How the Left views the South

Or at least the part of the Left M.J. Rosenberg represents. He's a “Senior Foreign Policy Fellow” at Media Matters. When speaking at a New America Foundation panel recently, he had this to say about Southern support for Israel:

The whole south shifts to the Republican Party over one issue, they don’t like black people…so you have the racism thing, the fact that we’ve eradicated the separation of church and state essentially, which started I have to say when Jimmy Carter was first elected. As a Jew I noticed it — first president who talked about Jesus Christ, and that was sort of like, “whoa, presidents don’t talk about Christ!”…and now you have the modern Republican Party that has to cater to these racists and that gets me to my fundamental point, it is not that they are pro-Israel. They are anti-Muslim. They do not like Muslims. They are on the side of Israel because Israel is — they don’t like Jews that much to start out with, either — but compared to Muslims, they like Jews fine.

They’re infatuated with the Israeli army. Why? Because the Israeli army kills Muslims. I mean, this is what it’s all about….When you hear them talk to the, I don’t want to say the average American, but certainly the average American south of the Mason-Dixon line, “these Muslims” — well, someone said to me the other day, “how’s Keith Ellison doing?” Because he’s a Muslim member of congress, with all these crazy wackos wandering around, I said “how’s Keith Ellison doing?” and he said, “oh, they don’t bother with Keith Ellison, he’s just Al-Qaeda.” …

Huh. That'll be news to my friends in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, especially with our camp's monthly newsletter that usually had an article on Jewish Confederate history. (And I'm pretty sure it was Christians writing those articles, too.) In fact, I'd grown up in the rural mountain South hearing praise for Jews and how it made no sense for anybody to discriminate against them. Israel was simply the place where Jews got to run their own country, and was our democratic ally.

(Via Commentary

The Europeanization of America

Cliff May has an article on Charles Murray's AEI speech on the Europeanization of America, up at NRO. I haven't read it yet, but I read several Corner posts about Murray's speech, and it's gotten me thinking again about something I've had in the back of my head for several years. I've got a copy of I'll Take My Stand, the literary and cultural manifesto of the early 20th century Southern movements known as the Agrarians and Fugitives. It's a great book in general, but there's one essay in particular that's puzzled me for years. Now, without going and looking it up (lazy), I don't remember who wrote it. But the author notes a cultural kinship between Southerners and Europeans, simultaneously contrasting us culturally with the Yankees.

The latter part is obvious and uncontroversial to me. But the former? I've never quite gotten it. Partly, I think, it's that I'm thinking of the mid-late 20th century Western Europe, which had by my time fallen into decay, destroyed any history of individualism, religiosity, or self-reliance, and developed an infantile dependence on the State. All of which are antithetical to Southern culture. So I've had trouble getting into the mind of the author and seeing European life as it might have been in the late 19th century, the immediate background to his experience.

I'll write more on this later, if I think about it. In the meantime, I'm finishing up a research paper and an observing proposal this week.

Dang Yankee

I often agree with Ann Althouse, but not today: "22% of Americans "believe any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic."

Her comments? "So all these people have the law wrong and don't seem to know the basics of the history of the Civil War." "Fascinating(ly stupid)."

Go insult somebody else, yankee. The natural right exists, the history of the War Between the States shows us that you need more soldiers with guns to protect this right, and the advocates of this right have included all of our founding fathers, who weren't stupid.

Deo Vindice!

Just what the doctor ordered:

Howard Dean is going to "help" Obama get Southern votes. Yeah. That'll work.

Bonus: find the "Southerners vote Republican because they're racist" assumption the lazy AP writer uses.

Let the North seceed!

Via Instapundit, here's an annoying and insulting article by a damned Yankee who understands less about the South than a tick does about gardening. As far as Hirsh's throwaway line about the North seceeding, go right on ahead! Just be sure to take D.C. with you.

Clinton's awkward backtracking on Mississippi insult

"[T]he former first lady said the comments she made about the state in the run up to the Iowa caucuses "were not exactly what I said," even though they came directly from an interview she gave to the Des Moines Register in October. Let's review those comments, shall we?

The newspaper quoted the New York senator discussing Iowa and Mississippi being the only states that have never elected a woman governor or sent a woman to Congress.

"How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That's not what I see. That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism; that's not the openness I see in Iowa."

And how does she slither out of this one?

"What I said is what I learned is that neither Iowa or Mississippi had ever elected a woman statewide and I referenced the fact that I was the first woman elected statewide in New York and I told the Iowans that they had a chance to try to change that and now in Mississippi giving Mississippi voters a chance to change that."

Awww, how noble of her! Offering her humble services to lift the benighted Mississippians out of their backwardness.

Obviously, though, her original comment was insulting precisely because she was praising Iowa at the expense of Mississippi--using the latter state as the standard of backwardness. It does no good to say that Mississippi and Iowa both have opportunities with her candidacy. "How can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi?" She was flat-out slamming Mississippi.

Damn yankee. (And my apologies to nice yankees out there.)

The Lincoln Memorial and the National Park Service

Groan. Groan on both sides, honestly.

The National Park Service's website is politicising the Lincoln Memorial? Kind of inevitable, isn't it? Well, the particular way in which they're doing it is truly a problem. They're applying some kind of postmodernism to the building itself:

One of the interesting things about monuments and memorials is that they often say more about the generation that built them as they do about the person or period they were originally intended to commemorate.

...

Perhaps it should come as little surprise that the predominately white, classically minded and university educated, upper-middle class generation of architects and engineers that built the Lincoln Memorial would stress the theme of National Unity over that of Social Justice.

Ugh. So the Yankees get damned right along with us Southerners. Not that I really mind the hoisting on one's own petard aspect of this, but it doesn't advance Southern interests to have this nonsense propagated by the Federal government.

But then, Schaefer's National Review Online article has to make snide comments about Jefferson Davis in the process, so I'm not predisposed to take sides in this thing. Let the conservative Yankees fight the liberal Yankees. If they can't be courteous to us Southerners, I'm not getting involved.