From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Malcolm X: "Everything South of Canada is the South".... Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibiity, attachment to fictions and false values..., too great an attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism... . Not all of us, just yet; but those words were written to describe the people of the eleven states of the "New South" that evolved after 1877. ...
Sad, that's the US today for sure. I am no fan of Southern traditions (or war) and frankly believe it would have been better if the Civil War had never been fought and the North and South had each gone their own way in 1861. As it is, I have been stunned to see the South's growing political and cultural domination of the US over the past 40 years. There is no better indicator of how victorious Southern values have been than the action of the Bush clan -- a strangely psychopathic crew, apparently capable of endless shapechanging -- morph so eagerly and successfully into a Dixie archetype in the person of GWB. I have long meant to read _Dixie Rising: How the South Is Shaping American Values, Politics, and Culture_ by Peter Applebome, but I think the book (now nearly ten years old) may be dated and too tentative about describing a South-ification of the US that has now definitely taken place. This is from Slate's review of the book: "The South is ... a cautionary blueprint for the nation when it comes to economic development. Applebome's discussion of South Carolina probes the dirty secret behind Dixie's stunning rise from poverty: its rabid anti-unionism, or what one historian calls 'the South's most respectable prejudice.' (As one labor leader says of Strom Thurmond, 'He'll accept blacks now, but you still don't see Strom shaking hands with union people.') The South's 'Faustian bargain'--send us jobs, any jobs, in exchange for cheap, nonunion labor--has undermined Northern workers and made the South 'the bad-job capital of America.' This balmy business climate has also led to gross neglect of workers' safety. To cite just one example, 25 North Carolina workers died during a chicken-plant fire in 1991, due to 'locked exit doors that were blocked off so workers wouldn't steal chickens.'" <http://slate.msn.com/id/2935/> Carl
