The Unvanquished

I am currently on a road trip, and am laying my weary head this night in the heart of Tennessee. And in making my way through the South, I am forced once again to consider the issue of "the true American identity". Because when one is in the South, one has to reflect on the fact that this is conquered territory -- it is the homeland of a vanquished race. And yet it lives on, and in a way that is, in many respects, much more vigorous and assertive than the comparatively pale, bland, sterile assertiveness of the North, which is embodied, in our time, in the "coasts", the mainstream media, academia, and certainly -- on an international scale -- in our ceaseless meddling abroad, as exemplified by the exertions of the State Department and the CIA, in their endless Wilsonian zeal to "promote democracy", which is a cover story for good, old-fashioned imperialism.

But this -- let’s say -- superficial, or “first blush” appearance conceals a great paradox, which is that Southern culture is not only alive and well -- with a clear lineage to the antebellum period -- but is embodied in the perennial dominance of Southern politicians in Congress, and by the deep-rooted Southern predominance in our military, particularly the Army. It has been pointed out -- with ruthless cynicism, perhaps -- that the biggest mistake a society or nation bent on genocide (either literal or cultural) can make is to leave survivors. Because those survivors develop an almost superhuman sense of history, a crystal-clear memory of wrongs committed, and an urge to, somehow, turn the clock back to the glory days when their own culture was, if not predominant, then most definitely in contention. We see this played out on a daily basis, for example, in the case of the Turks, who inexplicably left countless Armenians still standing… in the fact that Native Americans are still very much with us, and growing more assertive each day, despite all the best efforts of those of the Custer stripe to eradicate them… of the recent eruption of cultural self-assertion among the Australian Aborigines and the Indians of South America… and so on. Just about the only exception that I can think of is the indigenous tribes of Argentina, who disappeared without a trace -- an event which has not been satisfactorily explained even unto this day. And then we have the Palestinians, a group that, officially, was held to not even exist (“A land without a people”) but who are making endless trouble for the supposedly-victorious Zionists.

And so it is with the South. These were people who had been thoroughly conquered… humiliated… mortified… disgraced… and who were supposed to, basically, disappear and stop bothering everyone and standing in the way of “progress”. They had been, you see, a sort of fly in the ointment of the humanist experiment that was America -- and once it was discovered (“shazam!”) that slavery was a bad and unnatural thing, it and the culture that nourished and depended on it was supposed to immolate itself and wind up on the dust heap of history. And this did occur, after a fashion, since the ruling elite -- the Southern nobility -- did, in fact, cease to exist, for all intents and purposes -- as Margaret Mitchell put it, it was “gone with the wind”. But lo and behold, the inheritors of that culture, or what was left of it, did not go gently into that still night -- the ordinary white people, farmers and sharecroppers, took up the gauntlet and carried on, in their own somewhat crude way, and built -- ramshackle as it might be -- the South as we know it today, and as it has been known in all of living memory.

Now, as I’ve already implied, the “cutting edge” of American culture -- the face we attempt to show to the rest of the world -- is anything but “Southern”. In fact, it involves an implicit denial of the value and worth of anything that comes from below the Mason-Dixon line. The message that our elites give to the world is that,when it comes to the American South, the truth is not in them. But at the same time, the sheer vigor of Southern “folk” (as opposed to elite) culture cannot be denied -- and ironically, this culture is at the very least bimodal. It consists of one part black culture and one part white -- and the Europeans, for example, being far less obsessive about these things than we are, don’t seem to care, on any given day, which is which. Black blues and white rock ‘n’ roll crossed the Atlantic and came bouncing back courtesy of groups like the Rolling Stones, for example. Did they give a hang about our politics (historical or current)? No -- all they knew is that there was something of value there. And let’s admit that the “folk” culture of this country -- even though it has been infused with white liberal elitism since at least the 1930s -- has been a uniquely tolerant and “diverse” field of play as compared to, for example, politics. Activists of the WPA sort fell in love with black "folkways", but eventually -- grudgingly, perhaps -- decided that white Southerners had something to offer as well (as witness, e.g., the "Foxfire Books").

But the paradoxes go even deeper than this. The armies of General Lee were turned back and eventually vanquished by the armies of Grant, Sheridan, et al -- and yet our military traditions have a markedly Southern tone, especially if you’re talking about the Army. West Point may overlook the Hudson River, but it owes much more to VMI than it does to any Northern traditions; and many of our military leaders of today are firmly rooted in their Southern heritage.

So does this mean that, in today’s America, Southerners are fighting Yankee wars -- acting as collaborators, in effect? The answer is, basically, yes. Ivy League think-tankers come up with the latest plan to “spread democracy” -- they are reinforced by East Coast media, business, and financiers -- and it’s the Southern boys who wind up in Iraq and Afghanistan. So the Southern military tradition is being exploited, in this sense -- but it is nonetheless a point of pride in these regions. You can see more US flags on a drive across Tennessee on any given day than you’ll see in New England in an entire year. (Of course, you’ll also see Confederate flags and other very non-PC manifestations of resurgent Southern pride.) And this is not to deny that one of the primary vectors in our exertions in the Middle East is the Evangelical movement, which is firmly grounded in the South. In what has to be one of the more anachronistic episodes in our recent history, Christian Zionists -- nearly all Southerners -- have made common cause with Israel, and were, for the eight very long years of the Bush administration, very much the dominant force in our foreign policy, along with the Neocons (Ivy League to a man) and the arms merchants (Yankees all, as usual). But hey, what would history be without paradoxes and anachronisms? It would be mightily boring, that’s what.

So when we consider the issue of cultural dominance, we should not just stare at the shell of the egg, as it were. That shell, in this case, shows nothing but the total dominance of the mainstream media and Northern academic -- um -- eggheads. But what’s inside the shell, and what constitutes most of its total mass, is the zeal and military aspirations of a conquered race. And one might ask, why should the South “sell out”, still, at this late date? And the answer, I suppose, has to do with tradition, and romanticism, and manhood… you know, all of those qualities universally lacking among our cultural elites and ruling class. It has to do with a brand of patriotism that is so ingrained that it could be transferred from the Confederacy to the Union -- i.e. to the re-united states. Southerners are warriors, first and foremost -- and if they have to express this impulse in a somewhat ambivalent fashion, well, so be it. It’s sure better than beating one’s swords into plowshares, you must admit. So regardless of the machinations of diplomats and “experts” in the State Department, when a planeload of troops lands in Baghdad or Kabul, it is overflowing with Southern pride.

So to these people I say, bravo for not having allowed your culture and traditions to be completely plowed under -- and bravo for being clever (or bull-headed) enough to “morph” them into something that is still viable in this day and age. And -- wave your banners high, even those of the politically-incorrect stripe -- because the South may yet turn out to be the salvation of what is left of America.