(no subject)

[geekchick]

Today is Sweetmorn, day 49 in the season of The Aftermath, 3268.

It seems like every time Trent Lott opens his damn mouth, I get more and more embarrassed to say that I grew up in Mississippi.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20730-2002Dec6.html

Senate Republican leader Trent Lott of Mississippi has provoked criticism by saying the United States would have been better off if then-segregationist candidate Strom Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948.

Speaking Thursday at a 100th birthday party and retirement celebration for Sen. Thurmond (R-S.C.) in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Lott said, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
[...]
William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, said "Oh, God," when he learned of Lott's comments. "It's ludicrous. He should remember it's the party of Lincoln," referring to Lott's role as Republican leader of the Senate, which the GOP will control when the new Congress convenes next month.

When I came to DC for college, the first thing that I was almost always asked when people found out where I was from was "So, have you seen Mississippi Burning?" Trent is not exactly helping dispel the idea that anyone from Mississippi is some sort of inbred, segregationist, homophobic asshole, now is he?

Comments

Re: When did all those streets get named for confederate generals?

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

Is there a holiday commemorating Jackson and Lee? I'm originally from GA, is it a VA only thing?

Re: still fighting the Civil War - the South has this weird relationship to the Civil War that I still don't quite understand. On the one hand, there is the desire to move on and forget the past, on the other there is still a strong impetus to whitewash the Confederacy and the reasons behind it, if only because a lot of us had ancestors who fought in the war. In my own family there are members who have tried to convince me that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, it was about states rights - which it was. It was about the inhumane "right" to own slaves.

For myself, I excuse my ancestors as being creatures of the time in which they were born - I don't condone the stances they took, but I also realize that they knew no better. I also don't feel particularly responsible for the failings of long dead great-great-great grandfathers - I wasn't there. Nothing to do with me.

But I do wish that people would just get over it - it's OVER. We LOST. And that's good, because as creatures of our time we realize that slavery is something to never be condoned.

Sorry for the ramble.

Who Lost?

[telnar.livejournal.com]

I take a very different perspective: It's over ... We won!

Part of the question is whether to identify with a side based on geography/ancestry or based on ideology. Germany was unified as a nation at about the same time as the US Civil War, but I can't recall having even heard about complaints in modern times from Bavarians that they had been oppressed by Prussia in spite of the fact that the South German states only joined Prussia because they expected an imminent French invasion (and Prussia exercised a fairly extreme level of control over the newly unified country, in 1871).

At some point, people got past thinking that "we" were subjugated by Prussia and remembered things as "we" (i.e. both Prussia and Bavaria) successfully fought back the French.

I know that the history of the confederacy is more extreme since the largest armies the world had ever seen had fought over whether the confederate states could secede (even Napoleon's Grand Armee was only about half a million men), but at some point we have to get past this.
The English don't talk about how "we" lost to the Normans in 1066. The Turks don't talk about how "we" lost Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. At some point, there needs to be a statute of limitations on identifying with causes whose values the current residents of a region no longer support.

Whatever its flaws, reconstruction was not run like Stalin's occupation of some of the smaller former Soviet Republics (which included shipping whole populations to Siberia among other atrocities). There are no present day grievances against the union for southerners to rally around. I hope that someday we reach a time where southerners can say "we" fought a war to preserve the union and free the slaves.

Re: Who Lost?

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

The English don't talk about how "we" lost to the Normans in 1066. The Turks don't talk about how "we" lost Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. At some point, there needs to be a statute of limitations on identifying with causes whose values the current residents of a region no longer support.

I quite agree. I think that a lot of the problem with the American South is that some people still act like the actions of their ancestors reflect on them somehow. I think that there is also this "ideal" of the Old South as seen in "Gone with the Wind" that still holds an appeal, and there is a reluctance to let go of that ideal, even though historically very few people lived on plantations and those that did needed the institution of slavery to support that lifestyle. I think some people are still made uncomfortable by that.

I hope that someday we reach a time where southerners can say "we" fought a war to preserve the union and free the slaves.

The southerners in the 19th century started the civil war to maintain their "right" to hold slaves. Preserving the union and freeing the slaves were absolutely NOT in the plan, even though the triumph of the Union created this result. To pretend that Southern intentions were otherwise is to attempt to whitewash history, the very thing that annoys me so with southern "revisionists".

However, I do hope that modern southerners can eventually own up to the fact that the intentions of their forebears were not noble but misguided, but frankly wrong - and that it's OK, because we aren't responsible for what our ancestors did. Once this happens I hope that the process of identifying as "American" rather than "Yankee" or "Southern" can begin.

Who are "we"

[telnar.livejournal.com]

What I was alluding to by suggesting that I want southerners to someday be able to say that "we" fought a war to preserve the union and free the slaves is that I would like to see them identify with the 1860s Americans whose values they now share -- i.e. Northern Republicans. I certainly don't imagine that southerners of that era wanted those goals.

I don't need to check my lineage to know that I'm on Galileo's side against the inquisition, or on Martin Luther King's side against the government of Selma, Alabama, or opposed to the supreme court ruling in US vs Korematsu. If I were to find that an ancestor of mine was on the wrong side of these things, I wouldn't say that "we" did the wrong thing. I'd identify with the side that I consider to have the nobler goals and regret that not everyone shared those goals at the time.

I have a lot of trouble understanding why southerners don't generally feel the same way when it comes to the confederacy.

Re: Who are "we"

[anotheranon.livejournal.com]

Very good question, why a person would lump themselves in with Southerners, Northerners, or any other subset of "American".

Personally, I don't identify with 1860's northern Republicans as such, simply because I don't know enough about their social history to know how much in common I'd have with them or not. I DO know that I think slavery is wrong, but I'm a 21st century American and hindsight is always 20/20.. there's no way to guess what I'd think had I lived back then.

I guess why I call myself "southern" is because I lived there all my life - even the same town and house - until I graduated college. If I'd moved around more, maybe I wouldn't.

As it is, modern America is increasingly homogenized - one can travel from DC to California and still watch the same tv shows, find your favorite restaurant, speak the same language, etc.

But you present a very good question... I'll have to give it a think.