I always crack up when I think of the giant mural that covered part of the gym wall that showed Sherman on a horse with flames surrounding him as he marched through Atlanta. I'm sure the PC police has had that covered since my days for fear of offending someone.
I will always remember my Ohio history teacher telling us at the time that you should probably never tell a southerner that you are from that school because you are sure to provoke a confrontation.
That was the mid seventies, when bell bottoms were awfully popular.
I tell that story because the conventional wisdom is that those racist southerners switched from being democrats to republicans as a reflection of their racist past.
But I've traveled all over the south staying in every state east of Texas at one point in time over my lifetime and you know what I've noticed in my travels? The lack of southern dialects. Most of the people who live in the south today couldn't give a crap about William Sherman. The next time I head to Tennessee and Georgia, I'm going to test it out.
None the less, what this tells me is that so much of the south has been invaded by northerners who brought with them their conservative sensibilities and leaving behind the union protected stooges of the northern states. Many of these people left their native northern homesteads for job opportunities in the south.
The Gekko's have three family members who now reside in the south and I would venture to guess that a significant number of southerners who reside in the area probably don't go back more than two generations there.
But that doesn't stop people like Joan Walsh from attempting to perpetrate the myth of the "Southern Strategy". In this case as it pertains to Fox News.
The most important point is this: Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state "Southern strategy," the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn't merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon). Now Fox is using the election of our first black president to scare (mainly older) white people in all 50 states that, again, the Democratic Party is run by corrupt black people trying to give blacks advantages over whites (MSNBC's Rachel Maddow laid out this history last week).
Once again, let me offer that Fox News has more black guests and contributors on their supposedly "white" broadcasts than the purveyors of great diversity over at MSNBC. I guess they believe because Rachel is a gay chick they get two bonus points for their diversity efforts.
1 comment:
Blaming Richard Nixon for some "Southern Strategy" is bunk.
Richard Nixon isn't alive to defend himself. Never met him but I am sure he was indeed a son of a bitch. That said all of the evils attributed to him probably are not true.
Nixon didn't win the South in 1968, and in 1972 he won 49 out of 50 states. He didn't need a southern strategy and he collected more black votes than any Republican presidential candidate since he was in office. He never needed the south in either election. And Republicans voted for Civil Rights in higher percentages than Democrats. It seems like an odd time to signal the start of a "Southern Strategy". I think few people care to defend Tricky Dick, and many people consider him the root of all evil. I think that is why people like to attribute things like this to him.
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