A Fatal Blow
Alas, Tea Partiers, you may as well fold your tents and quietly leave the field. Salon (a website that apparently caters to members and would-be members of the national elite) has given your movement the coup de grace. They have uncovered the cruel truth that your movement is a "Southern" movement. No more need be said. The taint is ineradicable.
According to Salon, 67 per cent of the supporters of the movement come from the South. They also hint darkly that the teenage level percentages of "Tea Party" support that come from the Midwest and West are probably people cursed with Southern blood in their family tree. (This is probably true. It is also likely that some of the adherents in the South are Rust Belt refugees.)
For readers of Salon, the fact itself is decisive and conclusive. Whatever comes from the South, in this case populist resentment of the federal government, is beyond redemption by being identified as Southern. They can count on a good part of the public to react on cue with the same automatic hostility and disdain.
What Salon reports neither surprises nor frightens folks down this way. Every populist movement in American history has come from the South. There is no other kind. In America, anti-government populist movements are always conservative—they look back to a past better time and they have a Jeffersonian suspicion of government. The South is the only part of the country that has a historical memory that goes back more than a week and that still contains something of original American feeling.
However, Salonites need not worry. People's movements in this country are invariably taken over by slick operators from above the Potomac and Ohio who turn them into commercial ventures. (This happened to the campaign that grew around Judge Roy Moore of Alabama for his stand against federal obliteration of the Ten Commandments.)
Speaking of numbers, it is reported that after the recent carnival in the federal city, the public approval of Congress has fallen from 27% to 14%. The only thing curious about this is—Who are those 14%? My guess is people who keep sports channels turned on all the time. The number of people, mostly Chronicles readers, who are intelligent enough to know that party conflicts are meaningless for the fate of our country are to few to show up in the numbers.
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Dr. Wilson,
To be a Southerner today is alot like being a contemporary agrarian as described by the cantakerous Kentukian,(now retired) Wendell Berry. Salon can perhaps sometime do a piece on him as well. They should do another on country music, another on outdoor cooking, another on poets, another on horses,... simply change the names and plaster it with contempt, you can get the same article time after time.
"To be an agrarian writer in such a time is an odd experience. One keeps writing essays and speeches that one would prefer not to write, that one wishes would prove unnecessary, that one hopes nobody will have any need for in twenty-five years. My life as an agrarian writer has certainly involved me in such confusions, but I have never doubted for a minute the importance of the hope I have tried to serve: the hope that we might become a healthy people in a healthy land.
We agrarians are involved in a hard, long, momentous contest, in which we are so far, and by a considerable margin, the losers. What we have undertaken to defend is the complex accomplishment of knowledge, cultural memory, skill, self-mastery, good sense, and fundamental decency—the high and indispensable art—for which we probably can find no better name than “good farming.” I mean farming as defined by agrarianism as opposed to farming as defined by industrialism: farming as the proper use and care of an immeasurable gift.
I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world."
And so it does and has for a very long time --- in more ways than one!
Dr. Wilson,
The South is America's Vendée. We dared not yield to the Republican Revolution. We, like them, are ironically called "The Rebels," ironically because we, like them, sought to preserve that which was good in Western culture, they in their ancient idiom and we in our newer one; the Republican Revolution sought to and did overthrow it. The usurper always hates and attempts to destroy the legitimate heir. Salon is but one of the latest voices of the usurper.
There are just too many forces working to destroy Southern culture: rampant immigration, a corrupt education system, and misguided popular media, including Hollywood, just to name a few.
Being only 26 years old, and thus still in the process of getting acquainted with the American Empire and its political establishment of tyrannical elite busybodies who serve at its feet, I could not help but be absolutely stunned and shocked when I read a reader's comment on the Salon.com website. Some creature said that he would rather have a million Bin Ladens in this country rather than the same number of Southerners with Confederate sympathies who advocate the restoration of the U.S. Constitution, as the latter pose a much greater threat to the American people than the former. I seriously liked to think previously that only Satan could believe such a thing.
Mr. Henderson @ 4:
I've read and re-read Dr. Wilson's article "Defending Southern Heritage, 2001" (I originally found it over at LewRockwell.com in the Columnists' archives). While we don't want to walk around with chips on our shoulders and thinking every non-Southerner is out to get us, we need to understand the times and the America we live in. Our Southern-ness, our culture is fine as long as it stays in its cage, makes money for the chamber of commerce and big business, and remains a mere cartoon caricature as I remember some years ago the Snuffy Smith character or the brief re-making of Colonel Sanders as a hipster did. But Southerners valuing and taking their culture seriously, wishing to maintain and celebrate it is a threat. We don't live in that America any more. We are aliens and strangers now, expected to bow down to the idols of E Pluribus Unum, big business, and the Statue of Liberty with its poem expressing a desire that the nations of the world send us their huddled masses.
Once again, I suggest you read the article.
There is a large minority of non-Southerners who actually agree with the sentiments of traditional southern culture and political thought especially anyone with a knowledge of history. Unfortunately, due to circumstances of birth, employment or family, we are trapped in our native/adopted states and/or subjugated to collectivist thinking, plutocratic control and alien invasions. Here is California, a substantial number of citizens are of Southern family origin (my wife for one) and inhabit the non-coastal areas and are predictably tradition minded, conservative and libertarian in our cultural and political thinking. Unfortunately, successive invasions of the California coastal areas over the past 50 years of Yankee liberals from northern cities, who BTW have taken over the university systems, sexual deviates of all kinds and stripes and 20 million illegals have turned California from a 'Southern Outpost' into an unamalgamated stew of radical socialism, globalism and decadence. My only advice is to pass on the Southern heritage to your children because it cannot be transmitted any other way in 21st century America.......and subscribe to Chronicles.
Clyde Wilson's essay written ten years ago is timeless. Never complain and never explain is one of his underlying themes in the current battle, and Tom Fleming hit upon it in another context some months ago when writing about the Marine Corps Commandants reservations about dismantling "don't ask, don't tell."
What they both have said concerning no good reasons to compromise is again evident in today's Washington Times concerning the attempt to satisfy endless lusts.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/sep/5/after-winning-key-right-gays-press-for-more-from-m/#0_undefined,0_
Mr. Mulvey @ 6:
I was born and raised in the Los Angeles area, my parents originally coming to the area due to Dad's service in the Navy during the Korean Conflict. They wound up staying for work, the post-war boom offering way more opportunity in SoCal with the building of freeways than there was in their native rural Middle Tennessee.
Due to the military, I now reside back here in Tennessee, close to where parts of my family settled over 200 years ago. From my view, it looks like California is in the process of committing suicide. And the shame of it is - the damnable shame - is that there are many good folks like you and your family who are caught up in the dysfunction of the coastal corridor from San Francisco down to San Diego.
Yes, these values as reflected in traditional Southern thought and culture shouldn't merely be Southern; properly speaking, they should be American. Unfortunately, I don't know what "American" means any more.
Following the vein of pjmulvey's post, in my experience, the residents of the rural north, places like Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan and Wisconsin, etc., seem to have much more in common, culturally speaking, with "the Southern heritage", insofar as it represents traditional family life, commitment to place, living and recreating close to if not on the land, self-sufficiency, etc. To be sure, the educational establishment has thoroughly inculcated an anti-Southern bias among these folks, but their lived similarities far surpass historical antipathies. In Maine, country music and pick-ups dominate, while the NPR & Saab-types hold fast almost exclusively to the state's largest city, Portland. What divides this country, I submit, is less South v. North or Red v. Blue but urban v. rural, a divide older than the nation itself, and never more pronounced than today.