Is the South Dragging the Rest of the Nation Down? - Allan Berra, Truthdig

[Bill USA]

http://www.alternet.org/south-dragging-rest-nation-down

[font size="3"]Why poor white Southerners keep voting for policies that screw them and how this hurts the rest of the nation. [/font]

In 1978, out of college without a job and having failed to establish Birmingham’s version of The Village Voice, I took a job as advance man for the Alabama Republican Senate candidate.

One incident that stuck with me was a visit to campaign headquarters by a young Republican adviser—I didn’t recognize his name, but I remember that he strummed a guitar while talking to us. He told us, “Don’t ever use the words ‘black’ and ‘white’ in an argument. Always say ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative.’ You’ll turn every argument about race into a political one. You do that, and race will start to disappear as an issue.”

Our candidate, Jim Martin, lost the election to somebody named Donald Stewart, who was the very model of the politically ineffectual Democrat who would soon get steamrolled by the new Reagan-led Republican Party. Within a few years, however, Alabama would move, along with much of the South, from the Democratic to the Republican Party. But it was a case of rebranding rather than change. In less than a generation, every Wallace segregationist Democrat I knew had turned into a conservative Reagan Republican; as the guitar-picking adviser had predicted, race almost ceased to be a political issue and, as my friend the late journalist Paul Hemphill put it, “George Wallace’s role in framing the politics of the new South was obscured.”

I thought of these words while reading Chuck Thompson’s “Better Off Without ’Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.” Or rather, rereading. On its release in August, I dismissed it because the author is rude and obnoxious and because his chapter on football in the South is utterly lacking in logic and sound history. Thompson doesn’t think that the Alabama Crimson Tide has the greatest tradition in college football. But I digress. (More on football later.)

Over the past months, however, I’ve become more convinced by Thompson’s main argument, that the South—the states that comprised the Old Confederacy—should not only be allowed to secede, but both countries created by the split would be better off.
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[NMDemDist2]

1. good article n/t

[Doctor_J]

2. Yep. The sooner the better

They can have their guns, churches, and plantations. We'll have public schools, public airwaves, clean water and air, driveable public roads, union labor, pensions, and SP HC. An generous amnesty period for those wanting to migrate will be set up. There will also be an agreement between us and the confederacy so that if any teabaggers show themselves here they'll be relocated promptly and quietly. And should any FDR devotees somehow get lost, they'll be returned in the same manner.

This makes a lot more sense than trying to find "middle ground" with Peter King, Michelle Bachmann, and Glen Beck

[Bill USA]

3. Whenever I hear some simple minded sort talking about seceding, I say to myself...

"Oh, pleeeease, make my day!" ... our country would, over-night, have a brighter, more productive, happier future ahead of it!

"Oh HAPPY DAY!"

[Doctor_J]

4. I know. Unfortunately the ones who are always talking about seceding are the same ones who

depend the most on Fed money, and no one of import ever calls then the miserable lying hypocrites they are, so it will never happen. Cutting the ward states off would mean a lot of money left over for those who actually like the US. We could pay for education, Health Care, and pensions and still have money to spare. Maybe some time soon.