Seph:

Savannah has long been known back to the 1700’s as a haven for Sephardic Jews—in the South, any place Jews were accepted was likely to be more liberal.

Oklahoma has elected as its two senators, Tom Coburn and James Inhofe, who may be the two most ignorant AND mean-spirited men to be elected from one state in a century.  Coburn claimed Gay rights was the greatest threat ever to our freedom and knew NOTHING of the Holocaust until long after he was elected to Congress.  Inhofe insane rants against global warming, evolution, and ANY environmental restrictions are famous.

Then there’s Jeff Sessions, the throw-back to the 50’s and early 60’s Jim Crow, who made his name attempting (and failing) to put civil rights leaders in jail, who DARES call Sotomayor “racist”.

Sure, there are lots of racists and ignorant bigots up North.  We just don’t usually elect them to state-wide offices, and only rarely to Congressional seats (Michelle Bachman from Minnesota being an exception—but that’s an odd district).  Even Republicans from up here rarely fall into that crazy mode—and Rick Santorum was tossed out in 2006 (Did you know that the urban dictionary named something after him?—I’m too shy to say what “santorum” is…).  I may not LIKE Peter King, but he’s not a crazy idiot like Coburn or Inhofe or…Palin.  Or my favorite congressional twit, Jim Bunning, who should have stayed in baseball.

Night Gaunt—Zacceto. Thanks. I’ll tell Raeden so she knows or she’ll just keep asking people. Catholics are Christians, but maybe the Protestants didn’t take it up. You’re right, Moslems wear little round caps but they usually are bigger. I think anyway. Covering the head nearly to the forehead. Much more sensible and easier to keep on, I imagine.

Inherit, I take your point. I don’t know if there are more haters waiting to re-arise in the South than elsewhere in the U.S., but it all depends where you are and who you run into I guess. My dad spent a night in a Birmingham jail after refusing to sign an accident report blaming an elderly black farmer who stopped so suddenly our car hit him. (He stopped so suddenly because a drunken state trooper drove right out of a roadhouse in front of us. Miracle my mom holding my baby brother in the front weren’t killed. I was 8, and remember standing in the hot sun with Mom trying to contain her famous temper. Some ladies with not too many clothes on staggered out of the roadhouse and asked her if we didn’t want to come in out of the hot sun and have some watermelon. I brightened up and wheeled right around but got jerked back hard. “No. We’ll stand out here, thanks all the same.” Mom phoned the triple A insurance agent who followed my dad to the jail, got a lawyer, got us into a motel. Came back later that night to say he was getting our car fixed, my dad would get out of the jail in the a.m. and the agent said “You all get in the car and don’t stop for anything till you cross the state line.” That’s what we did.

On the other hand I stayed a couple months with friends teaching at the U. of Louisiana in Lafayette, and was taken in by a big old Cajun family and taught how to cook. (“First you make a roux…”). Their dances and parties were completely integrated—black, white, Indian, French, whatever.

But there sure are some mean people there too. Ole Miss is great, but have had some not great experiences with white guys who liked to knock their kids around and not be called on it. Yet in Savannah, when my son-in-law returned to Ft. Hunter after his first tour in Iraq, his family from Brazil, Cape Verde, Atlanta and Algeria were all over the place and no one looked at us twice on the streets of Savannah.

Only the stone KKKers don’t like Jews (or Catholics—I don’t know who they DO like). Wasn’t always that way in some places, and in others Jews were much more welcome than up north. For that matter, I know blacks more at home down south than up north, which is why they live there.

Our family is so variously hued that we all have pretty good radar. Our oldest son, now teaching at Ohio State, drove from California to St. Louis to see his ailing grandma before continuing on to university in your state, NJ, and told us he was really scared crossing Colorado and Kansas; got major attitude in truck stops, gas stations, etc. He’s Romanian-GermanJewish/Dutch/Cherokee/French Haitian and absolutely gorgeous. You just never know about people.

The Catholics call it a zacceto. One of the influences that Paul hadn’t excized from Christianity. You will find many Islamics too wear one but I don’t know its name.

Seph, I lived in the South for 15 years, and loved it and miss it.  I “fit” there better than back up North in NJ.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t see the extreme problems and the re-rising resentments of the red-neck set—racist, fascist, and irrational.  The Holocaust Museum shooters are all just waiting to re-arise.

I don’t know why Catholic priests wear kippas.  The Pope wears one, too.  I guess at the level of Monsignor or Bishop and above they, too, have to cover their heads.  I would ask someone Catholic about that.

Inherit, why people in the South keep electing Trent Lotts and Sessions, (not to mention the South Carolina Romeo Mark Sanford) is because the South isn’t perfect either. Nowhere is. I love Chicago, went to school there, and observed that the cops were corrupt, the Mayor was corrupt, the whole damned city was but people had jobs, the unions were happy, South Side (where I lived) wasn’t so bad as ghettos go ... and later learned that Mayor Daley also did the country a favor and voted the cemeteries for JFK.

One thing Southerners have going for them that I really really like and really miss in California is a sky-high tolerance for eccentrics and their eccentricities. The more eccentric the better. I really did like that. (And I suspect you would too.) My lunatic husband trailered a mare from Canada down to southern Louisiana and, with a few extra days before he had to be back at work here, just rode the horse around, camping out, getting lost. He’s a little wierd himself—blunt to a fault; if you ask him what he thinks about something you’d better want to know— and had no problems with the poorer whites and blacks and Cajuns he encountered. In fact they charmed the pants off him, and reported that he finally understood what I liked about the South.

What I don’t like about the part of California where I live is that everyone is trying to be Something. Cool, or earthmother/earthfather or wise or spiritual or fast-track or very KPFA ... maybe I’m just getting old and cranky as well as paranoid.

Here’s a question for you. Visiting with our young granddaughters in Columbus Ohio, took them to a free on-the-grass in the park comic opera “The Three Musketeers”, which we all enjoyed. (I wouldn’ve enjoyed being anywhere with the girls but it really was fun.) So afterwords, 8-year-old Raeden asks me why Cardinal Richilieu was wearing a yarmulke. I didn’t know. Do you?

My problem with the South is despite its history and many noble efforts to overcome it, people there keep electing racist assholes like Jeff Sessions, Trent Lott and many others, all Republicans.  Lindsey Graham while frequently annoying, actually has always tended to be an independent thinker, standing up against his party at unexpected times—and at others being another ditto-head…oh well.

This crap about FDR planning the attack on Pearl Harbor is more of that urban legend crap.  It is WELL-documented that an attack WAS expected—that is not a conspiracy or a secret.  Roberta Wohlstetter, for one supported it back in the 1960’s.

The ATTACK was no surprise. That it was on Pearl Harbor, was.  Yes, there was traffic indicating interest in Hawaii as a target, but far more about the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines, both far easier for a projection of power by Japan than Pearl Harbor, halfway across the Pacific.

With hindsight, it was almost brilliant—destroy the USA’s ability to project power in the Pacific, at least till they rebuild. Almost, since most of our fleet was actually obsolete anyway.  So was Britain’s too.

Yet these stories have surfaced since an aged, semi-senile, angry and snubbed historian, Charles Beard first popularized the myth that FDR knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor and did nothing. It was an angry old man, Beard, getting in a low blow on a President who humiliated him—by ignoring him.

But people like to believe this crap.

I wrote a couple of pieces on racism in my blog.

Check it out

http://thefederalistpapers2007.blogspot.com

Paracelsus, your’re welcome. I also enjoyed your post—had never heard of the Dutch submariner who apparently tried to be a Paul Revere and got cyanide for his trouble. (Truth be told, my parents were glad when we got into that war because the Brits and some Americans knew early on what the Nazis were working up to in the solution of their Jewish problem and did nothing long enough for a third of all the Jews in the world were killed. Didn’t have to happen. But a war is not anything to enter lightly.)

I was born in St. Louis (in a border state occupied by Federal troops that disbanded the Missouri legislature when it voted to join the Confederacy), and so grew up learning both sides of the War of Rebellion, the Civil War or the War Between the States. Not that both sides were in the history books, but our public schools had some amazingly aware, conscientious teachers. Learned early on that Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories were slave tales, re how they outwitted their masters. A decade ago, my daughter-in-law, whom I love and am exceedingly proud of, was shocked when I gave the kids an Uncle Remus book but relented when I told her the background. Also learned all about Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, who figured large in the colonies’ victory. I didn’t think Lincoln went to war to free the slaves (not based on his articles penned for New York newspapers anyway) but to keep the union together. Most Southerners didn’t own slaves—just a large handful of big planters. The cotton gin was already functioning and probably slavery would have ended in maybe a decade. Though if you were a slave, those would have been a long 10 years. I think the war was like most wars, about economics, and tariffs on Southern cotton so it would go to Boston mills rather than to England. But the South should never have seceded though that was their right. They underestimated the effect that Northern factories would have on the outcome of the war, also the effect of heightened immigration on replenishing troops. But it has always bothered me that the South has been so demonized so unfairly. Max Lerner’s excellent book “America as a Civilization” gives a clearer perspective on the late 19th-early 20th century South. No one in their right mind would condone slavery and bigotry, but knowing where these things originate always helps. (Another instructive book is DeTocqueville’s “Democracy in America”, particularly useful to anyone trying to understand both North and South in the decades leading up to the War Between the States.) There are also books on Southern populism in the early 20th century that most people, even populists, haven’t bothered to read. C. Van Woodward’s on Tom Watson is a good place to start.

Sometimes I think I’m so interested in the South is because I am interested in the long-term survival of Israel. There are many parallels in terms of perceptions and realities. But in truth I’ve always been interested in both, just as I am in other subjects and corners of the world. All of it is a good excuse to read books, a pastime to which I’m as exceptionally partial as I am in exploring the physical world from the back of a horse (though the latter unfortunately, being conditional on the physical, has a “use by” date whereas books are for forever).

@ Clonakilty 32

Lindsay Graham was one of the biggest supporters of pathway to citizenship and amnesty. I would think this would be a “liberal” cause. In the end this Sotomayor is proving a distraction to more important issues:

1. Cap and Trade

2. The Mathew Sheppard Anti-Hate Bill

#1 will create massive unemployment and #2 will knock out free speech.

As to having a bench that is 3/4’s Catholic, I would think most people would want a more diverse number of believers on the bench. Perhaps it doesn’t mean anything.
But why is it that when I ask for diversity on the bench, I should be accused of being bigoted? Go figure.

The one thing that is scary about Sotomayor is her stance on gun control, and that is worth considering. Have you forgotten the same machien of tyranny is still in power. We are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our new boy wonder is pushing American forces into Pakistan. I would think that with a government that doesn’t respect the consent of its citizens that would be good for the citizens to hang onto their gun rights. But you still want to play this game of Southerners are assholes. 

I never liked GW Bush. I never voted for him. I suppose that is weird for your typical image of a white Southerner. As a matter of fact I am a registered Democrat still. As to whom I would like to see on the bench, I would like to see a civil libertarian. The problem is that government is choosing officials on the basis of color in order to push an agenda that is unconstitutional, and illiberal. If a Southerner as myself picks on the latest incarnation of Clarence Thomas, Alberto Gonzales, or John Yu under Democratic cover I get tarred as a racist.

I know the South has its problems, but there are a lot of good people who live here. Consider that the American Revolution could not have been won, if it had not been for the Indian fighting and guerrilla tactics of southern soldiers. New York City and Boston were British properties during the Revolutionary War. More of the North was occupied by the British than the South. The war was won at Yorktown, Virginia, not New York City.

So you want the South to go away. Fine, my feelings aren’t hurt.

@ Sepharad

Thank you. That was an excellent post. I have had family from way back in the South. Some of my relations were in Virginia before it became West Virginia. I feel that the Civil War was in part justified by those who thought they could improve Southerners morally. Yes, slavery is a rotten thing, but the understanding was that the federation was a voluntary thing.Most any scholars of that time will say that Lincoln’s justification for the union was an extemporaneous to the law and custom for that time. True enough the abolitionists taught the South a moral lesson. Isn’t it odd though that the government in Washington still feels the need to improve the morals of the world through warfare? With the Civil War or the Northern War of Aggression, Southerners were taught to free the slaves. Then the Great War was about teaching Europe about democracy. WWII was engineered for entry by Winnie and Frank so that we could save the world from the Nazis. There was a book called Operation James Bond. The book tells the story of a young spy, who would be the template fro Ian Flemming’s James Bond. A spy named Christopher Creighton was dispatched to a Dutch sub in the Pacific. The sub had found that Japanese aircraft carriers were in advanced posts near Hawaii. It seemed an attack by the Japanese was likely. So the Dutch submarine commander sent messages home that the Japanese were about to attack Hawaii. Mr. Creighton, a British espionage agent had found the Dutch sub, and had salted its air supply with cyanide capsules. The sub was also had explosives attached to it, which were later detonated. Obviously the Americans and the British wanted to prevent allegations of having prior knowledge of the attack. Anyhow the federal government has seen fit to involve us in many wars to fight communism, terrorism , and so forth, because some eggheads seem to think that these people do not know how to live, and we need to bomb them to hell to teach them righteousness.

Bud and hippie4ever, you guys almost sound like racists yourselves, and I don’t think you are (based on your other posts), but South-bashing is pretty extreme.  The American South is a wildly diverse place. When I was young and registering people to vote down there, I was sometimes scared but also met a lot of decent whites. A couple guys and I were arrested and had to spend the night in a little jail somewhere in the Georgia backwoods, and the sheriff who arrested us knew we were scared, so he showed up with some coffee and meals his wife had cooked for us and sat up with us all night. The next day, after the civil rights lawyer paid our fines, the sheriff said he’d follow us till we were safely on the state highway. (This was after Shwerner, Goodman and Cheney disappeared so we were all pretty nervous.) Atlanta had a large middle and upperclass black community long before anywhere up north, also a black mayor; Louisiana has always been very integrated racially; the KKK of the 20th century was reborn in Indiana, not the South. The South has produced major writers (Faulkner, McCullers, O’Conner, Capote and many others). The South has had some long stretches of being poor, as it was agricultural much longer than the North and less industrialized (why they lost the Civil War). A friend of mind went to teach Freedom of Information in the journalism school at Ole Miss in Jackson, and told me the kids there were eager to learn, not bigots, bright and curious. Another friend is journalism dean at the U. of Arkansas in Lafayette, and likes the ambience. There are probably more integrated neighborhoods in the South than up North, and where were the worst race riots? South Boston, Watts in Los Angeles, and Detroit. When the city of Charleston wrote up its charter in the late 1600s, it specifically welcomed “Jews and other heretics to be part of our community.” Before the Civil War, states like Ohio banned free blacks within their borders. In 1864, New York workingmen lynched hundreds of workingclass black men during the draft riots. (My main complaint about some of the South today is that people have gotten really religious, but I also have friends and former colleagues living there who are progressive in every way that matters. Deluded politicians are from every state in the union. (Cheney, I believe, was from way north of the Mason-Dixon line.)

Wexler, must admit though I’ve spent a large part of my life fighting it, and still do in small immediate ways that present themselves, I’m ready to spend some time helping my kids help their kids understand what’s real, what’s illusion, what’s possible and what’s not. Also as much time as possible is going into living with what’s good in my life—husband, horses, reading, doing a bit for the peace (not pacifist) party in Israel, where I also have family and friends. I’m an American, and secular, so religion has never been part of my life except in so far as it’s been cause/excuse for going along with corporate wars. I’m not as rigidly anti-religion as some of my atheist friends, but my main objection to it is that it purveys the myth (as Joe Hill once expressed in a song) that “There’ll be pie in the sky when you die. That’s a lie.” The absence of religion would also clear a bit of fog, when we look for explanations of our lot in life. Opiate of the masses is not, I think, too strong an expression.
But I never really stop thinking about things, and if I ever have a useful suggestion as to what we can do, will make it.

Well, as I said, we’re not going to get William O. Douglas.

@ Anarcissie

I don’t care for Sotomayor’s use of the good faith provision to rule not to suppress evidence from a search warrant that went after excludable evidence. I know the case involved a man with child porn on his computer, but the police were charged with finding other evidence. I think good faith should not be part of probable cause.

If you look at Sotomayor’s record as a judge I think you’ll find she’s a moderate liberal (using contemporary jargon)—not very exciting.  I’d prefer a fire-eating civil libertarian like William O. Douglas, but I’m not going to get one.  So the only interesting thing is to watch and see if the Republicans chew off another one of their feet.

One of the funny things about the present situation is that Hispanic Americans are, by and large, socially conservative, patriotic, enterprising, law-abiding, community-minded people who would be natural Republicans if the Republicans weren’t too busy kissing the sagging butt of the Angry White Man to let them join up.

@ Anarcissie

Paracelsus—one of the payoffs of nominating Sotomayor is to get certain people to call attention to the facts of her being Hispanic and female and complain, or at least imply, that she will, therefore, be prejudiced against White males.

My concern is that Sotomayor is a closet racist against white people. If you look at her history you will find that she was a member of NCLR,The National Council on The Race, or La Raza. La Raza has enshrined the mythology of Azatlan. They speak of the superiority of the Latino/Chicano race. They have been openly nationalistic and separatist. I don’t think her membership is any different than that of a Dixiecrat with Klan associations. I have been around enough La Razites at the University of New Mexico to know better. Also why are nominating another Catholic to the bench? We already have 5.

Paracelsus—one of the payoffs of nominating Sotomayor is to get certain people to call attention to the facts of her being Hispanic and female and complain, or at least imply, that she will, therefore, be prejudiced against White males.  Since there will be no evidence that she is actually prejudiced, this contention will bounce, serving only to offend Hispanics and women, without gaining any additional traction with White males or anyone else.  A number of Republicans seem to have fallen into the trap.  You have now played your part, although in this venue it was probably wasted.

I would like a Latina nominee who doesn’t see people on the basis of color, but on the basis of law. This has become more a matter of identity politics. How much should the average white man or woman have to pay for white guilt? I object to the corruption of blood argument when it comes to quotas. It is just as bad to victimize the poor working class whites for the crimes of the rich as it was to use the Bible to justify slavery with the hewers of wood argument. You don’t penalize the children of one race to pay for the sins of their fathers toward the other race. Otherwise you set up a system that forever penalizes one group of people to pay some sort of reparations. How much is enough? I am afraid Sotomayor wants to perpetuate such a system.

One way to put an end to the American Empire is to let the Confederacy secede and, as hippie4ever says, let them stew in their ignorance and hatred.  They will be very good at football and killing dark skinned peoples.  They can take over in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan and the Union can then attempt to save itself which will probably be impossible with the Confederacy hanging around our necks.

Will the Civil War never end? Sessions is no peacemaker; just another pseudo-christian-neocon-racist-kkk-inspired-multi-bigot and major crook. Sorry I forgot “homophobe.” This jerk is in office thanks to corporate america, and no doubt sells out his constituency on behalf of shady deals behind closed doors. They’re so badly educated in Alabama the poor actually think ol’ Jeff’s one o’ ‘em. The poor deluded bastards.

I wouldn’t mind if the South left the Union; I’m sick of these sheeple keeping the rest of us down. Where I live we don’t have anything in common with the South, except language and that’s questionable. They could fester in their ignorance and hatred, and just stew and go nowhere. Pick at their scabs and scratch their asses. That’s the kind of people they are, and removed from the Union we’d have lots of money for OUR programs because they’re also a big cash drain. Jeff’s expensive—he doesn’t turn tricks for just anybody. They have to be male, straight, christian and white. After all, the KKK is all about standards.

Sephared….

I just know a tiny bit of the truth, some by what others have shared, some by inspection.

I am uncertain what to do about it.  I suppose the options are live with it, fight it, or leave the country. 

Right now I’m trying the second option by trying to help people understand what is happening to them.  It’s a tough job.  People hate having their illusions shattered, even though it is somewhat mystifying to me why anyone would want to live in a fantasy world.  But I’m told that Americans profess to be some of the most religious people on earth, so there you go.

I don’t know what else to say.  I’m open to suggestions.

http://twitter.com/wwwexler

Wexler—You just told us all we need to know. The truth. However, now what?

“It presumes that the white male experience is the only authentically American experience, and therefore the only one that could possibly be unbiased. Whatever predispositions or inclinations these men bring to the law are the valid ones. After all, they are not hampered by some silly notions they may have picked up along the way had they lived their lives as women or as members of minority groups.”

These white males of the ole Dixiecrat party are allowing their “empathy” to show!  That “empathy” is toward white male privilege.  Far from being a party of “openness and big-tent” these small minded bigots have merely discarded their sheets and hoods!  These people forget that the Constitution is a living document - that will and should change to accommodate the changes that society needs!

After all “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The privileged white men that wrote those words, did not write this for the people of their time, but maybe they wrote it for future generations in the hope that “We the people” would be more evolved in our dealings with each other than they were able to be!

Judge Sotomayor is tough on the innocent.  Check out Sotomayor’s role in keeping an innocent man in prison for years.  Click on http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/14/story_of_wrongfully_convicted_prisoner_jailed

First, the Neo-Confederate Sessions;
“Down one path is the traditional American legal system, so admired around the world, where judges impartially apply the law to the facts without regard to their own personal views,” Sessions declared. “This is the compassionate system because it is the fair system.”

An excellent article! Especially this phrase that I could not improve upon that answers Sessions;

“Undeterred by his gross historical error—had every court in American history applied the law in this manner, schools would still be legally segregated, a woman’s right to earn a living and obtain credit would still be denied, and so on…”—Marie Cocco

However the standing upon established over president reminds me of Robert Bork who would have steadfastly stayed with the Constitution the way it was written and interpreted in 1789 or 1953. He was properly criticized for it because then no changes would have been made and we would be like the above as well. So how do we win?

@William W Wexler,

Whoops, there it is. Truth.

- Insurgent

Marie Cocco:
’... The price, though, is barely coded race baiting that has been part of the assault on Sotomayor since her nomination was announced. And it dominates the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. ...

From the point of view of the Democratic Party, that’s not a price, it’s a payoff.

A great article

Sessions is the New Southern Republican: Racist dixiecrat redneck who left the Democratic Party when Democrats totally disavowed racism.  Even the last vestige of it, Robert Byrd, has totally denounced it.

Like so many of his Southern GOP colleagues, Sessions is nothing more than a frustrated segregationist whose only problem with the KKK is they make for bad PR.

It’s time to name these Jim Crow Republicans for what they are…and ask why the other Republicans tolerate them and pretend they are NOT racist.

I remember Jesse Helms in North Carolina, in his 1978 campaign, with his TV ads: “Jesse Helms, a dedicated Christian”....Yeah. Right.

Regardless of Sotomayor’s judicial history, ethnicity, gender, empathy, and any other qualification or disqualification mentioned, you can bet your bottom dollar that she is a candidate friendly to the corporatist agenda.

Regarding the GOP posturing, spewing, and the mewling class led by Chris Matthews (barf), it’s just part of the three ringed circus to make you believe that our government is still functioning in the way the founders intended.

It’s not.

-Wexler