Hmmm, I lived in Alabama for 25 years and thought people like him were complete dumbfucks. Oddly, my ass never got kicked for it, but probably because most folks I knew agreed he and his hooded friends were dumbfucks too.

"I'm not racist - all my black friends wish they could scrub out my skid marks for free."

Posted by: andy at May 5, 2004 09:36 PM

But Andy! Him and his ilk don't make skid marks. And it don't stink, neither. And when you pull their fingers you're greeted with the scent of lilacs.

Posted by: McGehee at May 5, 2004 09:53 PM

Damn, I have the best commenters in the 'sphere.

Posted by: zombyboy at May 5, 2004 09:55 PM

Dear Dumb farookin' Goober.

Enjoy your possum.

Yours truly,
Just another ignorant Yankee

Posted by: Parkway Rest Stop at May 5, 2004 10:13 PM

"I am not a racist...but the southern cause was just."? Southern hospitality I guess. I had occasion to visit the South last year. Low and behold in a small Tennessee town was a church with this sign, “ No Darkies Allowed”. I’m damn glad to be a Yankee!

Posted by: Goatroper at May 6, 2004 08:46 AM

Southerners are sometimes like Europeans. They never forget shit and they hold grudges. That war was over a looooong time ago. Man, get over it.

A story abou tthe South:
When I was fifteen years old I went along with a friend on a family vacation to visit their relatives in the South. One of the days was dedicated to touring some plantations in Louisiana. It was actually a very interesting tour for me as I am from California and had never left the state. These grand old mansions were something to behold. At Oak Alley Plantation we stood on the grand veranda looking out onto the rows of stately oak trees that lined the path from the road to the house. As the tour guide continued to speak, my friend’s uncle leaned to a stranger and said, “This is nice. All we need are some mint juleps and a couple of darkies to serve them.” I was floored. I had heard racist remarks at home and at school, but never someone implying that slavery was a good thing. This episode and the separate proms for black and white students at the local high school were enough to sour me on the South for good. This was not in the back woods. This was a town just outside of New Orleans and it was not in 1950. It was 1987!

Posted by: Patrick at May 6, 2004 09:36 AM

The only time I've ever even heard that phrase spoken in public and without any sense of irony were by my grandfather. A little background: my grandpa is a very old 81 years old. He's a frail little man who was born and raised in Kansas where his family had a farm. When he was young, they literally lived in an excavated hole in the ground while they built the house that he would grow up in.

I doubt very seriously that he ever met a black man or woman until he was much older. He had a typical, poor rural life, I suppose. The pictures that I've seen of him when he was a boy, shirtless in his overalls, with a big grin and a glint in his eye, look like something straight out of a Norman Rockwell vision of Huck Finn.

My dad grew up in Colorado Springs on a chicken farm, his best friend a man who ended up serving in Vietnam around the same time that my dad did. This guy and his family were all part of our Thanksgivings, 4th of July, and, often, Christmas celebrations, as was an artist (one of whose original paintings I still have in my apartment) friend. Both men are black, and it was an odd thing given the passively racist attitude of people like my Uncle Billy (who apparently thought that these were the only two decent black men in the world) and Uncle W (who never even seemed quite sure of that).

My grandpa, though, never seemed to have a racist bone in his body--he just didn't seem to care.

Two years ago, I was out to dinner with my parents and grandparents. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to what was going on--these events are painful for me for reasons far to difficult to explain without lots of booze and time--but my head shot up when I heard my grandpa saying, "...like the darkies do."

I still have no idea what it was he was saying, but the entire table just stopped talking, with no one sure what to say. I was more embarrassed than I can say, but the funny thing is that he didn't even notice. He's an old man, his mind isn't nearly as quick as it used to be, and he didn't notice that he'd just said something that would offend a lot of people.

He certainly didn't mean it in a mean spirited way.

What is amazing about this story, to me, is that we aren't that far removed from a casual, racist society. I would say that over the last eighty years, we've come a hell of a long way--but it's good to remember that we aren't that far away from some lynchings, segregation, and those mint juleps that your friend's uncle was talking about.

I grew up in a mildly racist household and it took experiencing the real world to beat some of the that passive racism out of me.

Posted by: zombyboy at May 6, 2004 10:08 AM

Okay, I'm not Southern, I hated living in the South, and being forced to return there could bring on a bout of suicidal depression...but:
"The Cause Was Just" is probably simply the Cause of State's Rights.
Honestly, folks, the issue of slavery was a trigger, not a cause. Sure, it all came to a head because the North was moving toward forcing abolition on the South, but that was anywhere from 5-10 years in the future; the issue was the South thought the North was being far too heavy-handed and didactic.
Go read this and this:

Lincoln was a moderate Republican. As such he was a compromise candidate, everybody’s second choice. He was convinced that the Constitution forbade the Federal government from taking action against slavery where it already existed, (emphasis mine) but was determined to keep it from spreading further.

before you start blithely charging racism.
Need some logic, reason, and evidence to back that up? Consider how the government of the Confederation differed from the Union (and how the confederation structure undermined their war effort), consider that most of the Southerners fighting in the Civil War did not own slaves, consider that there were border states (in which slavery remained legal) that fought on the side of the Union, and note that the war was begun to prevent the secession of the Southern States.
Don't get me wrong, I support Lincoln's choice, I'm glad we remained a nation, and the Southerners were taking the concept of State's Rights too far (the Southern Baptist Church model). However, slavery was a side issue, not the central issue to the war.
[...walks away grumbling about the state of education these days...]

Posted by: nathan at May 6, 2004 10:30 AM

Fully realizing all of the above, I still say it was a racist cause. Yes, it was about states' rights, but embodied in an argument about a racist institution.

If slavery hadn't been an issue, would there still have been a civil war? It wasn't a side issue, it was one of the central issues. Just one of the issues, yes, but not just some vague side note in the conflict.

Take this from the Georgia causes of Secession:

A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the Federal Government has been committed will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party.

Then tell me that slavery was just a side note.

In fact, the entire Declaration is a comment on slavery and the political and economic effects of political moves made by Northerners and the Federal government.

Northern anti-slavery men of all parties asserted the right to exclude slavery from the territory by Congressional legislation and demanded the prompt and efficient exercise of this power to that end. This insulting and unconstitutional demand was met with great moderation and firmness by the South. We had shed our blood and paid our money for its acquisition; we demanded a division of it on the line of the Missouri restriction or an equal participation in the whole of it.

Georgia, Mississippi, SC, and Texas declarations.

Posted by: zombyboy at May 6, 2004 10:55 AM

Sure it would still have happened. One word: tariffs.
The things that were good for Northern manufacturing industry were bad for the southern agriculture. The disparities of population and industrial base between the North and South would have come to a head within 20 years anyway.
Obviously, slavery is a big part of it. It was slavery that allowed the South to become so dependent on agriculture/cotton/plantations.
Look, there is a strong subset of Libertarians who call Lincoln a traitor. They call the Civil War the "War of Northern Aggression", and blame Lincoln for the power of the strong central government we have now. The ones I know are from states that weren't even in the Confederacy, but believe absolutely that the weakening of the State's Rights argument is absolutely the biggest problem facing the US today. They point to Congress' use of the "Interstate Commerce" clause and the direct election of Senators as contributing factors. There is absolutely nothing to do with racism in this view, because they aren't racist and maintain the South would have dropped slavery within 20 years anyway.

I re-read the comment in context to make sure I wasn't missing something. There is nothing the commenter says at all that indicates he is racist in any way, shape, or form. He merely says "...the southern cause was just." You assumed he was talking about slavery, but he could have easily been one of these State's Rights Libertarians. Everything else he said was stupid enough to qualify him to be one of these SRLs, IMHO...
...and he may be just as racist as you assume. I don't think there is enough evidence to conclude that, though, and I absolutely maintain that while slavery was a major contributing factor to the Civil War, it was not fought to free the slaves by the North, so was it not fought to maintain slavery by the South.
To restate: The North fought the Civil War to preserve the union, to insist that state's do not have the right to secede. The South seceded because they were unable to maintain a balance of power in the Senate to counteract a weak position in the House of Representatives to ensure their interests were protected. These interests included both slavery and tariffs on agricultural products, and probably included other issues, as well (I think the issue of a Federal Bank was in there somewhere).
Since many of the Southerners did not even own slaves, the argument that they fought for the right of self-determination seems far more compelling to me. The fact that the South pre-emptively seceded out of fear that Lincoln would attempt to abolish slavery is still a side issue, since Lincoln himself felt that was prohibited by the US Constitution.
Modern equivalency: The use of activist judges to enact liberal policies in defiance of the popular will is irritating to me and many other people. They have mainly acted on abortion, affirmative action, and (most recently) homosexual marriage. If the 9th Circuit Court continued to seize power to itself not allowed by the US Constitution, and things were to spiral out of control to the point of a President needing to send in troops to enforce a Supreme Court order, would it be due to Abortion/Affirmative Action/Homosexual Marriage or would it be about Judicial Activism?

Another equivalency: from one point of view, Bill Clinton's impeachment was only about sex. This is the view that has dominated our news media, aided by Democrats "staying on message". That doesn't make it the correct view, but it is politically expedient to ignore the fact that if Bill Clinton lied under oath to avoid a minor problem, what else did he lie about?

In the same way, insisting the Civil War was only or even mainly about slavery seizes a moral high ground that automatically puts the South in the wrong, and eliminates any possibility of discussing some of the more valid issues for seceding and going to war to enforce the secession.

Posted by: nathan at May 6, 2004 12:32 PM

Nathan, the north fought to preserve the union. The south fought to preserve slavery as a state's right.

Slavery is not and was not a side issue, it was the central issue and cause of the Civil War. The south wasn't fighting to preserve the right to set their own drinking age, they were fighting to preserve slavery as the foundation of their economy. The declarations of secession make that very clear.

Is the commenter a racist? Perhaps not, and perhaps that's an unfair categorization. He is, however, sticking up for a racist cause. The southern cause was wrapped inextricably around the issue of slavery--to say otherwise is revisionist.

From Encarta:

The chief and immediate cause of the war was slavery. Southern states, including the 11 states that formed the Confederacy, depended on slavery to support their economy. Southerners used slave labor to produce crops, especially cotton. Although slavery was illegal in the Northern states, only a small proportion of Northerners actively opposed it. The main debate between the North and the South on the eve of the war was whether slavery should be permitted in the Western territories recently acquired during the Mexican War (1846-1848), including New Mexico, part of California, and Utah. Opponents of slavery were concerned about its expansion, in part because they did not want to compete against slave labor.

These thoughts are backed up completely by the secession papers.

I've read papers and books (so, hopefully, we can leave the "state of education" comments out of this) that claim that the issue of slavery was one mostly of Northern creation--that's a joke. Again, read the papers of secession and the issue of slavery was at the heart of the Southern argument for state rights. Tariffs are barely, if at all, mentioned in those papers.

Note that this doesn't leave all of the moral high ground with the North. Most Northerners weren't opposed to slavery, and the economic issue definitely had a starring role. But you are utterly minimizing the effect that the issue of slavery had on the genesis of the war.

You can argue that the individuals fighting the war fought for something other than the slaves that they did or didn't have. But the reason the states seceded, as given by the heads of those states, was over slavery and the spread of slavery. And slavery--and the economic issues and moral issues surrounding it--weren't just words brought out by Northerners after the fact, it was a continual sore point that was one of the cultural causes of disagreement well before the Civil War broke out.

Posted by: zombyboy at May 6, 2004 03:16 PM

...or maybe Encarta is revisionist? [grin]
Okay, points taken.
But I still disagree, and think that saying the South's cause was slavery is a gross oversimplification, particularly in light of the North's use of population advantage to enact tariffs that prevented the South from selling their products to Europe at a better price...

...and I still maintain that I think the South's cause was wrong, even if I am correct that it was more about federalism than slavery.

Posted by: nathan at May 6, 2004 03:40 PM

Fair enough.

I do agree that it would be a gross oversimplification to say that the Civil War was only about slavery--or even to say that it was about the morality of slavery.

Now, can we go back to talking about the cowardly jerk who threatened me from the safety of his insular little world down south?

Posted by: zombyboy at May 6, 2004 03:57 PM

Oh.
Yeah, okay:
When you and I go visit Kevin next, we'll make a side trip to Louisiana for some...accountability, k?

Posted by: nathan at May 6, 2004 04:49 PM

I can work with that...

Posted by: zombyboy at May 6, 2004 04:51 PM

the south will rise again. and the north will knock it back on its ass again too.

Posted by: bill at May 14, 2004 06:33 AM

Please do not judge the south because of a few people and a small town church. I was born and raised in the south and in my community people dislike someone for who they are, not what color they are. In closing I will say that the worst individual on earth is "White trash" and we have plenty but that does not mean all of us.

Posted by: Marc at May 19, 2004 04:57 AM

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