"...one of the most important and most neglected subjects in United States history — the Yankee problem.
By Yankee I do not mean everybody from north of the Potomac and Ohio. Lots of them have always been good folks.
The firemen who died in the World Trade Center on September 11 were Americans.
The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees.
I am using the term historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around. Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good in their religion but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.
The politicians and TV personalities who stood around telling us what we are to think about it are Yankees.
I am using the term historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around. Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good in their religion but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee — self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing. Northern Methodism and Chicago were both, in their formative periods, hotbeds of abolitionist, high tariff Black Republicanism. The Yankee temperament, it should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the Deep North by later immigrants.
The ethnic division between Yankees and other Americans goes back to earliest colonial times. Up until the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were considered to be the American mainstream and Yankees were considered to be the "peculiar" people. [No different today -- HM]
Because of a long campaign of cultural imperialism and the successful military imperialism engineered by the Yankees, the South, since the war, has been considered the problem, the deviation from the true American norm. Historians have made an industry of explaining why the South is different (and evil, for that which defies the "American" as now established, is by definition evil). Is the South different because of slavery? white supremacy? the climate? pellagra? illiteracy? poverty? guilt? defeat? Celtic wildness rather than Anglo-Saxon sobriety?"
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The great defender of Southern heritage and biographer of John C. Calhoun, Dr. Clyde Wilson, wrote this essay in 2003.
Like bedbugs, Yankees insinuate themselves into every nook and cranny of your existence. While you are asleep, they suck your blood.
Careful. You are getting more and more anemic for lack of blood...
Like bedbugs, Yankees insinuate themselves into every nook and cranny of your existence. While you are asleep, they suck your blood.
Careful. You are getting more and more anemic for lack of blood...
Damn tootin'.
ReplyDeleteThis Celtic descended southerner thinks this was a damn good post...
ReplyDeleteRead Aston's 'Yankee Babylon' for a fascinating and in-depth look into the Puritan-Yankee continuum that perpetuates our current "problem". And the world's...
ReplyDeleteMisery in the making, since 1600!
- Dutchy
I'm gonna check that out--thanks Dutchy.
ReplyDelete