As I said long ago on the list, it was
> >insane for the North to fight to hold onto the South, then and now a
> >hopelessly backward region peopled by poorly educated, violence-prone,
> >anti-labor, religious loonies. The US today has a savage, reactionary,
> >simple-minded popular and political culture in large part because of
> Grant
> >& Co.'s triumphantly counterproductive efforts to keep the benighted
> South
> >forever affixed to the long-suffering North.
> >
But what is amazing about this list, is how one can glean nuggets of valuable information from the most transparently idiotic, unintentionally funny rants like the preceeding. Anti-souther prejudice is the liberalism of fools; hilarious that any supposed radical would spout. Certainly, the southern US today has, along with the mountain west, a deeply conservative mainstream culture, mostly among its religious whites. But this comes from material, historical reasons, of which anyone on this list could enumerate half a dozen; not from the supposed inferiority or 'backward... poorly educated, violence-prone' nature of individuals who live below the mason dixon line.
As a matter of fact, the only places of substantial quotidian violence in the US is in the underclass ghettos of many old industrial and sunbelt cities. Care to spare some bigotry for them carl, like wojtek does (altho he at least lives in baltimore and can thus actually get mugged periodically)? Or perhaps you could expound a bit on your disgust for those less educated than yourself, like me, a poor simpleton highschool dropout, who by the grace of luck I suppose became a socialist rather than a knuckle-dragging christian or muslim. As it happens, the conservatism of the south is abetted and sustained by the open, snobbish disdain shown to the south by non-southern ignorant liberals like yourself--- it allows southern rightists to mobilize the sense of aggreived dignity against 'elitist northern liberals' when the economic interests of white southerners actually lies in taking on southern and northern actual elites.
Have you ever visited rural parts of your preciously superior north, central pennsylvania, southern indiana or south dakota perhaps? My own understanding is that the powers that be in the north are also quite anti-labor, but that only derives from my experiences fighting with workers in ohio and nevada trying to unionize and getting fired and harrassed left and right for doing so. Conservative? No, suh, not in the effete and sophisticated wards of the Cincinnati suburbs or Idaho. If our national drift to the right is the fault of the south, then perhaps you can explain to me why statewide politics in indiana or north dakota are what they are, or why southwestern las vegas is the new stronghold of union power in our country, or why extreme rightist legislation on immigrant rights or teaching evolution have been in places like kansas and pennsylvania.
I'm only surprised Joe Catron hasn't smacked you down yet. He must be busy, out talking to actual workers.