<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/59124558@N06/7117016481/” title=”2012-Romney-campaign-sign by dengre.bj, on Flickr”><img src=”http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7102/7117016481_21b74f81f4.jpg” width=”500″ height=”162″ alt=”2012-Romney-campaign-sign”></a>
A new museum opened today on the campus of Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.
It is the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. The collection is pretty shocking, but more shocking is the realization that they’ll need to add an new wing just to collect and display the fresh bile that wingnutopia is creating in this election year.
Race is the trump card of Romney, Rove and the GOP. White folks of a certain age in America grew up in a culture of institutionalized racism. Certain stereotypes, fears, anxieties, and even haterds were taught and learned to the point where these notions of race became the “normal facts” of everyday life in White America. This changed with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s (which may be why the Right hates that decade so much). Still, if the GOP can get enough of these White folks of a certain age to vote their learned prejudices, then they just might win. This appeal to race was strong enough to mobilize the Tea party in 2010 and now they hope that this white lightning will strike again.
Just this week a Romney adviser made clear that his concern about immigration was rooted in his fear that White folks might lose their majority status in America. Earlier today Rove’s group launched an ad jam packed with racist dog whistles, portraying the President as a too-cool-to care-about-you urban Negro hipster. And Romney’s entire campaign is built on the repetition of lies loaded & coded with phrases crafted to appeal to fear, hate and prejudice.
It has made for a very ugly GOP primary and now it will get worst as they pull out all the stops. Of course they will do their best to hide the appeals with weasel words and “plausible deniabily”. For the most part our news media will avoid the topic, but if anybody ever points out what they are doing, Romney and the gang will feigned outrage, blame the President, cry “reverse-racism” and quickly claim to be “victims”. This is known.
And yet, that will not change that the core message of the GOP, Romney, Rove and wingnutopia in 2012 is all about race.
The image above–from the JCMRM–could serve as a Romney campaign sign. All it would need is his logo (and maybe the addition of “women” and “the gays). This sign describing who is not allowed in Romney’s America could serve as the tagline for his effort, but that would be way too honest for Mitt and his Party.
And so, they will stick with the code talking. And the fake outrage. And the claims of victim-hood when called-out. And the endless playing of the race card over and over and over and over. They are just getting started.
If Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia decides to document the 2012 Election, I think they’ll need to add an extra room.
Cheers
MikeJ
Be fair, he did hire a misogynistic gay guy. For Romney, if you have enough hatrewd for others you can rise above your own shortcomings. Of course the rest of the party doesn’t like it.
Good to see you post here again. Don’t be a stranger.
Villago Delenda Est
Geeze, being OT so early, but too good not to share:
Mitt Romney’s entry in the Oregon Voters Guide:
Occupation: Former Governor of Massachusetts
That’s his occupation. An office he left a decade ago.
He goes on to say he’s not a career politician, even though he’s been running for President for a decade.
Doesn’t mention he founded Bain Capital. Alludes to it, but nothing direct.
Baud
Note to Romney: “Blah” is not good code-speak.
the Conster
The old white farts will mostly vote for goopers out of fear of the browns, but they’re losing the war.
If race anxiety is all the GOP has left to offer, they’ve got one or two more election cycles left to fearmonger. 2010 was a dead cat bounce.
Dennis G.
@efgoldman: As am I. And I would never vote for these asswipes as well.
Many and more white folks of a certain age would never vote for the wankers as well, but about half might. And that is their hope.
Cheers
gaz
I’m bored. Somebody should say something clever.
=)
Villago Delenda Est
I don’t know. While Rmoney will not use the n-word, as it’s so proletarian, the actual proletarians are chomping at the bit to utter it openly. Just look at Rush Limbaugh, who you know, know, is about to burst like a pressure cooker that has a jammed release valve to use THAT WORD on the air to describe the Sheriff of Rock Ridge.
Baud
@Villago Delenda Est:
If they know their days are numbered, what have they got left to lose?
Southern Beale
Republicans are horrible people.
Really. They are.
MildGyrate
The fact that this museum is located in Michigan should make all you hypocritical double standard fuckwits shut the mighty hell up about the “racist South,” but it won’t. Fuckin echo chamber full of regionalist pieces of Obot shit.
Raven
@MildGyrate: Fuck off klan ass motherfucker. The south is a state of mind not a direction. Punk.
Baud
@gaz: Is #12 clever enough for you?
Odie Hugh Manatee
I really enjoy your writing Dengre, but we need moar from you! :) Really, you offer a view on race relations and the history behind it that we don’t hear near enough about today.
“Those who cannot remember the past…”
So true.
@Southern Beale:
Fucking DUH! ;)
srv
Mistakes were made… by all those southern Democrats. If Republicans can live in a post-racial era, why can’t Democrats?
In the meantime, can we sell Arizona to Mexico?
double nickel
@MildGyrate: How do you type with that hood over your head?
bootsy
Maybe there should be a special wing for those formerly discriminated against who are now eager to do it to others. My hat’s off to whatever cracker sheriff pulls over Alito or Scalia and thinks their names seem a little, I dunno, ‘Latin.’ Do they carry their papers on them at all times?
MildGyrate
@double nickel: The largest Klan membership today is in North Dakota, so shut the fuck up with your South-blaming, asswipe. All you douchebags want to do is trash the character of Southern generals to purify your own racist sins. I guess none of you ever heard of New York City draft riots? Didn’t they teach that in your perfect integrated schools?
Ruckus
@Southern Beale:
You are being too kind. Way too kind. An unmeasurable amount of kind. And using the descriptor people may be stretching it a bit as well.
ETA See post 12 and 19 for proof.
Raven
@MildGyrate: You’re a fucking asshole. Go fuck yourself with that weak shit.
Mike in NC
Which is why there are so many silly old farts in their 70s and 80s sending daily letters to the editorial page of their local newspapers, whining about how their precious freedoms are slipping away, and pining for the good old days of “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy”.
They seem to literally live in a world where everything is black and white, not just the TV shows.
Rommie
Once again – Sherman didn’t burn enough.
Comrade Mary
The curator of the museum, David Pilgrim, was interviewed on CBC’s As It Happens tonight. Click the Listen button and choose segment two from the pop-up. Yes, he said that he’s been collecting of lot of vicious racist crap aimed at Obama and his family.
Southern Beale
Yes WE know Republicans are horrible people, but far too many Villagers and independents are trying to pretend they’re normal. They’re not.
They don’t give a shit about race. They don’t give a shit about anything. All they care about is WINNING. They’re sociopaths and sadists. It’s clinical.
the Conster
Fucking Bruins fans. The Confederacy is a state of mind.
Skerry
OT, but I missed this.
First inductees into the Internet Hall of Fame (yes, Al Gore is one of them)
stickler
Last time I looked at a history textbook, I didn’t notice anything about New York City rioters joining the Confederate army and trying to DESTROY THE UNION. Unlike, say, Southern Generals. Who did lead the largest act of armed treason in all of America’s history.
Oh — and they lost, too.
That tramping sound? Off in the distance? That’s the ghosts of Sherman’s Army, marching through Georgia.
jl
@MildGyrate: You were the first person to mention ‘South’ in this thread. So what are you talking about?
I’ve been very free in discussing my home state California’s past racist sins on this blog.
You’re probably DougJ, spoof trolling.
Mnemosyne
Guys, MildGyrate is a spoof troll (rhyme the name).
Also, too, it would be fascinating and yet nauseating to visit the Jim Crow museum. Kind of like going to the Mutter Museum, I’m guessing.
ETA: I’m not naming the commenter being spoofed because I’m pretty sure he’s been banned.
jl
I notice Rubio’s very reasonable, and polite, and nice, and non scary, minimalist, and maybe BS, suggestions about immigration reform were shot down by his own party’s bigshots within one day.
DREAM On, Dude
Josh Marshall April 26, 2012, 3:20 PM 304
Boehner tells Rubio even his phony ‘Dream Act’ is probably DOA in the House.
talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/04/sorry_dude.php?ref=fpblg
Baud
@Mnemosyne: Wow, nice catch. So what’s more pathetic – a racist troll or a faux racist troll?
Hill Dweller
There are racist people everywhere. But having lived in four southern states(and spent a couple of summers in a fifth), I can say, without equivocation, the vast majority of people I encountered were openly racist.
That said, it is generational, even in the South. For the most part, the younger the person, the more healthy their views on race.
Chris
What scares me even more is when I run into people my age who buy into all the racial shit. Not that they’re the same guys who want to return to segregation, you understand. “Of course we believe in racial equality, but the real enemies of racial equality these days are Affirmative Action, and all those Black Racists the media and government are helping, and all those Special Privileges black people are given, and all those people inciting hatred of Zimmerman while ignoring all those Black criminals, which there are more of, did you know that? But dude, Martin Luther King would’ve agreed with us.”
My initial reaction is “wow, I guess the face of racism is changing,” until I remember that George Wallace campaigned against the Civil Rights Act by claiming that it would “enslave white people,” and that Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans (even then) waggled their fingers at the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction to tell them that their attempts to make everyone equal were going too far in favor of black people, and who then abolished Reconstruction altogether and ushered in decades of racial terror in order to protect the poor white people’s rights.
And I realize that those earnest young “duuuude, MLK would’ve agreed with us, black people are the real problem now!” are what the face of racism has always looked like. Even as plantation owners beat, raped and murdered their way through the ranks of their slaves, in their own self-pitying heads, they were always the real victims, maaaann.
Martin
This is why Biden is so awesome:
Not intentionally embarrassing hilarious, and yet there it is and he can laugh it off.
Evolving Deep Southerner
Dengre, always good to see your words. You post here far too seldom. Do you post anywhere else regularly?
jl
@jl:
On other hand, all the whites south and east of the SF Bay Area in California was full of the South South Southy South Southerners, back in the day. So, it was all their fault.
freelancer
@MildGyrate:
I will make
GeorgiaMildGyrate howl!Dennis G.
@MildGyrate: The fact that the culture of racism lived and lives in all 50 States is hardly news, nor is it a viable defense of the South.
150 years ago tonight, traitors from Southern States were fighting to destroy the American Union and create an Empire based on slavery. When the war ended they shifted their efforts to other means of stealing labor (and in this effort they found support from way too many Northerners in the decades following the War).
These traitors were the old Southern Confederates and the foundation of the more geographically dispersed neo-Confederates of today. Yes, they can be found in the North–and in the West and East, but it was and is a movement strongest among the whites of and from the South. And yes, once they controlled the Democratic Party (when those draft riots happened), but now the neo-Confederates control the GOP (and fuel the Party’s Obama derangement syndrome).
Your small smatterings of data-points and misdirection masquerading as a defense of “The South” does little to hide your ignorance and your hate. “The South” is not the problem. It is folks like you. So it goes.
Raven
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Criterium this weekend, how’s Raleigh?
Martin
I’m going with my new theory that The Cosby Show made everyone lose their shit and decide that St Ronnie was the last golden age of America.
Fear of a black middle class.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: I am looking forward to the VP debate with Biden squaring up against whatever mook the GOP brings in to humanize Mitt.
shortstop
@Mnemosyne: Has he? I noticed he disappeared right after he started getting spoofed, but perhaps that was a coinkidink.
dead existentialist
@the Conster: Hilarious comments there. It’s the epitome of white privilege. “Go play basketball. Hockey is a white sport.” Hee hee!
Well, at least there’s shuffleboard.
Baud
@Martin: I’m just happy he actually said “stick.”
The Moar You Know
@MildGyrate: I’m born from at least six generations of Southerners, and most of my family still lives in Alabama. By the grace of God and an accident of deployment, I was born in California, which has some racist issues of it’s own. Listen carefully from one who knows:
The South Is Racist. Racism elsewhere does not change that indisputable FACT.
That being said, yeah, so’s the rest of the country. But the South lives and breathes it in a way no other part of this nation does.
Deal with it.
Mr Stagger Lee
@the Conster: Well their goalie is a Glenn Beck wingnut who refused to meet the President because he was (you know….Black). I loved that a black player caused Southies and Townies load of Butthurt. Hey Boston as Bill Russell one of the greatest to wear the Boston Celtics uniform,remarked “Boston is a flea market of rascism.”
jl
@Chris: One of the main things I remember the 1980s and early 1990s for, was the overt and obnoxious racism of the CW old white man gas bag pundits on the TV and moderate right minded press.
I remember listening to panels of vicious old white man perhaps senile nincompoops on TV politics shows saying that ‘we’ should not give black communities resources for development, or even proper law enforcement until ‘they got their act together’ and similar nonsense. I could not believe it.
One example was the campaign against Chuck D. The fuss about him made me buy my first Public Enemy album, and I listened to it and read the lyrics. And I said ‘ah, I see what the game is here’. And I became a Public Enemy fan.
But, I guess I am a self hating white man, is all.
Or maybe I remember, being half Irish, my kind was not ‘white’ for a long time in this country, and who knows, might not be ‘white’ again someday.
Naw, probably the first option.
Dennis G.
@Evolving Deep Southerner: Only here for the most part. It has been a fairly busy 2012 at work and taking care of some family matters. I am hoping that things have settled down and I’ll have more time to write and post.
Cheers
Woodrowfan
@efgoldman:
My 80-something Mom is, I suspect, the only vote Obama will get from her assisted-living facility, besides the African-American and Latina staff of course. She’s also the only one who doesn’t watch Fox “News”, not that the two are related in any way.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: So you are saying that while many of us were watching this, a significant portion of the country saw this instead?
Raven
@Dennis G.: Pete says hi.
jl
@Martin: I love me them BidenGaffes. He should copyright them. Does he put them on his Twitter?
General Stuck
Yup, this is the front and center issue for all the republican base. For now, it is even above the wingnut prime directive of stuffing stolen cash into their bed springs.
What it looks like is a manic ideological surge for the known voting blocks that favor the GOP in general. Fundies, xenophobes, anti government paranoid types. He already has the country club vote. It is going to be interesting to see how far down the wingnut rabbit hole Romney can stomach, assuming he has even a shred of conscience.
RossInDetroit
My dad is a Ferris alumnus. ’56 I think. I didn’t know about that museum. I’ll ask him what he thinks.
I briefly lived in NC. I was amazed while there how relaxed and friendly people were toward me. And shocked at how many casually dropped N-bombs in front of someone they hardly knew. That’s not to say all Southerners are racist, but I can’t recall that happening ONCE in 50 years of living in MI without the person getting their ass chewed or mouth washed out.
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
The time for them to try this shit was four years ago—of course they did, but to nothing like the intensity they will this time. The thing is, I can’t imagine it working for them.
People are the product of their environment. In 2008 there may have been a lot of voters—not stone racists, just having grown up in a certain era—who found the idea of pulling the lever (Ha! I’m old enough to remember levers!) for a black man for president to be a big step, maybe one they weren’t ready for. In many cases it probably wasn’t even conscious.
Now, however, Obama is a known quantity. They’ve seen him and his charming family for four years now. To paraphrase Archie Bunker, no chicken bones or watermelon rinds have come flying out of the White House windows. I don’t think this racist shit is going to stick—and the more they hammer away at it, the worse it makes them look. Let them start harping on Reverend Wright, that’ll be a winner! Pace Taco, I remember the last month-and-a-half before the 2008 election, and my TV was Jeremiah Wright 24/7. How did that turn out?
They’ve been caught completely flat-footed. They thought they could have him impeached and removed on some Clintonesque bullshit before now—because you know how Those People are! They expected him to come in all “Wheah da white women at?” Sadly for them it didn’t turn out that way. Everybody heard all they have to say four years ago, and Obama beat a white, formerly well-regarded “War Hero” who used to be considered a fairly jovial old coot 53/45. How on God’s Green Earth is Mittens going to outperform McCain? It’s just completely impossible. (Of course, I’ve been wrong before.)
Voter suppression is of course the wild card, and keeping college students from voting because they’re away from home. If it weren’t for that, I think Mittens would get Landoned. As it is is, he may merely be Dukakised, but I’m hoping for a Mondaling at least!
jl
@RossInDetroit:
There are regional differences in attitudes. I grew up in a pretty multicultural part of central California (NOT DFH SF Bay Area, BTW, but rather a boring agricultural area), where seeing African Americans, Hispanics, Sikhs, Asians doing all sorts of stuff along with whites in all walks of life was pretty SOP from as long as I can remember. Except the really wealthy were all white, at least as I remember.
There was a lot of bigotry, and housing segregation, and IMHO rather subtle discriminatory public policies at local level.
But I do not remember hearing racial or ethnic slurs from my childhood, even when whites were talking among themselves.
But down in Los Angeles suburbs, and other parts of the country, I hear NClang, Greaser, Wetback, and overt racial and ethnic comments and stereotypes on a regular basis.
jl
@The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge: IMHO, the GOP primary candidates for presidentin’, and their surrogates, keep making statements that indicate to me that they think they will destroy Obama in the debates. Sounds like they think that a (genuine or pretend) conservative real white man will humiliate some ‘inadequate black man’ just by showing up.
My personal opinion is that they are bigots, pure and simple.
rikyrah
One of the funniest thing that I always enjoy with the President and First Lady is that they know that they are Black and have gone about their business as such. …which kills them.
Hill Dweller
@jl: They’ve bought into their teleprompter and affirmative action Harvard student nonsense.
Let them keep on believing it. They said the same thing before the McCain debates, but Obama calmly broke him down.
ruemara
Fascinating link, Dennis. I can’t tell if I should be annoyed or enchanted, but I am learning things. But I really don’t feel offended by golliwog dolls.
Cacti
@jl:
Lucky you.
I grew up in crackerville, just south of St. Louis, where ni-CLANG was sprinkled into everyday conversation.
Steve in DC
It’s over Obama will win. Racism is far over played. Anybody who’s not going to vote for a black guy isn’t going to vote for a liberal either. Liberal still pisses off far more of the population than black people do. Short of it turning out he’s an atheist, he’s fine.
Besides McCain was a rather loved politician and a war hero. And despite his cranky side at times, he had a personality and could connect with people. Romney on the other hand has no history to trot out showing any sort of positive character, and is a fucking robot. McCain had his faults but he didn’t come off as an non human or a money grabbing fuck wit.
IMHO, the Republicans had two candidates who could have credibly won this, they rejected both. Huntsman has far more charasima than anybody else from either party, possibly excepting Biden, in this election. He’s well spoken, not retarded, and didn’t flip flop all over the place. Sadly for him he believes in global warming, doesn’t want to nuke Iran, had nice things to say about China, and worked for a liberal, a LIBERAL! Buddy is actually talking income inequality, speaks very well, comes off as a human and a common man, wanted to work with the other side, and actually wanted to help poor people.
Both of them got shown the door, for not being angry or crazy enough.
I said this earlier on several sites… a John/Buddy ticket would have won in the general election. It’s as charismatic, stylish, humble, human, intelligent, and swift as the Democratic ticket. It’s also passes the “who would you have a beer with” test. The Republicans decided to double down on stupid. That chance is gone. Now all they have is an assholish combo of a Cylon that fucked Gordon Geeko to team up with a Tea Party nut job. Good luck with that!
RossInDetroit
Speaking of racist signs, I actually saw this hilariously racist whiskey advertisement in an antique shop and tried to buy it. It wasn’t for sale and the owner said if he ever did part with it it would be for ‘six figures’. Beautiful hand painted metal sign with a terrible stereotype. Three of them, actually, if you’re counting.
The prophet Nostradumbass
I’m not accusing anyone of anything; this is something that I have wondered about. Why will people bowdlerize the word “nigger”, but leave ones like “greaser” or “wetback” alone? How are they any less offensive?
Ruckus
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
They are not.
I don’t understand it either. It’s like saying frack in place of fuck. As we all understand exactly the word you mean, why not spell it out? To me it is more offensive to try to pretend that I didn’t intend the word to mean what everyone thinks it does. Own up to it. If you are using a word as a description of what not to say the context should make that clear. If not, you’re doing it wrong. On the other hand it I seem to recall that ABL was the first I saw to use N-Clang and given her race I’d defer to her in this instance. A far better judge of racial word usage than this old white fart, that’s for sure.
andy
@MildGyrate: “The character of Southern generals” was to serve under the flag of treason, filth.
The First Minnesota, a Northern outfit, practically got wiped out holding the line at Gettysburg so that rag would never fly over decent people’s heads ever again. There’s your character.
Even if you are some kind of a stunt troll, fuck you most sincerely.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Ruckus: Well, the Ni-CLANG thing comes from the movie Blazing Saddles. The best way to explain it is to point to a video of the scene.
Odie Hugh Manatee
What has always bothered me about signs like the one Dennis posted was the equating of people of color with dogs. The purpose of this ‘message’ was to denigrate and demoralize POC while feeding the white need for feelings of racial superiority.
While we all may be human, far too many people out there believe that they are better than other humans. These people are willing to cause misery and pain to others in order to feed their need to feel superior. The attitude is so prevalent that we now have a political party openly embracing and endorsing it for partisan political gain. The fact that the support the Republicans get is going to be turned on the very people who put them in power completely escapes them. All they care is that their party is going to make Democrats and POC miserable.
Their hatred of POC makes them blind to everything else.
Brachiator
@Dennis G.:
You clearly have not been keeping up with the open displays of racism by the younger generation, for example, the young fans of the Hunger Game movie, who were angered that they did not get a “white only” film going experience, or the abysmal and frankly racist comments from hockey fans over a goal scored by a black player.
This not only did not change with the Civil Rights movement; to the contrary, a counter movement was spawned. Yes, there were obviously many who happily threw off the collar of racism, but others stewed in the juices of racial anxiety and passed their fears and anger along to their children. This is one of the reasons that the Democrats lost the white male vote since the days of the Johnson administration. And the numbers have held fairly steady, which easily contradicts any simplistic notion that this is an old, dying generation of recalcitrant racists.
Also, too, there is the stubborn defense of the creators of the new, edgy, youth oriented tv show “Girls,” of their right to depict a white only universe, and to openly mock black critics of the show. Oh yeah, and then, there is that recent Vanity Fair Young Hollywood cover, where actresses of color are relegated to the area behind the fold.
But back to politics. The GOP decided to play with racist fire when they indulged the sick fantasies of birthers and the Real America(tm) reveries of the Tea Party. This is nothing special or specific to either Rove or Romney. It may be that Romney is too much of a coward to stand up to the racists in his party, but even Gramps McCain decided to continue to embrace a political party which previously slimed his own family with vicious racist attacks.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Raven: Raleigh is fine as frog hair and suiting me well. Glad as hell to be out of the other Carolina.
ChrisNYC
@The prophet Nostradumbass: I think the others are less offensive. It’s the central thing in this issue, race in the US, that difference. Slavery, dehumanization of black people is woven through our history and in one way or another fueled the development of the country. Wetbacks came here voluntarily and not via capture nor to be treated as chattel, indeed, just the opposite. Strike one. Plus wetbacks also speaks to a point in time — the child of a wet back is nothing better or worse than a first generation American, and that itself has some clout. N-word not so much. The N word defines a demeaned and static position based on skin color.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@ChrisNYC: Ask a Mexican, or Mexican-American, what they think of those two terms, and see what response you get.
RalfW
@jl:
Yeah, and the fucker had the temerity to blame “operating in a very hostile political environment” as the reason he (boo hoo) can’t bring up the GOP ‘revised’ DREAM Act. Because Dems are meanines. Waaaaaaaa.
ChrisNYC
@The prophet Nostradumbass: I still don’t think there is any comparison. There is a long (and quite elevated, lionized, in terms of our story of the US) history of people coming here “for a better life” or “so that their children will do better” and indeed suffering indignities valiantly for that larger goal — no Irish need apply, Italians being seen as shifty or “too dark” etc. That is, in our myth a valued and almost sacrosanct thing. The capture and (!!!) stealing of work, the destruction of families — the treatment as basically non-human, hung on the “rational” reason of skin color, is, to me, the significance of the N word and the weight it carries.
jl
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
NiClang is a joke from Blazing Saddles.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@Raven: The Criterium. Goodness, gracious. Last time I took LSD was the ’94 Criterium weekend, the last thrashings of my Athens adolescence at 24, just as I was getting out of grad school. The lead bike overtook the Suzuki “pace car,” which came dangerously close to wiping out into a big berm of haybales and very fucked up people at the corner where the Odyssey (later the Nowhere Bar, and now I don’t know what) was. The Suzuki was all over the place. I remember some of those haybales catching fire not much later that night. Have never had the first lysergic desire since.
Brachiator
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Yeah, Jezebel had a sobering post on the reaction of a sad number of people on Twitter to the winning goal in this game:
The tweets, in which fools proudly identified themselves by name, is appalling.
To be fair, a number of people in another blog site not only called out these fools for their racism, but identified some of them by name and neighborhood.
But the sad reality is that many of these posters were young Boston sports fans, not ancient Confederates.
Frankensteinbeck
@The Moar You Know: and @MildGyrate:
Let me go one further. Born and bred in THE briar patch, South Carolina, lived most of the rest of my life in Kentucky, traveled far and wide in this country – especially the South – and yearning to move back to Los Angeles:
If there is any, ANY ‘but’ to the South’s racism, it’s ‘But the South hates everyone.’ It is a region-wide culture of neanderthal conformism, seething with malice for anyone and anything considered different. The hate that stews in Southerners shocks me over and over, because it’s systemic and socially approved. In LA, considered a cold and unfriendly city, strangers wished me Merry Christmas on the streets. In Kentucky, they screamed profanities at me out of the window of their cars, and I’m not even a minority. The culture of the South is one of hating everything different, and black people are different at a glance.
Canuckistani Tom
@Brachiator:
I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t know that Ward was a fellow Torontonian. I may have to pay attention to the Caps for the rest of the playoffs.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@jl: You seem to think you’re educating me about something. Scroll back about an hour before your comment, and you will see that I had already pointed that out.
@ChrisNYC: Yes, yes, you think racist comments about Mexicans aren’t as bad, I got that. Blow it out your ass.
sherparick
@MildGyrate: Well, the South (which always means the White South), institutionalized racism from slavery through Jim Crow. But there were always Northerners who, as Charlie Pierce, says think the South had a point. The old pre-New Deal Democratic party was strange, reactioinary, coalition of the Bourbon south and white working class North, with racism being one of its principle binding energies. In the 60s,if Nixon had been a principled man, and after 1968 had not pursued southern strategy, the crazies would have moveed off into Wallacite party of permaenent isolation. But of course if the scorpion was not the scorpion, he and the frog would have swum the river.
sherparick
@MildGyrate: Well, the South (which always means the White South), institutionalized racism from slavery through Jim Crow. But there were always Northerners who, as Charlie Pierce, says think the South had a point. The old pre-New Deal Democratic party was strange, reactioinary, coalition of the Bourbon south and white working class North, with racism being one of its principle binding energies. In the 60s,if Nixon had been a principled man, and after 1968 had not pursued southern strategy, the crazies would have moveed off into Wallacite party of permaenent isolation. But of course if the scorpion was not the scorpion, he and the frog would have swum the river.
Dennis G.
@Evolving Deep Southerner: I remember that Twilight. And the Nowhere bar. And when they mixed.
I think it was a year or two after 1994 when a fellow stumbled out of the Nowhere Bar, climbed the hay bales and walked into the road. It resulted in a crash and many injuries.
Still, there was nothing like hanging out at Rocky’s (or the Globe) and watching the riders fly by…
Drive-by Nomad
You asked for it… Romney’s New Campaign Sign