but NO one will do that very literal reading. they will read exactly what she meant. what she insists upon in further comments: it’s the “culture of the South” that’s bad, bad bad. and of course the culture has nothing to do with the people.
and how astute of you to detect my borderer ancestry. did you look it up in Who’s Who?
Coberly:
Nonsense. Beverly is a literate person who constructs what she means. That you take it other than such does not give credence to what you propose. It is just your interpretation flawed that it is.
and just another hint for you all. i had some neighbors in Massachusetts who were very kind to me. they invited me to Thanksgiving dinner where they… none of them from Scotland or Ireland or the Borderer… all sat around and talked about how the Jews were ruining the country.
[for anyone skipping through the comments, “the Borderer” is a place in Scent of Violet’s Atlas of degenerate races.
I did have a good friend once who was a Border collie, a race that was especially useful along the border (between Scotland and England) because they were black and worked silently at night.
My girl never had a chance to steal sheep, but she could fetch a rabbit out of the bushes with no fuss at all, unlike my German shepherd and the pit bull mix someone tried to make into a fighting dog but came to live with me instead. Must be the culture.
I didn’t approve of the rabbit nabbing, and when i showed no interest in her presents she just looked at me, “well, some people have no taste.” and found another line of work.
i had another dog… australian shepherd, no border there I guess.. who used to go into the woods and bring me back a deer. when i showed no interest in shooting it, she got disgusted with me. I just never could get the hang of that culture.
and Mr Violets
if I am privileging my feelings over everyone else’s, what is it you are doing?
Violets
I apparently enjoy a reputation around Angry Bear of being the rude sort of person who would say to someone who comes into my house with … ah… mud… on his shoes, “your are getting the carpet dirty.”
I am sorry to say that you have… ah… mud on your shoes.
Coberly:
Not rude, just of other sorts.
Btw, speaking of Virginia Scanlan (which I was, in an earlier comment), I really should mention her cute bait-and-switch, equating Chicago’s mayor with the perpetrators of the maniacal, ongoing shooting spree in some Chicago neighborhoods. I’m no Rahm Emanuel fan—and apparently not many Chicagoans are either; a recent poll I read about gives him almost no chance to win reelection. But given Chicago’s very, very longstanding problem with gang violence, there may simply be nothing a mayor can do about it. In any event, Emanuel isn’t perpetrating the shootings. Or dog fights. Or at least he hasn’t been caught.
And, no, Dale: I criticized the predominant culture in the South, not all Southerners.
As for your Massachusetts Thanksgiving friends, they obviously had a point. I know for a fact that we Jews are ruining the country. Just read my AB posts to see my part in it! Including this one!
And I do think your Border collie should have passed on the rabbits and bitten you instead.
Thanks for the link, Little John.
Bev.
nah, she had better taste than that.
but since i am a not literate person who can’t construct what i mean… allow me to emote about what i meant
your essay, however well constructed and literate and well meant is likely to give people the wrong impression about you…
and since you are a decent person with something important to say, i wish you would be more careful how you say it.
i don’t think virginia.. even with a name like a southern state was doing any bait and switch, cute or otherwise. she was trying to make a point about Chicago, and she didn’t actually blame Emanuel for the gangs, she just said that “if” she were there she’d feel mad at him for failing to stop it. she didn’t even say that “he could” stop it.
you see, careful literalist parsing can exonerate or hang anyone, depending on who’s doing the parsing.
you really don’t want to hang around with smell of violets.
Is sort of discussion is important, but should better be approached via factual aggregates, rather than assumed social flaws like callousness, prejudice, brutality, greed and so on.
We should approach the problem from a factual, rather than social side. I can’t imagine anyone would dispute that the American south dominates the nation for almost all those measures you would assign to the undesirable end of the scale. And this shows up most blatantly on maps.
For instance, here is a map of the frequency of murders in the US. The American south predominates (with Michigan tagging along.)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10320691/US-crime-murders-and-manslaughters-by-state.html
But this could just as easily be a map of poverty, or obesity, or dozens of other ills that not only dominate in the south, but (if you see a time series) seem to originate there and spread.
Forget about insults and taking umbrage — we should be asking why the south is the homeland of American misery?
Noni
PS As for the fabled, and true, southern hospitality, keep in mind that when tourists go to really poor countries they always comment on the generosity of the destitute locals. It may be that deep poverty and hospitality are linked.
Quelle Surprise and Michigan is right in there with them? Michigan is made up of the South with the migration of Taylor-tuckians to Michigan to work in the automotive industry. Just 20 minutes east of the former GD of the KKK home and south of the militia.
I do not believe they find me to be much fun. Someone will fling a bullet at me some day.
I read a recent post at “Balloon Juice” which linked to an older article at “The American Conservative”, in which a massive dataset on IQ (compiled for a book which proposed that wealth inequality between rich and poor nations is due to bad heredity/IQ in the poor nations) was used to show that in fact wealth-IQ causality runs in the other direction. Populations in neighboring nations who could not be distinguished by their (complete) genetic sequences had average IQ differences of one or two standard deviations which mirrored the differences in their average wealths. Countries in which economic conditions improved had a lagging improvement in average IQ.
If nuture/up-bringing/education/childhood-nutrition has a tremendous effect on IQ, I suspect it has an equal effect on traits like those mentioned in this post. That is, I suspect the genetic differences between, say, New York and Alabama are not large, but perhaps the poverty levels are.
I also wonder if more lead paint and leaded gasoline (see Kevin Drum’s articles on the latter) might have been used in certain areas of the country, when they were legal.
Anyway, there but for the grace of god (or random chance, in my case) go I.
I don’t think it’s genetic or, for that matter, ethnic–other than that British and Scottish ethnics have never been a disfavored ethnic minority in this country, which I think may play a psychological/political/cultural role. I think that, at its essence, the brutal aspect evident in much of the American South’s predominant culture is a result of the centuries’-long, deep ideological belief that is at the heart of the “states’ rights” mantra: that the states are entitled to create and protect the right of individual members of favored groups, and of state and local governments themselves, to do, really, anything, however horrible, to non-members of the favored groups. The centuries’-long defense of slavery in the guise of “states’ rights” is at the core of the brutality, and also is the theoretical root of the current Conservative Legal Movement’s neo-federalism.
That was my intended point in this can-of-worms post.
Bev:
I started writing this long ago and I need to finish it some time.
“The poor man’s conscience is clear . . . he does not feel guilty and has no reason to . . . yet, he is ashamed. Mankind takes no notice of him. He rambles unheeded. In the midst of a crowd; at a church; in the market . . . he is in as much obscurity as he would be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or reproached; he is not seen . . . To be wholly overlooked, and to know it, are intolerable.” John Adams
For the poor white man in the 19th century, poverty added the injury of being socially invisible when compared to a man of wealth or prominence. Society not acknowledging their presence created a class of insignificance effectively shamed into oblivion as a class not worthy of notice. Adams did not speak of the black man and Slavery took it one step further creating a stigma worst than that of poverty and more shame inducing. Slaves were economic chattel to be disposed of at the discretion of their owners without observance of their being at a separate class lower than that of the poorest white man. While not as overt in the 20th century, the distinction of black slave versus poor white man has kept the class system alive and well in the US in the development of a discriminatory informal caste system. This distraction of a class level lower than the poorest of the white has kept them from concentrating on the disproportionate, and growing, distribution of wealth and income in the US. For the lower class, an allowed luxury, a place in the hierarchy and a sure form of self esteem insurance.
One of these days, I will finish reading my references and finish this.
Find Dr. James Gilligan; “Violence; Reflections on a National Epidemic” Prison psychiatrist. Fritz recommended I read it. Fritz also said I was a mean old bastard too. I laughed and you know me for how I am.
I just checked out Balloon Juice, mentioned above by JimV. Here’s a link to the Balloon Juice Store: http://www.cafepress.com/balloonjuice
Bev, here’s a little capsule summary of the Borderer culture. This sort of attitude explains your observation about their god-given right to treat out-groups as badly as they please. I agree, BTW, that there is something really rotten about the culture of a police state populated by unrepentant slavers. Yes, that’s exactly what the Old South was: a police state. What else could it have been, given the large population of slaves? And why do you think the second amendment was written into the constitution? Hint: it’s a lot easier to put down slave rebellions if the slavers have guns and their chattel does not.
This struck me, from the article you link to, ScentOfViolets:
“This is quite in tandem with our self-justifying national storyline. Americans have always described themselves in Borderer terms and values, such as fierce, liberty loving, individualistic, freely religious, and fighting to defend our way of life. With the neo-conservative takeover of American politics, this has intensified, and we see a supercharging of these themes in the forms of fanatical religiosity, hatred of government, bellicose piety, and in a new twist, the technological fist of Jesus smiting the swarthy godless heathen in the name of a crude-oil-stained flag.”
It struck me because five members of the current Supreme Court fit this description and are translating these beliefs into legal fiat, but only one of them—Kennedy—is Scottish or Irish, and he’s Irish Catholic, not Scottish or Scots-Irish Protestant. Also, of course, only one of them—Thomas—is a native of the South. So this culture permeates, now, pretty broadly, whatever its ethnic origin.
Right, Bev. Hence Coberly being so wrong-footed (when isn’t he when stuff like this comes up) when he insists that ‘culture’ is just a code word for ‘racist’.
A final point on this subject: Whatever the predominant ethnicity of the brutal “states’ rights” culture of much of the South, an important indication that its core is not ethnicity but instead the defense of the “right” of states to allow slavery, or to allow whatever brutality they want to allow, is that (as I said above) Appalachia itself, which has a very large Scots-Irish population, actually had (I believe) very few plantations. West Virginia, after all, was not a Confederate state, and northern Kentucky had large contingents of soldiers who joined the Union army.
I don’t think this is an ethnicity legacy. I think it’s a plantation-culture political and cultural legacy—one that is at the very essence of the Conservative Legal Movement, whether its adherents are from the South or instead from, say, New Jersey, upstate New York and Northwestern Indiana, or northern California. The attribution of the current, fun-house-bizarre states’-rights legal movement to the alleged “structure” of the Constitution is a pre-Civil War, and therefore pre-Reconstruction Amendments, construct. It should be recognized for the machination of constitutional law that it is.
So much of Conservative Movement constitutional and statutory-interpretation law is really just a kaleidoscope—false statements of fact, sleight-of-hand redefinitions of standard-English words and of earlier-defined legal standards, comedy-routine-caliber the-knee-bone-is-connected-to-the-thigh-bone-which-is-connected-to-the-hip-bone (whether or not it actually is) Dictionary games, malleable-as-needed Court-created legal doctrines, and a deeply institutionalized look-the-other-way-at-everything-but-Conservative-Movement-claims ethos.
So much of Conservative Movement constitutional and statutory-interpretation law is really just a kaleidoscope—false statements of fact, sleight-of-hand redefinitions of standard-English words and earlier-defined legal standards, malleable-as-needed Court-created legal doctrines, and an institutionalized look-the-other-way-at-everything-but-Conservative-Movement-claims ethos.
What a cesspool.