> [This is getting interesting. Which will implode first, the U.S. economy
or
> culture? The following is from Slate.]
I'm betting on the economy, but it's tough. The League of the South is a chartered student organization here at Auburn, and not a day goes by when one of my white students doesn't express their sense of being oppressed by blacks, northerners and the government. I had a student propose just three weeks ago to write a research paper on the contemporary forms of oppression of whites at the hands of the Black Panthers. There are exceptions--a student who wants to be an investment banker, for example, came to my office and complained to me about how parochial his peers seemed. Many, if not most, are concerned about racial tensions locally and nationally; but I'd say 60% are worried b/c of the erosion of the advantages of being white.
One gets the feeling that they live in a world like the Soviet Union as described by Jameson years ago: "hitherto isolated in its specific pressure area as under some ideological and socioeconomic geodesic dome, and now [having] imprudently open[ed] the airlocks without their space suits on . . allow themselves and their institutions to be subjected to the infinitely more intense pressures characteristic of the world outside." Except that, unlike the fsu, the region thrives on its ability to transform those pressures into opportunities to exert itself politically.
Christian