Londoner Underground
Margaret Thatcher was a nasty woman, responsible for the deaths of almost a thousand Britons, Argentines, and Falkland Islanders in the Falklands War of 1982. She gave her fellow Shock Doctrine disciple Augusto Pinochet a medal when the Butcher of Chile was finally arrested for his crimes in Spain. She propped up apartheid South Africa for a decade and called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. She wrecked the economy of her nation in ways that are still being felt today, stripping the investment world there of its system of checks and balances, which led directly and ultimately to the Libor manipulation scandal uncovered a year ago. Her political handiwork capitalized initially on a sort of post-colonial despondency in Great Britain during the late 1970's that modern-day Americans should have no trouble recognizing. And she knew exactly what she was doing with each greedy, destructive action she took because, to people like her, it will always be more important to manufacture wealth for a few than to protect the welfare of the many.Her death will not be mourned in this space, as it will not be mourned in places like Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the northern mining fields of England. There will be no hand-wringing over the fact. The reflexive concern over speaking ill of the dead was born of superstition. Many of the same people who would scold us for this cold attitude towards Thatcher today were cheering the death of Osama bin Laden 23 months ago. Thatcher has surviving family. So did bin Laden. You earn your courtesies in this life.
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Country music star Brad Paisley has a controversial new song out with LL Cool J called "Accidental Racist." It's M.O. seems to be a sort of combined apology for, and defense of, the Confederate flag, clumsy at best, and offensive at its worst, particularly in its off-the-wall equation of the original sin of slavery with a defense of black urban fashion. It contains possibly the worst lyric ever contained in an American popular song, uttered by Cool James, "If you forget my gold chains/I'll forget the iron chains." Clearly Paisley's heart is in the right place, despite his being embarrassing ignorant of the fact that the "Southern heritage" of his "red flag" has been, and remains as strongly as ever, a terrorist taunt directed at black Southern heritage.
My tangential angle to this story is this: Paisley is from West Virginia. So when he says he's " a proud Southerner" in this context, that's more historical ignorance. You might already be aware that West Virginia was a state actually formed as a direct result of the Civil War, a new government carved out of the secessionist Old Dominion State by Unionists. West Virginia army regiments fought off the treasonous Southern army in costly and bloody battles at both Antietam and Gettysburg, and the new state set up a system of near-equal education for black children in 1863.
Paisley and other West Virginians' bizarre modern-day evolution towards identification with Southern culture recalls a chapter in Tony Horwitz's kaleidoscopic 1998 book "Confederates in the Attic." In the author's travels through the South almost two decades ago, he found that some of the strongest Confederate sympathies (and modern Ku Klux Klan activity, for that matter) lied in Kentucky, birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, a border state, like West Virginia, that remained firm with the Union throughout the war, and in which the tribal loyalties to the North were strongest among the poor, yeoman farmers that are theoretically the ascendants of today's poor Kentuckians. It's ignorance of one's own history really. Psychologists call it "False Memory Syndrome" as it relates to contemporary recovered-memory therapy. Of course, we also see Confederate battle flag decals on pick-up trucks all across Iowa so what the fuck do I know.
posted by CM @ 7:47 PM
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