My fellow Americans in Georgia.
I know that what I am going to say does not apply to all of you. It only applies to a majority of you. That it applies to a majority of you is clear from history, as well as the present. There are plenty of Georgians who are good people, who are not willing to tread down the tired old path of racism and disenfranchisement, and I’m not speaking to those people. To those people: you have my sympathy. Maybe it’s time to give up on the rest of Georgia and just leave; let them sink into the status of a 3rd world nation and – if you feel like living in Georgia again, someday, come back and buy up some real estate at fire-sale prices once Georgia is in the tank where it belongs.
The rest of you Georgians: you keep electing anti-democratic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, intolerant christian dominionist politicians. You have had at least 125 years – several generations – to stop that stupidity but, instead of taking your beating like men, and re-assessing the right and wrong of your attitudes, you’ve resorted to being sneaky cowards. Some of you sneaky cowards wear pillowcases on your heads, and try to convince yourselves you did it to be scary instead of that you were hiding because you knew that, if your identity were known, you’d get your white southern asses whupped again. I’m sorry, was that too direct? Let me be more clear: you were idiots in 1861 and had everything you had worked for, and built (or gotten black slaves to build for you) destroyed. You risked it all, and you lost. You lost because you were stupid; you were a minor agrarian power and you declared war on an industrialized nation. You were a bunch of arrogant mice who were so full of your white supremacy that you thought you’d win at ridiculous odds. Instead, as you should have expected, you got to experience what being ground under the boot feels like. You didn’t experience anywhere near as bad a subjection as your black slaves experienced for much longer, but you ought to have put 2 and 2 together at that time, and re-thought your ways. Only an ideologically deranged fool would have taken an ass whupping like you did, and still clung to some notion of supremacy. But, that is what you did. Or, your great grandparents did. But your grandparents and parents continued that tradition and some of you still proudly and stupidly wave the flag of failure. You’re worse and stupider than the nazis, who caught on to the error of their ways after their thousand year reich was hammered to bits in 12 years. Can’t you learn from mistakes?
Since you’re Georgians, you probably don’t even know the history of post-civil-war reconstruction,[hist] and how you were given a chance to rejoin your country on remarkably generous terms. There were many in the United States who wished to punish the south, but you got lucky, what with a crazed assassin killing Abraham Lincoln at a convenient moment, and someone I can only describe as “one of your people” wound up in the White House. That was an opportunity for you collectively to stop being such horrible people – but it was an opportunity you most enthusiastically rejected. Since you’re ignorant of history (you have to be, to be a Georgian) briefly: Georgia was required to respect United States democracy, including giving black people the vote and opportunity to run for office. That was one of the conditions for your rejoining the country and some mumbled oaths of loyalty (i.e.: lies) later, Georgians immediately began a campaign of covert, cowardly, assassination, violence and political suppression in an attempt to re-establish exactly the same politics that had gotten your asses thrashed in 1865. None of you alive remember when Georgia’s economy cratered to 1/20th of what it was before The Civil War you helped start, but rest assured, that can happen again. During reconstruction, after swearing to obey the constitution of the United States (again) your ancestors reneged on their oath so thoroughly – rejecting the 14th Amendment (a thing they had no right to do as a state within the United States) – that the United States threw Georgia out of the union, again from 1868-1869, re-establishing military rule over you jackasses and cowardly night-murdering KKK terrorists. Your white neighbors, friends, and the jackasses you helped elect to office – they’re trying to replay the cowardly maneuvers that got your asses whupped again in 1869. Such an inability to learn from mistakes is epic; in fact failure to learn from your mistakes is practically the salient characteristic of the Georgian white American.
But it’s 2021 now, and your politicians are horrified to see that a couple of black people managed to get elected in spite of their best efforts to gerrymander and suppress the vote. They’re stuck in the glory days of 1868, when, fresh from losing on the battlefield, they had to lose again and again in the courts and legislature. Enough. And I mean, enough.
As your president, I have powers you probably don’t understand. For starters, as the commander in chief of the US Army, I am directing that all of the US military bases in Georgia be shut down; they will be relocating to states where they will be appreciated. I expect that move may cause some unhappiness or even unrest so I am declaring a State of Emergency along the Georgia border with the rest of the United States; ID checks will be mandatory at the main border crossings; white Georgians attempting to leave Georgia will need a US Government Passport. Depending on how things go, you may be deported back to Georgia, so don’t plan on sinking deep roots elsewhere in the country. Oh, and we will be establishing a tax surcharge for goods exiting Georgia to destinations elsewhere in the country, to help defray the cost of the new border that we will be building. I will not sign a budget that has federal money for Georgia. That’ll give you a chance to get a feeling for what secession will be like.
Because, you see, I think it’s time for you to “Gexit” or “GTFO” or whatever you want to call it. Your jackass politicians have not wanted to be part of the United States’ democracy, so, well, we’re going to force you out. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about throwing a state out of the union, but it’s easy to divide a state up, and subdivide it until you’re an economic “powerhouse” that envies Haiti. You won’t have a military. You won’t get any federal infrastructure money, medical research, telecommunications subsidies, corporate tax incentives, etc. Every business in Georgia will have its tax filings examined with a fine-tooth comb and if they’ve been dodging their federal taxes they’ll have the choice of moving to someplace that wants to be part of the United States, or paying back taxes. Your economy isn’t even going to be large enough to describe as “a cinder.” That’s all assuming your citizens and politicians don’t do a very rapid 180 degree turn and start being American. Because, if you don’t want to be participants in American democracy, you can be a third world power with an economy about the size of Nicaragua’s – and you’ll have no military and you’re nearest neighbor (the USA) is the world’s leading super-power. After “Gexit” has proceeded some distance, you will realize that the sun will never rise on a Georgia in which the white politicians and voters are not subjected to the daily humiliation of your own stupidity.
After we’ve gotten rid of you jackasses, we’ll have the votes in the Senate to partition Texas and give those complaining jerks back to Mexico. North Carolina and Mississippi, you’ve got until my next term in office to turn things around, because – with all the flooding that’s coming – we’d save a whole lot of tax dollars if we cut you loose so you can have your “liberties.”
Enjoy the ride,
Your President
I wanted to write this for April 1, but I wound up spending my time experimenting with pan-seared scallops and pasta with lemon butter and bitterness-blogging didn’t seem that compelling. But, today, I woke up and read about more Southern Jackassery and – well – I’m just “over” the south. We should just fuck the white south back to the stone age, then drop a rock on them. What a mess. Yeah, I know “not all southerners are bad people” but that’s basically the “a few bad apples” argument – except that the white south is at least 50% bad apples and obviously so. They keep talking about seceeding, well, give them what they want and let them choke to death on it.
Given the GQP’s industrious, decades-long efforts in gerrymandering and voter suppression, are you sure that the GQP voters constitute an actual, no-shit majority of the Georgia voting public?
“Given the GQP’s industrious, decades-long efforts in gerrymandering and voter suppression, are you sure that the GQP voters constitute an actual, no-shit majority of the Georgia voting public?”
Given those efforts, I’m pretty sure the GQP knows it is NOT a majority.
To amplify: nobody changes the rules of the game if they think they’re already winning.
Historically, I would argue that pro-Confederate southerners actually learned a lot from their defeat in the US Civil War. Unfortunately, it was not to make themselves more enlightened people. The lesson they learned was that if they used terrorist and insurgent tactics against Black citizens while also appealing to white racism in the north, they could get the northern-dominated federal government to give up on trying to protect and support the civil and political rights of Black people. Once they suppressed the votes of blacks and whites who supported civil rights, they could reestablish many elements of the society that had existed before the Civil War. They couldn’t slave legal slavery or become an independent nation, but they succeeded in establishing a sort of quasi-serfdom and preserved white supremacy. In this, they were very successful for almost a century, and successful to some degree up until today.
Of course, much of the south remained an impoverished portion of the US for a century after the US Civil War, but for many whites keeping white supremacy was more important than economic prosperity. It helped greatly that most northern whites were also racist. During the Grant administration (1869-1877) some very energetic and effective attempts were made by the Federal government to suppress white supremacist terror and protect black civil rights, but after a few years the northern white public gave up support for these initiatives, and by the end of Grant’s second term the federal government was already winding down efforts against white supremacists in the south. Grant’s successor Hayes would abandon the effort altogether.
If the federal government had been willing to act against white supremacists in the south and elsewhere, and support black rights for a longer period of time, subsequent US history might have been very different and much better. The problem is that this would only have happened if racist attitudes had been less entrenched in white society in every part of the country.
springa73@#4:
A fair summary of the situation.
I don’t let the northern whites off the hook, either – they’re just less bad than the southerners. Make me your president and I will bring them to heel.
Did you mean North Carolina or South Carolina?
North “bathroom bill” Carolina, aggresively regressive.
I would argue that North Carolina is behaving in such a way because they’re seeing the end of the road. They’re slowly going the way of Virginia. It’s going to get more ugly. As North Carolina attempts to modernize they suddenly see the enormous conflict in values.
I’d argue the same process is occurring in Georgia. But I understand the rage at the ignorance, and for lack of a better word, evil, of so many of their residents. I feel it, too.
I believe I read on your blog, the same thing I’ve heard, growing up, first in a small very white village in England, then a ridiculously racist town in Minnesota (St. Cloud). That there wasn’t a problem with racism until a black person showed up.
Asheville is a wonderful city of contradictions. Super fundamentalist white christians, hippies, extremely agro-FBI, and slums. As Chapel Hill moves to modernize for economic reasons, I believe, hope the state will fold in about 50 years, become a California–which also is an extremely problematic state in many ways. That’s a long time for their serious abuses to continue.
Now if you wanted to just station troops around those fundie-Christain, racist, gated communities in Asheville and Charlotte-Mecklenberg, I would totally be on board. They already built the walls for us.
If Georgia got a righteous thrashing, all the other southerners would suddenly feel a change of heart. At least on paper. Racists are, at their core, stupid cowards – and many-time losers. Make an example of a bunch of them, and watch the rest stumble all over themselves to get progressive.
You’ll note that, in my fantasy world, I set things up on that assumption. We Gexit Georgia, partition Texas and give a chunk back to Mexico then step back and give the rest of the south a chance to re-think the error of their ways.
If I were emperor of the US, as my namesake, the Great Aurelius, I’d be handing out crucifixions like Oprah hands out cookware. The survivors would look to the heavens and count themselves as lucky. Seriously, imagine what the imperial Romans would have done for “reconstruction”…
There are lots of decent people in the south. They just need to show it by curb-stomping the baddies. You know how patronizingly the US would say “the good Afghanis need to stand up…” ? That’s the vibe I’m talking about. I am now officially sick of their shit.
Do you ever listen to TheDollop? It’s this funny podcast about events in American history. One episode was about this anti-racist that went down to Kansas, took off a few racist dingbat heads with a broadsword, and the racists freaked out like mad.
He had a really typical name. Just found it under ‘Bleeding Kansas’ in wikipedia, John Brown.
Lest anyone think it wasn’t proportional. Pro-slavery settlers in Kansas and nearby states were regularly torturing and killing abolitionists.
Sam N@#11:
Brown didn’t just go alone – he made his hobby a family effort. Raised his kids properly, he did.
His final speech before they hanged him was unrepentant and quite bad-ass:
That’s what they should have been teaching me in my high school American History class. Not the white-washed garbage out that text ‘American Pageant’.
@ 10 Marcus
partition Texas and give a chunk back to Mexico
And just what part would Mexico be mad enough to take? The costs of deprogramming alone would be exorbitant.
jrkrideau@#15:
And just what part would Mexico be mad enough to take?
Whatever piece Ted Cruz is standing in? I gotta admit I have not fleshed out my plans for Texas.
One thing you areal forgetting is the role of Big Capital in industrializing the South. Big Capital moved industry that wasn’t off shored to the South. Atlanta is not basket case…it is a major headquarters town.
Lincoln should have cut them loose when he had the chance. Blockade their harbors, interdict all supply lines into the CSA, and them let them collapse from their own internal rot. Eventually, they would beg to be let back in, by which time racism and racists would have been discredited by the starving, poor whites and rebellious blacks coming together to overthrow the white aristocracy. ( I don’t know if it would have happened like that, but it’s a nice thought. )
publicola@#18:
Lincoln should have cut them loose when he had the chance. Blockade their harbors, interdict all supply lines into the CSA, and them let them collapse from their own internal rot.
Lincoln was not very fast-moving. But most people don’t realize how close in time was the end of the war and Lincoln’s assassination. Nor do they emphasize in school just how much of a southern ideologue Booth was. When I was a kid the story I absorbed made it sound like Lincoln was murdered a while after the war ended, by a crazy ex-actor. No – he was murdered at a politically opportune time by a southern sympathizer who realized that Johnson would be a much more south-favorable president. Lincoln’s assassination was the first move in a general southern attempt to prevent reconstruction.