Yet another week where I've worked more than 20 hours. Y'all I didn't make it back to the house until 9:30 on Thursday...then turned right around and worked for five hours on Friday. It's like I'm making Nike tennis shoes in China. There's nothing for a week like that but liquor, smoke and Chrome.
Our friend from Satellite of Love is back...only now, he loves her even more. So Sweet.
Beat yer head on that for a while.*
Mainly I've just been beating my head against this laptop and blogger...and idiots. Below is not a sketch as such...but, a material artifact of a conversation between me and Martha.
Through a convoluted series of links I ended up on an article from, where else, Salon, that blamed all of America's wars on Southerners. Why? Because we are the dregs of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and North and West England. We like to scrap. The author had just read Albion's Seed.
The last decade or so has been a real revelation for the Yankee. Through the publication of a few books and essays (see: See Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell or Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secesion, Albion's Seed, etc.) the Yankee has finally come to understand that flawed as we are...we aren't flawed versions of them. We are different from them. We are still, to a large extent, the same people that were too poor and rowdy to live in the poorest and rowdiest parts of Britain (or kidnapped from West Africa).
New England, and the United States of God Almighty America and the whole of the Western Hemisphere was invented by the Puritans...the better sorts of England...the sober and industrious and, above all, the Pious. The example to all...they founded a shinning city on a hill. A beacon for the rest of us struggling in the dark. They will save the world...even if they have to burn it down to do so. From Calvinism through Transcendentalism to Statism...they haven't changed a lick.
Some of these people were sent out to save the Great Lakes region (the Midwest)while others stayed back to get the minds of wave after wave after wave of immigrants right. They pulled that shit on the Italians and Poles...found ready allies in the Germans of 1848 but, we instinctively knew why they'd been kicked out of England in the first place. F***ing witch burners. We've never wanted any part of it...and that is our great and unpardonable Sin. We aren't just different than them...we don't want to be them. That's Cardinal. That is what they are finally coming to realize.
One of the reasons we don't want to be them is that their Piety is literal minded and dull. They're not Righteous. They're busybodies.* Their industriousness, their solid work ethic, looks an awful lot like grasping, rapacious, greed. In short, they're the kind of people who would invade, conquer and occupy Sovereign States, slaughter indigenous peoples, go on rabbit hunts in the Philippine, send gunboats to South America, Vietnam, and on...all in the name of Abolition or Manifest Destiny or making the world safe for Democracy or etc. etc. etc. and BAAAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhh. Now matter how dastardly...they can always come up with some cockeyed Moral Justification paper over their Imperial compulsions.
We're the warmongers??? Pound sand dickh**ds.
Anyway...the above is what you obviously see in those scribbles. We will revisit all this later.
We gotta clear the air in here...
Stay tuned...I didn't want to sully F-Word's efforts with all this nonsense but, next up...we will be examining a piece of his excellent work that purchased recently.
*You may be asking yourself...Isn't the Bible Belt in the South...isn't the South hyper-religious. One, there's more than one religion (see the State). Two, much of what passes for religion in The South is not naturally Southern...fundamentalism, for instance, is a product of modernity and a Midwestern import. Three, we go to church because we, as individuals are Sinners, not to plot the salvation of the world. Jesus handled that...without any help from Cotton Mathers even. Again, we will be discussing all this in the future.
What are your normal hours?
ReplyDeleteI like to pretend I never work....it helps me deal with the reality. At any rate...one hour of work is one too many.
DeleteI work in sales so...I have six hour days and 10 hour days...I work when there's money to be made.
There is a semi-conscious idea that mainstream economists and dominant empirical cultures (at present more or less the same thing) seem to share - if something is going well, not only will it keep going well but it is good because it is going well. I expect we'll see in our own lifetimes, though, how evanescent the lights of the shining city on the hill were compared to most of history's empires . . . I'll be surprised if it makes it to 100.
ReplyDeleteI'll give it a start date of 1865...this is the point where These United States become The United States and one faction rules all...the grasping one.
DeleteYou never want to be premature in signing the death certificate but one can hope. Ha.
It's a faint echo of the British Empire (but for the love of 26" inch spinners don't ever say the E word out loud). Who wants it? Who really wants to be in a position where you feel like you've got to get involved in every dispute over a goat in kakistan. What kind of personality is that thinks he's got the answers.
Too small to get involved...a rallying cry.
No political input from me, too tired from all the working myself, . A musical and historical education education as ever - and the whole pretending never to work to deal with reality comment - on the really shitty days I pretend I am in a really bad fly on the wall documentary complete with soundtrack, whatever gets you through the day and doesn't get you fired I say!
ReplyDeleteChrome should have been bigger than grits.
DeleteThe issue here is more historical than political...the United States and it's world view was not shaped by us. That process began in Lincoln's War of tax collection.
Can you hook me up with some Nikes?
ReplyDeleteHow about a screaming child. I'm in the loudest day care in North Mississippi. In sure the lady runnin it would be happy to give you one.
DeleteIt sounds like a tent revival in here.
"It happen roun thanksgeevin...he's been in the jail since November. He's reel sick too...he's liver. He's prolly gonna go to prison "
ReplyDeleteStill in the day care.
ReplyDelete