Posted on 08/14/2018 5:54:38 PM PDT by Kaslin
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can't get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can't go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley.
The supposed "nationalist" rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was anything else significant. No one showed up but cops, journalists and anti-nationalist protesters.
Ho-hum. We're back approximately where we were before the Charlottesville, Virginia, disaster the Washington march was meant to commemorate -- a foul-tempered shouting match that ended in death for a bystander hit by a "nationalist"-driven car.
A vocal coterie continues to think all vestiges of the late Confederacy -- especially, statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee -- should be removed from the public gaze. A far larger number, it seems to me, posit the futility, and harm, that flow from keeping alive the animosities of the past.
The latter constituency rejects the contention that, look, the past is the present: requiring a huge, 16th-century-style auto da fe at which present generations confess and bewail the sins of generations long gone. The technique for repenting of sins one never committed in the first place is unknown to human experience. Nevertheless, it's what we're supposed to do. Small wonder we haven't done it, apart from removing the odd Lee statue, as at Dallas' Lee Park. To the enrichment of human understanding? If so, no one is making that claim.
Looks as though we're moving on to larger goals, like maybe -- I kid you not -- committing "The Eyes of Texas" to the purgative flames, now that the venerable school song of the University of Texas, and unofficial anthem of the whole state, has been found culpable.
Culpable, yes. I said I wasn't kidding. The university's vice provost for "diversity" has informed student government members who possibly hadn't known the brutal truth that "The Eyes" dates from the Jim Crow era. "This is definitely about minstrelsy and past racism," said the provost. "It's also about school pride. One question is whether it can be both those things."
Maybe it can't be anything. Maybe nothing can be, given our culture's susceptibility to calls for moral reformation involving less the change of heart than the wiping away of memory, like bad words on a blackboard. Gone! Forgotten! Except that nothing is ever forgotten, save at the margins of history. We are who we are because of who we have been; we are where we are because of the places we have dwelt and those to which we have journeyed.
A sign of cultural weakness at the knees is the disposition to appease the clamorous by acceding to their demands: as the Dallas City Council did when, erratically, and solely because a relative handful were demanding such an action, it sent its Lee statute away to repose in an airplane hanger. I am not kidding -- an airplane hanger.
Civilization demands that its genuine friends -- not the kibitzers and showmen on the fringe -- when taking the measure of present and future needs, will consider and reflect on the good and the less than good in life, not to mention the truly awful and the merely preposterous. To remember isn't to excuse; it's to learn and thus to grow in wisdom and understanding.
In freeing the slaves, Yankee soldiers shot and blew up and starved many a Confederate. Was that nice? Should we be happy that so many bayonets ripped apart so many intestines? No. Nor should we be happy that so many Africans came in innocence to a land of which they knew nothing to work all their days as the bought-and-paid-for property of others.
History is far more complex, far more multisided than today's self-anointed cleansers of the record can be induced to admit. I think the rest of us are going to have to work around them. In the end, I think, and insofar as it can be achieved, we're going to have to ignore them.
Damn X
I’m almost feeling love of wood in that post.
I’m going to listen to one hour of Gil Scot Heron and the Last Poets on my iPad in the spirit of things
I’m out back with my horses and pit style bulldogs and Rotts
And a fire pit
Everyone is asleep
I’m listening to Curtis Mayfield.....this all got started over Aretha and greasy sound from down US 31 about one hundred miles....I’m a half mile from 31
Marvin Gay just doesn’t do it...too pop....Smokey Robinson mo betta
Wilson Picket or Otis or Percy
Stax Malaco or Muscle Shoals
Black music use to be so good
Now black music sucks and white imitators
It’s just compressed vocals warbling
Anyhow hugs from the mid south
We should go to Mississippi together that’s the real South....middle tennessee has never quite up to it honestly.......the Delta is the starting point
If you see hanging moss on trees you’re in the South no denying
We’d be like a team...places you’d need me and where I’d need you
I’m up for it..
Maybe you’re still in school or writing somenthing....
Let’s see the Title “Wardaddy too me to Mississippi and I feared a klan meeting but instead he took me to Tunica”
“The country was more local back then. People were more preoccupied with what was going on locally than with what was happening at the other end of the country”
Same thing regarding the government. Somewhere long ago in on of my books on the war I read that prior to the war the greatest impact the Federal Government had on people’s daily lives was if they received mail.
He wasn’t all that lucky. After being taken to the Old Capitol Prison he was paroled and he returned to his unit in time for Gettysburg.
The 13th Mississippi was with Longstreet facing Dan Sickle’s exposed Union salient at the Peach Orchard. On the evening of July 2nd the 13th conducted a powerful charge through the Union lines and drove them back to Cemetery Ridge. My ancestor was killed in that battle, as was General Barksdale.
Sounds like Democrat talk to me -- you know how Democrats talk, right?
Whatever they are most guilty of (i.e., Russian collusion) they most loudly accuse their opponents of.
Posting under many screen names sounds like something a very small number of Lost Causers would do to make it seem there's a lot more of you.
rockrr has posted here frequently since 2002, under that one screen name.
Why would rockrr want another one?
John S Mosby: "Networks private message-wise with others who lurk on this topic."
You've never used a private message?
You've never pinged someone on a topic you think interesting?
Welcome to Free Republic, newbie.
John S Mosby: "Lot of cover names of others as well."
Cover names? You mean screen names, one screen name per person, right?
You see, unlike you Lost Causers there's no need for Unionists to puff up our numbers by taking out multiple names per person, certainly not on Civil War threads.
But, tell you what, if you think you've identified multiple screen names for the same person, tell us who they are.
John S Mosby: "All with zero respect and monolithic views."
"Monolithic views"?
Well... there is a certain consistency in the truth, doncha know?
If we all stick to the truth, then we'll all sound much the same, wouldn't you expect?
As for "zero respect", what, respect for slavers?
Respect for liars?
Respect for people who started & waged war on the United States -- over slavery??
Respect for Democrats???
Why would anyone want to respect such people?
John S Mosby: "Deo Vindice."
But He didn't, did He, and we can easily imagine why.
Pelahm: "That doesn’t fit the time line.
Van Buren was Andrew Jackson’s VP and was President from 1837-1841.
The Tammany Hall machine had been around since the 1790s but it wasn’t all that big until after the Irish Potato Famine circa 1845.
By that time Van Buren was an anti-slavery leader in the Free Soil Party.
Most of that machine stuff occurred after the Civil War during the Gilded Age when the lone Democrat President was Grover Cleveland, a Bourbon Democrat to the right of most modern conservatives."
No offense to Cleveland ("ma, ma, where's my pa?") at the time there were genuinely conservative Democrats.
Unfortunately neither Southerner Wilson nor New Yorker Franklin Roosevelt were amongst them.
But Martin Van Buren is the important point here.
Years ago he was identified by our own LS as the Founder of the Northern-Southern Democrat party alliance which ruled Washington, DC from the time of Andrew Jackson (circa 1828) until secession in 1861.
Van Buren's contribution was to forge Northern big-city immigrant populations into Democrat voting blocks firmly allied with the Southern slave-power.
Indeed, the Northern component included those "Northeastern power brokers" that so exercise DiogenesLamp.
They were business partners, political allies and social companions to Southern planters.
They loaned money, provided shipping & warehouses, their sons & daughters married and moved to start plantations of their own.
When Deep South Fire Eaters began declaring secession, in late 1860, those New Yorkers wanted to join them.
Point is this: long before D'Souza identified Martin Van Buren as the key player in cementing the Democrat North-South alliance, our own LS wrote books on it, and I'm satisfied the idea is simple fact.
wardaddy: "Bill your posts are superb but lost on these guys.
They exist through the prism of racial grievance and atonement.
Who knows who they are really...or why they are here."
Total nonsense, wardaddy.
We are here for one reason and one reason only: to correct the many lies you people keep posting.
That's it: if you stop lying, we're gone.
We're not here to attack you, or the South or anybody else, except to correct the Lost Causer lies you people tell.
As for Ohioan's comments here: the United States was founded by leaders who believed slavery was on the road to natural, gradual abolition, as indeed appeared obvious in 1787.
As late as 1832 there were serious debates in Virginia on abolition.
But they came to nothing and that was among the earliest breaks with Founders' original intent.
In 1834 the Brits abolished slavery in their empire and many Americans began asking, "why not here too?"
In the mean time slavery became the nation's single biggest economic force, allowing the US to dominate global cotton markets.
And so, as the cries for abolition became ever louder, the interests in protecting slavery grew ever stronger.
Irresistible force meet immovable object...
Your post #22 was a concurring opinion to golux #16, both perpetuating the Lost Causer lie that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation didn't free any slaves, in your memorable simile:
Fess up, sir, what is it?
Amen brothers.
Not to worry BroJoeK, you’re just responding to the “insulting hissing” I’ve heard tell of around these parts.
They have a strong bark - but not much of a bite.
Now, don’t stop the boys while they’re busy projecting...
Right. VB the vice president or president was unimportant.
It was Congressman Van Buren in 1825 who was the enemy of the American people.
It’s all you do?
So who are you?
Your obsession does not give you the moral right to determine when other folks, continuing with a labor system that prevailed in Biblical times (both Old & New Testament), in Classical Greece & Rome, in the Feudal era in both Europe & Asia; and which continued in both Brazil & Africa, after it was ended in America & Russia in the 1860s; when other folks whom you had a moral duty to respect, once you took an oath to support the Constitution, might decide to modernize their labor system?
The people you accuse of lying are far more familiar than you with the moral priorities of the Old South--perhaps the last truly Chivalric civilization on earth. They are rich in its literature, its human interaction, customs, laws & leadership; well aware that the principal difference between the Old South & others in that long, many thousand year history of that labor system, was the element of Christian kindness between Master & Servant..
Get off the arrogant pretense of a moral high ground. You do not occupy such; just caught up in the parochial strut of egalitarian fantasy seekers. And stop pretending that Reconstruction was benign or beneficial to anyone but scoundrels. If you were really familiar with the social statistics, you would know that the actual "benefit" to the ex-slaves was an enormous, but well- documented set back of outrageous proportions.
“slavers” “Peculiar institution” have unnecessary pejorative connotations, adding nothing to an historical discussion.
Touchy touchy... nerve nerve. Over the target. Buh bye.
Meant exactly what I said. Hence your broadside.
There are others- here longer who have your number, and keep track. It’s a big tent.... like our erstwhile GOPe fringe members.
“But Martin Van Buren is the important point here. Years ago he was identified by our own LS as the Founder of the Northern-Southern Democrat party alliance which ruled Washington, DC from the time of Andrew Jackson (circa 1828) until secession in 1861.
“Van Buren’s contribution was to forge Northern big-city immigrant populations into Democrat voting blocks firmly allied with the Southern slave-power.”
There’s no disputing Van Buren’s role in assembling the Democratic Party out of the wreckage of the Democratic-Republican Party around 1828. But the Whigs also formed from elements of that old party, plus Federalists.
The problem is trying to connect Van Buren with “big city machine politics supporting Southern slave power”. By 1844 Van Buren sided with New York’s anti-slavery Barnburner Democrats. By 1848 Van Buren was running for President on the anti-slavery Free Soil Party. When the Civil War began Van Buren supported Abe Lincoln.
New York’s Tammany Hall was the only real big city machine and Van Buren was a member. Tammany overwhelmingly supported the Jackson-Calhoun ticket in 1828 and Jackson rewarded them with patronage.
Tammany backed Van Buren in the 1836 Presidential election but only managed a meager 1,124 win for him in NYC. In 1840 Tammany’s help failed to win Van Buren a second term. In the 1844 Democratic Convention Tammany ended up voting for dark horse James Polk. In the 1848 Democratic Convention the Barnburner Democrats withdrew and joined the Free Soil Party in nominating Van Buren for President. Most of Tammany remained with the Democrats and nominated Lewis Cass.
Republicans/Whigs took advantage of political patronage, the spoils system, the same as Democrats. Patronage finally lost some of its power with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, named for a Democratic Senator from Ohio.
“Total nonsense, wardaddy.
We are here for one reason and one reason only: to correct the many lies you people keep posting.
That’s it: if you stop lying, we’re gone.”
Well obviously “we” are the arbiters of what is true, and you, wardaddy, are one of those lying posters. The ones that the Keepers of True History are forced to smite with the rod of truth. So kindly knock off the prevarications so that they can get some rest.
But it appears also that “we” prefers to remain cloaked in secrecy. A shy group, reticent to come out of the shadows until some smiting is required. Kinda like superheroes, unlike your villainous, dissembling self.
As childish mischaracterizations go that’s not bad.
“As childish mischaracterizations go that’s not bad.”
Actually it’s excellent.
I think a contest for guessing who the mysterious “we” might be is in order. There’s no limit to the number of guesses, and anyone can play. Even BroJoeK, who of course knows who “we” is, can guess.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.