This was a real epiphany for me:
After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, the audience member said “For what? For feeding him and housing him?” Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry’s outburst.
Finally, I understand the alliance between rebels and Randroids, Reardon metal and Robert E. Lee, the stars-and-bars and don’t-tread-on-me.
You see, those plantation owners weren’t slavers, they were job creators.
scav
It’s great . . .
Davis X. Machina
Look at this from the ‘maker’ perspective — like every other commodity, labor has a perfect price, a price at which the market for this particular commodity always clears — but in this case, it’s always a close approximation of zero, because unlike coal or cadmium, additional labor can be mass-produced more or less ex nihilo and will be, gratis, unbidden, by untrained, unskilled labor.
Anything above zero is consequently taken — basically extorted — from the employer by more or less covert threats of violence.
The economic intuition of the average person who matters in this country is on a good day trapped in 19th c. Britain and on a bad one in 13th. c. France.
Baud
Frederick Douglass shouldn’t have forgave his former master.
PeakVT
Anyone who creates a job has the right to steal the fruits of the worker’s labor. Amirite?
Chris
Of course. Thus has it ever been. The conservative ethic of licking the Boss’s boots because the Boss is a god from whom all things in life derive was around long before modern CEOs.
And the alliance between Reorden metal and Robert E. Lee goes all the way back to the 1870s. It was called the Tilden-Hayes Compromise, in which the agreement was that the Republican would get the White House in exchange for withdrawing U.S. troops from the South and ending Reconstruction. That turned into a decades-long situation in which ex-Confederate elites controlled the South as they saw fit while Gilded Age Republicans controlled pretty much the rest of the country. Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats had pretty much the same outlook – conservative, pro-business and WASP supremacist – and the robber-barons, the real rulers of the country, made out like bandits in partnership with both.
The alliance between white power and big business, between industrial interests based in the Northeast and Confederate nostalgists based in the South, goes all the way back to that era, something that’s often overlooked when we read history and remember that Republicans used to be the party of Lincoln.
(And I continue to be fascinated by that era, not only because it’s what modern-day Republicans want to return us to but also as a more general case study of how an aristocracy can take root and maintain control of a country even with all the legal mechanisms of democracy and constitutional government).
Baud
They have the job creators, we have the job doers.
I prefer us.
David in NY
Yup. Good title. Calls for the whole thing:
In America you’ll get food to eat
Won’t have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It’s great to be an American
Ain’t no lions or tigers-ain’t no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Ev’rybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard, little wog-sail away with me
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
In America every man is free
To take care of his home and his family
You’ll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree
You’re all gonna be an American
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Sail away-sail away
We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
I’ve seen Harriet Tubman’s name pop up fairly often lately, as March 10 was 100 years from the day she died, and I wondered to myself how likely it is that, sooner or later, some fuckwad is going to try to turn sentiment against her for “stealing”. Since, after all, by the laws of her time, she was indeed a thief: She ran away, thereby stealing her master’s lawful property, viz., herself. And if that weren’t bad enough, she went back again and again and helped other slaves steal their masters’ property. I can almost hear it already…
They’ll begin with some weak, half-hearted acknowledgement of the minor evils of slavery, and then plow right on ahead about how, well, you can’t just go breaking laws willy-nilly, you know, you can’t just steal other people’s lawful belongings. That isn’t right. Those slaveowners, as that astute young neanderthal in the clip brought up, did indeed house and clothe and feed their slaves! How about that! And who paid for it? We-he-hell, it surely wasn’t those shiftless slaves, was it? No, indeedy, ’twas those decent, upright, beleaguered slaveowners, that’s who!
I almost can’t believe somebody hasn’t made this argument yet. I guess it’s only a question of how long it’ll be, though, before somebody does…
Nicole
That video is amazing. The best part is when he says that he’s been reading a lot of fiction by his people and it’s given him a real appreciation for his culture. I wasn’t aware men read Gone With the Wind.
Haydnseek
@David in NY: Believe it or not, Sonny Terry and Brownie Mcghee covered this. I still can’t tell if they’re doing it ironically or not, but their version is so straight ahead that after all these years I still don’t quite know what to think…….
Mark S.
And the slaveowner didn’t even expect anything in return.
Oh wait.
JoyceH
This fellow who thinks the plantation owner was so generous to actually feed and house his slaves ought to take a moment to consider – who grew the food? Who built the houses? Who does he think did the actual labor that supported and sustained the plantation?
Baud
@Mark S.:
Wages (or in the case of slaves, expenses) always have greater value than the labor that can be acquired with them.
It’s Wealth of Nations, Wingnut edition.
M31
And look! The CPAC attendee in question happens to have founded the “Youth for Western Civilization” group (disbanded but now he’s part of, surprise, the “White Students Union”) at Towson University (Towson is in the Baltimore suburbs):
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/towson/bal-towson-student-advocates-for-segregation-at-cpac-event-20130316,0,2592318.story
Really a choice fellow, isn’t he:
“The Western Civilization group held several events including one in December 2011 where they set up a Nativity scene at the Union that appeared to compare President Barack Obama to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.”
and, of fucking course:
“Members of the group recently attended a Latin Mass before heading to a gun range for “tactical firearms training,” and plan to start campus patrols at Towson University, the post adds.”
Anoniminous
Won’t anyone think of the poor plantation owners forced to feed* and house a bunch of shiftless Negros who sat around playing the banjo, singing, dancing and drinking moonshine whiskey.
* on T-bone steak, no doubt
Chris
@JoyceH:
… SOCIALISM!
You MONSTER!
ETA: I’m not saying you’re wrong, mind you. Just that you sound like a socialist. And this is America! Better wrong than red!
MikeJ
@Baud: I always liked this response to a former master.
22over7
We’re fighting a cold civil war right now.
wenchacha
Jesus H Christ, what does the young white boy think about perhaps his bossman removing his wife and kids from his free house? Because if you are good enough to clothe and feed and house a person, shouldn’t you have the right to breed them with anyone you see fit?
Anybody who tries to float any reason that slavery was not that bad ought to be served the dope-slap, and frequently. Of course, this is from the same people who want us all to birth rape-babies, so it’s the same mindset. Fucked.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
And another thing:
So the dickwad reads some shit in college and finds out ho wonderful “his people” were. Fuck. My mother grew up in Virginia. Both my grandparents came from old, old families in the seaboard south, the kind that, before the Civil War, had all the money and ran everything. (After the war, they had a lot less money, but they still ran everything.) And, well, damn, “my people” were sadistic, greedy assholes who owned other people and made them do all their work. They weren’t “good people”; they weren’t “nice people”. They were assholes.
I don’t understand why this is so hard for people to understand. I come from a long line, on my mother’s side, of assholes. Doesn’t make me an asshole. It’s nothing more than a fact of my history. I can acknowledge their assholery without it breaking my spirit or whatever these weak little wwilting flowers fear will happen to them if they ever own up to the shit that their forebears did. I don’t get why they’re so scared of choosing to come down on the side of basic decency and humanity. These losers talk so big and tough, but deep down–and even not so deep at all–they’re nothing but the world’s biggest, scaredest, weakest, sorriest pussies. I hate these creeps.
David in NY
@Haydnseek: I think the song itself is the essence of irony. Even if one didn’t get it at first, the lines, “In America every man is free/ To take care of his home and his family,” are a dead giveaway.
But you’ve got to sing it perfectly straight, I think, or it loses its awful power. Certainly Randy Newman does.
And it firms my resolve never to go to South Carolina until they repent, and pull that damned flag of slavery off the lawn of their state capitol.
ETA: If it weren’t totally ironic, I certainly wouldn’t be quoting it in full, and seriously I doubt that DougJ would be using it as his title.
quannlace
But the wingnuts should just love her. She always carried a rifle, was a mean shot and was very adamant to any slave who decided to go with her on the Underground Railroad. If they tried to back out along the way, she’d shoot them!
Omnes Omnibus
@quannlace:
An armed black woman? I think they’d piss themselves.
aimai
Everyone should read a few books. E. Ball’s Slaves in the Family, Confederates in the Attic, and The Sweeter the Juice (as well, of course, as Albion’s Seed,Race and Reconstruction, Capitol Men and oh just a shitload of other stuff–I don’t mean people here I mean people in general. There’s a pretty good Kos diary up right now by a guy from down south explaining just how often he has heard the phrase “they owned slaves but they were good to them” and how very everpresent the lie that slavery was benign, or normal, or normatively correct has been presented to the modern generation in the US. In any event the South presents the one place in the country where injuries are never forgotten but historical memory is so shallow that the reality is not well understood. Read Confederates in the Attic and discover how places that were for the Union and were not slaveholding communities flipped and “discovered” their essential rebel-ness in the post civil war period. Its jaw dropping. Its like watching a case of mass hysteria followed by political alzheimers.
Yutsano
@Omnes Omnibus: There would be sternly worded letters and massive hurt fee-fees at the idea of an armed black woman.
HankP
The South was the original ownership society.
Arclite
The Republicans are still doing fine with their minority outreach tho. Because they have Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
Plenty of excitement in Ithaca today. Mercyhurst scores with 1:13 left in the third to go up 3-2. It took Cornell 18 seconds to tie it up and they’re headed to overtime. BC beat Harvard 3-1. BU is up 1-0 on Clarkson in the 1st.
Chris
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
I’ve noticed that a lot of conservatives derive an inordinate sense of their own self-worth based on their identity as a group member… and one of those “groups” is their own lineage. It’s the logic of having self-worth by association, like membership in a gang or cult. Which I’ve always found interesting given their purported hatred for collectivism.
Woody
@Chris:
Don’t think you’re going back far enough, actually.
I’m not surprised this fellow demanded slaveowners be thanked by their former slaves for their room and board while under bondage. I believe many of them would be saying the same thing if the slave in question were white.
So many Republicans and Libertarians – particularly their intelligentsia – extol serfdom. Subsistence – and charity – is granted by the majesty of their lord. Fealty is regarded as most important virtue for the proles.
This was the real conceit behind Romney’s 47% speech.
me
Ron Paul, at least, was never a libertarian (in the civil liberties sense). He’s an unreconstructed Confederate (States Rights!). He only cares about the power of the federal government. In his world, the states can be as tyrannical as they want.
David in NY
This all just makes me damn glad my great-grandfather was with Sherman at Atlanta, went North to cover his rear as he tore through Georgia and South Carolina, and got shipped East by rail and sea to the Battle of Wilmington (military pivot of Spielberg’s Lincoln), which finally cut off all contact of the slave-power with the outside, setting the stage for the surrender at Appomattox.
Just fuck them if they still defend slavery.
Haydnseek
@David in NY: Thanks for your take. Sure, the irony is obvious. It’s Randy Newman, after all. I agree with you about style being everything when doing the song. Randy Newman does irony. Sonny and Brownie? No. That’s why their truly exquisite version of the song slips past my irony filter from time to time. Perhaps it needs to be re-calibrated….
Chris
@aimai:
Yep. I wasn’t surprised in the last when I heard that guy say that last night; it’s not the first time I’ve heard the notion that slavery was harmless at worst and beneficial at best.
The person I thought of immediately was Douglas Wilson, a theologian my cousin on Facebook’s always linking to, who achieved some notoriety by stating that “slavery produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.” Anyone know any other major apologists in the same vein? I mostly just hear it anecdotally from regular people, but I’m sure there’s more “official” spokesmen for the cause out there.
Eric U.
I heard second-hand from a student that there is a Penn State professor that talked about how slavery was good for the slaves. He apparently is in love with contrarian nonsense, because he had a class that talked about how Salt Lake City was ranked the number one city for gays. In fact, from what I heard the whole class was contrarian nonsense.
Linda Featheringill
My ancestors have lived in the US for a long, long time. Many of them were assholes. The Family hasn’t had the money to run things for about 200 years but they still acted like assholes a good part of the time.
And they still are, actually.
raven
“At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”
SFAW
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
No, it took a concerted effort for you to attain that state.
(I’m just kidding – it was a line begging for an assholish response from someone, and better me than someone who’s not.)
raven
@me: Just like our pal Pat Lang!
Chris
@Woody:
In terms of the modern alliance between what the man called “Reorden metal and Robert E. Lee,” I think I pegged it pretty accurately, though I’d be happy to be corrected if I’m wrong. In terms of the general spirit of serfdom, I agree with you completely. It’s much older than the Civil War, the United States, and probably written civilization.
@me:
As is pretty much his entire side of the aisle.
I followed international relations before I followed domestic politics, and at some point during the latter exercise it dawned on me that our conservatives’ whines about “government overreach,” “states’ rights,” “free markets” and all that were essentially the domestic version of petty tyrants overseas (Saddam, Milosevic, the Taliban) screaming about “imperialism” and “national sovereignty” when the international community slapped an embargo on them or even intervened in the middle of some ethnic cleansing.
“Government overreach” isn’t an illegitimate target of complaint, any more than “imperialism,” but it’s not what people like that are really complaining about. They just want the right to continue persecuting people in peace.
David in NY
The words of the song are the words of a slaver — “Climb aboard, little wog-sail away with me.” I’ll have to listen to their version sometime. But for it to come off as not ironical — as not being a false promise of a good life in America to people who didn’t even want to come here — is impossible I think. It has that lovely chorus, of course, but that inevitably clashes with the words and the situation, and with what we know awaits them in Charleston. I mean, I find myself humming it. But a moment’s thought makes it a terrible song — the kind that should bring, and has brought, tears to my eyes.
Baud
@Linda Featheringill:
I’m a first generation asshole myself.
SFAW
DougJ –
What I really love about this thread is that, after your epic troll as “Scott Terry” (don’t think I/we didn’t notice you were gone for a coupla days, pardner), you return to comment on your own trolling, as if it were someone else.
That makes you something like a 57th-dan Trolling Master, able to do the troll-within-a-troll-within-a-troll thing without breaking a sweat.
Your awesomeness is beyond awesome.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
Mercyhurst eliminates #2 seed Cornell at 4:49 of overtime. Hopefully that’s the only big upset of the day.
SFAW
@efgoldman:
Great. Now we got commenters trying to one-up each other, trying to establish their asshole cred.
“No, me! I’m a bigger asshole!”
“Screw you! My ancestors were assholes before your family came over from Assholia!”
“Screw both of you! My family INVENTED assholes”
As God says, “That’s why I love
MankindBalloon Juice”Tokyokie
@aimai: Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Speilberg’s Lincoln cover roughly the same general subject matter, but Tarantino’s film, which makes no pretense of historical accuracy, is the far superior film and probably strikes closer to the emotional heart of the peculiar institution of slavery precisely because it is violative, exploitative and tasteless. Any treatment of slavery that observes the niceties of decorum has already failed to expose the monstrousness of the institution by affording it a patina of respectability. As Lincoln said in his Cooper Union speech, the only action that would have satisfied Southerners would have been for abolitionists to “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.” And sure enough, in Django Unchained, [SPOILER ALERT] things don’t really come to a head until Leonardo DiCaprio’s evil slaveholder character, having figured out the Christoph Waltz character’s angle and fleeced him in a deal, demands a handshake as well as undue compensation, to which the Waltz character responds by shooting him in the chest. (A death-scene gag Tarantino lifted straight out of the spaghetti western Il Mercenario, which was directed by Sergio Corbucci, who directed the original Django spaghetti western with Franco Nero.)
Woody
@Chris:
Fair point.
I’d add that their drive to feudalism is well camoflaged with Randian flimflam (ever notice there’s no information about custodians, secretaries, etc. at all in Galt’s Gulch?)
Scamp Dog
@Chris: I recall reading about the trial of a slave arrested for participating in (or maybe leading) a slave rebellion. He testified about hating and wanting to kill his master, who was genuinely surprised by that. In their minds, everything was fine, and the slaves usually thought better of disabusing them of that idea.
The slaves’ real opinion of their masters shows up in the way they fled when Union troops got close enough to make escape practical.
El Cid
During the early 1800s, much of the South’s economy turned toward the production of cotton. The cotton gin finally allowed the large landholders to return to earning profitable incomes from the large taker communities they housed, allowing the population of African immigrant moochers to finally begin giving back to the entrepreneurial innovators who had worked so hard to inherit their lands.
raven
FUCK INDIANA !!
David in NY
@David in NY: @SFAW:
Not me! Though, someday I’ll try to figure out why my great-grandfather volunteered to go to war in 1862, at the age of 37, and stuck it out for three years mostly tromping though brush and mud in Kentucky and Tennessee. Family word was he asked his future wife whether she’d wait for him, and crusty Scots-Irish lady she was, she said only, “Fortune favors the brave.” So maybe he was trying to establish some cred himself.
But was it to save the Union, because Michigan was a strong Union state, because he believed slavery was wrong, or even that blacks were the equals of whites? I’d bet he was a Union man and against slavery, but soft on the equality point. But my retirement looms, there’s a couple of boxes of his writings in storage in the library at Ann Arbor, and maybe I’ll find out what cred he and I are entitled to.
Mike in NC
@Woody: Recall that in the G. W. Bush administration, it didn’t matter if you were unqualified, or stupid, or incompetent. What mattered was your loyalty to the boss.
David in NY
@El Cid: I think that one excuse people give for the 3/5 rule and general preservation of slavery in the Constitution was that slavery wasn’t all that economical, and no one foresaw the technological change the cotton gin would bring — making the plantation economy highly profitable. Common wisdom was that slavery would wither away, counseling compromise to get the union going, and that changed dramatically.
JWL
“Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
A. Lincoln
Yastreblyansky
@Anoniminous: DougJ is all confused. Any true Republican (like Allen West) knows those plantation owners were liberals, creating a culture of dependency. Then Lincoln came and set the plantation owners free and they all saw the light and became Republicans.
scav
@David in NY: You’re lucky you’ve got stories. I’m am last lucky enough to have a letter where my (wounded) Union ancestor is being berated by his father for joining to fight for (1860s equivalent of ”those people”) and how everything that followed was his own fault. Bonus points for the announce of the assassination of “your boss” and the switch to “whiskey Johnson”. Not quite Burns-ready dialogue, all in all but the motivations are clear enough. Enjoy your letters.
ETA oh yes, the “plastic hand of the Almighty” makes an appearence.
Chris
@Tokyokie:
Agree. The final handshake demand was so completely in character for that kind of 1%er. It’s not enough to win, it’s not enough to have just gotten a $$$ windfall. No, you gotta have respect. It’s not just Mafia dons who prattle on about that shit.
@Woody:
Yeah, and before I knew who Ayn Rand was, I thought the same thing about their “everybody should start their own business” shit. It’s materially impossible for everybody to start their own business unless you think everybody can simultaneously do every job required by that business. Someone has to answer the phones, sweep the floors, fix the machines that break… etc etc etc. What’s your plan for them?
I think that’s what offends me the most about what the “American Dream” has come to mean today. It’s explicitly based on the notion of “well, things suck for you, but hey, if you just [insert advice here] you can become successful!” In other words, “yeah, it sucks to be little people, but what does it matter? Join the upper class!”
Which isn’t even “American;” it’s always been possible to break into the upper class. In the feudal days, you could buy your way in if you were rich or earn it on the battlefield if you weren’t. In the Communist Bloc, the Party and especially the KGB made it a point to cull the best and brightest younguns and bring them into the fraternity. The upper class is never impermeable, but not everybody can be upper class. The “American Dream,” or at least what it’s come to mean today, basically recognizes that but phrases it as “yeah, but if you couldn’t break into the upper class, you suck and you deserve to have a shitty life.”
aimai
Two more great books: The Lost German Slave Girl and http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Medea-Family-Slavery-Child-Murder/dp/0809069547 Modern Medea. The Lost German Slave Girl explores the nexus between impoverished white immigrant indentured servitude (destitute german families who came over to the South as indentured servants) and slavery through the lens of an infamous legal case where a young woman owned as an African slave sued under the assertion that she was actually a young german girl who had been mistakenly appropriated as a slave as a child and separated from her family and papers. The other, Modern Medea, is a non fiction account of the real legal case behind Toni Morrison’s Beloved of an escaping slave woman who killed her own child to prevent the child from being dragged back to slavery. Both are just great books that put you right in the thick of the horror and confusion of the period.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Brietbart is hosting a side convention, “Th Uninvited”, apparently for anti-Islamic obsessives like Gaffney and Pamela Gellar who offend Grover Norquist. Orly Taitz is protesting the Breitbart panel of excludeds for excluding Birthers. I guess this gives David Gregory a hook to call CPAC a gathering of moderates.
Maude
Harriet Tubman never lost a passenger.
Woodrowfan
remember, raising the top marginal tax rate to 38% is SOCIALISM AND TYRANNY! but actual slavery is OK if you get food and shelter.
the mind, it boggles..
Barney
Oh, it’s worse than that: the speaker K. Carl Smith has come off in most of the reports as reasonable – after all, he objected to the “feeding and housing” remark. But a more detailed write-up shows Smith pretty much set the conversation up for this:
It’s not that they want to call slave owners ‘job creators’. It’s that they want to equate the poor, unappreciated slaveowners with taxpayers, who end up paying for everything, like health care and entitlements, for the lazy, ungrateful
47%slaves.WereBear
@Barney: After all, these are the same folks who claim that giving abused women a place to flee to with their children is “breaking up families.”
David in NY
@scav: Wow. That’s a lotta points in the “ancestor asshole cred” category. Hope the thoughts were not shared by your Union ancestor, but you never know, I suppose.
My dabbling in historical documents has a strong tendency to make me understand why honest historians are uncomfortable drawing analogies between then and now. Those people are not like us, and their circumstances are ones we can scarcely understand. The more you know, the less obvious everything is. (I think, for example, I once found a book in my grandfather’s library that seemed like it would have been right at home in Nathan Bedford Forrest’s house — slave rebellion or something, portrayed in lurid terms, etc. But what that means about him, if I even remember it right, I’m damned if I know.)
pk
If the slave owners did not feed or house the slaves, the slaves would have died and the slave owners would have had to keep buying new salves every month or so. It’s kind of basic human biology. If the guy had taken biology instead of literature he may have appreciated this fact more. This is what anti science gets you.
But seriously this country is so fucked up if people are still arguing whether slavery was wrong.
Upper West
@Haydnseek: Possibly the best Randy Newman song ever (maybe along with “God’s Song”) and the perfect title for this post by Doug. And astonishing and revolting that it fits so well.
RSA
@MikeJ: That entire letter was excellent. Very sad, but excellent.
BC
Just wonder if this asshole is still one of those southerners who thinks black people aren’t fully human? That has been a part of the racism in the South. When I started reading history, it always seemed a disconnect to me to read about slaveowners on the one hand extolling the benefits of slavery to the slaves and on the other hand protesting that the federal government was going to make slaves of them (the slaveowners, I mean). But to have someone in this day and age make the point that slaves were a part of the 47% who were takers . . . the mind, it boggles.
Tk
It is fascinating to me that race and race alone determines who 40% of this country votes. I suppose it is progress that its only 40
kc
THIS needs to be spread far and wide, by God.
David in NY
@JWL:
I remember in high school half a century ago, kids saying stuff like that about slavery, and wanting to give that same response. Perhaps the history teacher did, in fact. But it is just so much better to be quoting Lincoln when you say it. Got a link handy by the way?
Ronzoni Rigatoni
@efgoldman: @efgoldman: We weren’t all assholes. In 1954 the ol’man explained to me the Brown v. Board of Education decision as we watched it (almost) live. At 12 years old at the time I was totally shocked. I still am.
jamick6000
the randian ideas are tools the southern racists use to punish black people.
Chris
@jamick6000:
And the Southern ideas are tools Randian ubermenschen use to divide the peasants. Symbiotic relationship.
Chris
@BC:
It can never be emphasized enough the extent to which conservatism rests on the idea that there are simply different kinds of people in the world, and that their kind is, in all modesty, better. They might not separate the different people by race anymore (on national television at least), but it’s the very core of their belief system.
This is why the concept of liberal “elitism” sticks in their craw to the point of obsessive madness. It’s the idea that anyone else could possibly be seen as above them in the great hierarchy of things that makes them furious, even if liberals don’t make a claim to any special status or entitlements and “liberal elitism” is mostly a figment of their own paranoid imagination. (Maybe especially because of that last).
JWL
@David in NY: I most certainly do, D in NY:
“Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume VIII, “Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Indiana Regiment” (March 17, 1865), p. 361.
Mnemosyne
@Chris:
I did manage to score a political point with my Fox-obsessed father one time when he was arguing that some people are just bad and I said something along the lines of, “That’s true, and what happens is that the poor ones deal drugs and the rich ones go to Harvard and start Enron.”
He changed the subject after that. ;-)
mtraven
@Tokyokie:
Amen to that. I’ve been trying to figure out why Django, despite it’s cartoonishness, seems to convey a more visceral sense of what slavery must have been like than any Hollywood film I can remember, and you may have nailed it.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
Ha. Yeah, true story.
Porlock Junior
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Men who hadn’t done her no harm!
In the words of the immortal Mr Finn.
Porlock Junior
In fairness to the audience, the most conspicuous and unambiguous reaction I saw when he said that was from a young woman in the front row, looking back at him with her jaw dropped open in amazement and shock. Someone has said she mouthed (something like) “He can’t have said that.” Which I don’t doubt, but didn’t observe for myself.
But no one disputes the massive sh*tt*n*ss of the audience as a whole.
fuckwit
For some reason, this kind of discussion always reminds me of this:
http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly060315.htm
opie jeanne
@David in NY: You have a treasure if you have the writings of that man. I have wondered myself why my great great grandfather joined the Union Army at the age of 40, only to die of wounds earned in the siege of Vicksburgh. He left a wife and ten children; they lived on a farm in the Ozarks, in Missouri. Both his father and father-in-law had a couple of slaves each, children. They appeared in the slave census as if dropped from the sky, no adult slaves in the family. In fact, no adult slaves in the area, but half of the little farms in the area had two or three young children listed as slaves, as if a peddler had gone door-to-door.
My questions, if only he’d written something down that had survived, are similar to yours. He may have written letters, but I have not heard of them. There is probably a picture of him as well, but it must have gone down a different family line: ten surviving children wasn’t unusual.
CT Voter
Bookmarking this post. Job creators rule.
El Cid
@David in NY: Well, worse than that, it really was true that slavery was dwindling in profitability and very likely would have shrunk to a very vulnerable level had the cotton gin not allowed the South’s short-staple cottons to become King Cotton.
Hob
@fuckwit: In a slightly different note but not unrelated, possibly favorite Kreider cartoon (with accompanying explanation) is this: http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly010905a.htm