’)At Ole Miss there’s been some controversy about people chanting “the south will rise again” at football games because THIS IS THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AND IT’S NOT COOL TO CHEER ON SLAVERY, so of course now the KKK is going to protest at Ole Miss.
Can we just give the south back to the Brits?
Flintstones in a Jetsons world
I don’t think the Brits would be to keen to accept the gift.
That’s “too” keen, of course.
There was an interesting discussion of this a few weeks ago at my college site. Not sure if this link will work or not.
http://ncaabbs.com/showthread.php?tid=394523
I live in Texas, Oliver, and over 3.5 million people voted for Obama in 2008.
So keep in mind when you trash the south, you’re trashing millions of progressive Democrats.
Yeah, the problem is you southern progressives are outnumbered significantly by knuckle draggers. Escape.
The problem with “escaping” is that nothing ever changes for those we leave behind. Brain drain is death. We deserve better.
I have two elderly parents, both of whom have serious health issues. Uprooting myself right now is not a possibility. After Bush got reelected, I was making plans to emigrate to Toronto when my mother tearfully begged me not to leave the country while my father was still alive.
Yeah, the problem is you southern progressives are outnumbered significantly by knuckle draggers.
I’m not too sure of that anymore. We’ve been in Eastern NC for 3 weeks now and I’ve seen a whole lot more Obama stickers on cars than anti-Obama sentiments. I’m still wearing my Obama 2009 hat (which I’ve worn every day since the RI primary) and no one has said anything negative to me.
NC was blue in 2009.
Also, a majority of our nation’s African Americans live in the U.S. South.
The South is not the property of only the reactionaries and neo-Confederates.
Give the ‘lost cause’ crazies some part of West Texas or something, or a floating island, or see if Brazil would be willing to sell some land in the Northeast, as the Confederatards once aimed to do.
But don’t give the crazy revanchist white right the whole South. They didn’t build it and they didn’t earn it, neither.
That said, if Britain would consider us, it might be a good deal.
Give the ‘lost cause’ crazies some part of West Texas or something, or a floating island, or see if Brazil would be willing to sell some land
Plenty of room left in Alaska.
Go to Hell, Ole Miss. Go to Hell!!!
(LSU fans have been WAY ahead of the curve on this one…)
Chomp! Chomp! Rebels, Tigers, Bulldogs. You’re all Gator bait to me.
It’s great! To be! A Florida Gator!
Rama Jama Give Em Hell Alabama!!!
The South gets unfairly slagged for alot but not in this area. Even in higher education they breed this stone age thinking.
There are areas of Maryland that aren’t that much different, you know.
Yes, but in the vast majority of Maryland, it isn’t. The south has allowed crackpots to control things.
Please tell me he didn’t say “heritage and culture.” Don’t these people go to the movies?
Can we just give the south back to the Brits?
Good luck with that.
Better they should adopt a song free of racial taint, one free of perjoratives and stereotype. Might I suggest “Hail to the Redskins”?
Okay, here’s how this went down (I live In Oxford, MS and have had to deal with this crap for quite some time):
For several decades, the Ole Miss Marching Band has played the same song for its pregame show, a song called “From Dixie, With Love” which is a medley of “Dixie” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” which is basically Elvis Presley’s “American Trilogy” with that boring middle section cut out. The problem, believe it or not, is not with Dixie, but with the Battle Hymn, specifically the last six notes. The actual lyrics of the Battle Hymn (which was, I remind you, a song associated with the North during the Civil War) which go with those six notes are “His truth is marching on.” Beginning sometime around 2003, a small group of drunken, idiot frat boys thought it cute to instead loudly sing “the South will rise again” (hereinafter “TSWRA”).
For the next several years, it was literally just a handful of drunken douchebags doing it. Then, this year, Ole Miss got a new Chancellor, Dan Jones, who expressed displeasure over TSWRA. Jones, incidentally, is not an alumnus, and his appointment was somewhat controversial. After Jones complained about TSWRA, the small group of drunken douchebags got a little bigger, as students who didn’t like Jones for reasons unrelated to TSWRA began chanting it in a childish bid to piss him off.
Then, the Associated Student Body got involved and passed a resolution calling on all Ole Miss students to refrain from chanting TSWRA and asking them(bizarrely, IMO) to instead chant “Go to Hell, LSU!”
I am not making this up.
At this point, the Daily Mississippian (the ludicrously conservative school newspaper whose editorials usually consist of regurgitations of whatever Sean Hannity said the night before) got involved and took the position that the University was trampling all over the students’ First Amendment rights by asking them not to be douchebags. Meanwhile, the coaches and players issued statements asking the students to stop chanting TSWRA, and several of university’s most influential donors began making noises that they would no longer give financial support to Ole Miss if it continued to be associated with a racist chant. The band director (David Willson, who I admire more than Jesus for what he’s been through since taking that job) rearranged “From Dixie With Love” to eliminate the six notes that were being used as a trigger for TSWRA.
Incensed, the douchebags figured out how to incorporate TSWRA into a different part of the song and coordinated through Facebook. At the next game, TSWRA was even louder. Although it was still only a small part of the attendees chanting it, they all sat together in the student section, and the chant was impossible to ignore.
The Chancellor then took the extraordinary step of publicly announcing that if students yelled TSWRA at the next game, he would ban “From Dixie With Love.” Letters poured into the Daily Mississippian imploring students to show some maturity and stop TSWRA. Sheppard freaking Smith (an Ole Miss alum) sent a video message to the students asking them not to chant TSWRA. Richard Barrett, noted white supremecist, entered the fray by making a public statement in favor of TSWRA. The Daily Mississippian printed several editorials. A few were opposed to TSWRA, but most took the utterly preposterous stance that the First Amendment required the University to play “From Dixie With Love” so that students could sing racist lyrics that the University found objectionable.
On Nov. 7, 2009, the Ole Miss Band played “From Dixie With Love” for the last time, as moronic fratboy douchebags chanted TSWRA to the very end. The next week, the band had two rehearsals to put together a new pregame show, replacing a song that had been its repertoire since before I was born with a medley of “America the Beautiful” and “I Saw The Light,” (the latter a gospel tune that had been part of its stands music for several decades). While there was a smattering of boos at the Nov. 14 game against Tennessee, the crowd was overall supportive.
The announcement by “KKK Great Titan Shane Tate” that the Klan would put in an appearance at this Saturday’s game came this past Monday, I believe, which brings us up to the present day
The University has done everything it possibly could to shut this down short of engaging in outright (and probably illegal) censorship in the form of actually arresting students for the crime of being abject morons. A clear majority of the students and alumni are appalled. I promise you, we’re not all crazy racists in North Mississippi, but damned if we don’t have an abundance of stupid.
Alan, Nice reporting.
I agree; it’s amazing when the root of certain stories are revealed. More often than not, the reason(s) are generally petty and/or foolish.
Alan,
thanks for this. So often these incidents devolve into 5 second soundbites, which then become viral. People on both sides of the political spectrum then jump to all sorts of conclusions, without any concern for the original context or complexity of the situation.
I think I have a solution that will please us all. We can get Mississippi off our hands, protect the rights of the poor and people of color, and give the rednecks cheap gas for their pickups:
Sell it to Venezuela.
OW, the Brits never really “had” what we call the South…just the 13 colonies and a bunch of territories.
I say we should just let the motherf**kers secede. We close all military bases and pull out fighting forces – let ‘em raise their own army. They get no support whatsoever: financial, agricultural, defense. They are on their own. This “New Dixie” will quickly become the laughingstock of the entire world. Inevitably, one of their cowboys will piss off some foreign leader, hostilities will rise – and they will get the ever-loving Jesus beaten out of them.
Then, when they come crying to us for support, we can make like the French taunter in “Monty Python & the Holy Grail” and fart in their general direction.
I’ve started this response five times and erased it to start over, because I really don’t know what to say. Intellectually, I should be offended at what Randy Brown said, but I’m not, because last summer, when Rick Perry was mouthing off about Texas seceding, I was saying pretty much the same thing:
Leave motherf******, so we can turn around and invade you for your oil!
But the truth is, the South will not try to secede again. The South (as a region) knows that it can’t defeat the North militarily today any more than it could in 1860. It knows that even if a New Confederacy could achieve independence, it would never function as anything more than a Third World economy. It knows that, despite all its braying about how morally superior the South is to the rest of the country, that it is utterly dependent on government subsidies to stay afloat. It knows that the only circumstances that ever allowed it to prosper required slavery on a massive scale, an institution which would be impossible to maintain today and still remain a part of any civilized world. And for all the incipient racism which is still present in the South, the majority of the South’s educated citizenry really has moved past all that antebellum crap and never wants to be associated with it again.
Sigh. There’s a lot more I’d like to say about where Mississippi and the South are and where they might be going, but I’m running late for my nephew’s soccer game, and I suspect this post will be pushed out of sight by this time tomorrow. Pity.
Happily, Alan, Oliver linked his Nov. 23 KKK vid to this thread, and I benefited. And thanks from me, too, for the perspective. I always suspected there was more worthiness to be found in Oxford, which after all nourished Faulkner, Barry Hannah and James Seawright. (OK, google Seawright)
Alan, two great comments.
And I beg of you, don’t let North Carolina be given away. We’re getting better, I swear! We went from sending Jesse Helms back to the Senate for a fifth term in 1996 to Obama carrying the state in 2008, so there’s hope for us yet.
Right? Right?
I don’t WANNA leave the US!
Last summer, I was praying fervently that McCain would pick Mitt Romney as his running mate, because if he had, I remain convinced Mississippi would have gone for Obama. The hostility most Southern Baptists have for Mormons is actually worse than the amount of incipient racism they have towards blacks. Back when Romney was still in the race, I heard a preacher announce to his congregationL “and by the way, Mormonism is a cult.” What made it so astonishing was that it literally came out of now where. He just stuck that remark in the middle of a sermon which did not even tangentially reference Mormonism in any way. It was a complete non sequitur, like Cato ending all his speeches with “Carthage must be destroyed.” I don’t know if it will be the same if Romney is the nominee in 2012, after four years of ludicrous Obama conspiracy theories, but in 2008, I really do think Romney’s Mormonism would have delivered Mississippi — Mississippi — to Obama.