<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1"> <title></title> </head> <body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff"> <big><big>Not yet, but it will if the Left buys it enough time by supporting the Democrats, a party the plantation masters have clearly recaptured:</big></big> <big><big>........ It would be tempting, indeed, to regard the whole complex of political neuroses herein described as a regrettable but minor aberration in the national narrative: the great sweep of the popular idea of sovereignty and democratic self-government from Plymouth Rock, to Independence Hall, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to FDR's More Abundant Life; from Melville's Young America, to Whitman's Broad Democratic Vistas, to Sandburg's The People, Yes, The People. [I'd say this (Yankee) narrative is dead, dead, dead, as in reabsorbed into the "Southern" story] </big></big> <big><big>But there is another, competing narrative.[5] It begins in the London counting houses as an idea. It makes its way to the slave pens of Conakry, and jumps to the the Western Hemisphere via the cane plantations of Barbados. It makes continental landfall in Charleston, South Carolina; it drives through the Old South to the Rio Grande. It is a socio-economic idea composed of financier-driven "free trade;" resource exploitation consisting of vast, soil-depleting monocultures (plantations then, agribusiness and oil now); human labor as a cheap commodity[6]; and the culture of violence. This idea is responsible for the most nearly successful conspiracy (so far) to attempt the overthrow Constitutional government in the American Republic, taking 600,000 lives in the process.</big></big> <big><big>Is it too far fetched to say Jefferson Davis's dream of a great Southern plantation empire stretching through Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, an empire of compliant natives and lucrative resource extraction, was never definitively thwarted? Or did it merely slumber, like a serpent coiled in the national thicket, waiting for the right geopolitical circumstances and psychological tenor to re-emerge, in appearance different but in substance the same? Let us not forget that the reins of government are now held by two Texas oil patch millionaires; substituting for dreamy Veracruz, Havana, Cartagena, and Santo Domingo are the flintier but no less exotic Djibouti, Basra, Kirkuk, and the fabled Khyber Pass.</big></big> <big><big>Thus considered, Zell Miller's chief significance is as folksy bard of the new overseas plantation.</big></big> <big><big>Werther</big><big> is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm well aware Counterpunch is hated on LBO. <big> </big>Well, too bad.  This article hits the zeitgeist nicely.  </big></big> <big>Of course</big> H.L. Mencken was an elitist asshole who hated the masses.  But for that very reason he possesed penetrating insights into the real character of his fellow ruling class elitists. I don't know who Werther is, but his claim to be a "defense analyst" is interesting.  <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://counterpunch.com/">http://counterpunch.com/</a> Pilger has jumped on the Kolko line.  There is a growing stream of non-Marxist intellectuals, generally but not necessarily left-leaning by various degrees, some like Todd quite anticommunist, who are fleeing America and its bankrupt "narrative" tout cort:  Todd, Wallerstein, now Kolko, Jeremy Rifkin ("The European Dream"), Randall Robinson (who has actually physically fled in "Leaving America", but leaving here is clearly a metaphor), even Van Wolferon, who has suddenly switched to urging the Japanese to flee their vassal "security" arrangement with the Americans, the sooner the better. They see the writing on the wall.  Too bad the American Left does not. </body> </html>