"Fuckin failures in a country ay failures. It's nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don't hate the English. They're just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We're ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? The lowest of the fuckin low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don't hate the English. They just git oan wi the shite thuv goat. Ah hate the Scots."
]]>O, I'm a good old Rebel,
Now that's just what I am,
For this Yankee Nation
I do not give a damn
I'm glad I fit again' her
I only wish we'd won,
I ain't asked any pardon
For anything I've done.
I hates the Yankee nation
And everything they do,
I hates the Declaration
Of Independence too;
I hates the glorious Union --
'Tis dripping with our blood --
I hates their striped banner,
I fit it all I could.
I rode with Robert E. Lee
For three years, near about,
Got wounded in four places
And I starved at Point Lookout;
I cotch the rheumatism
A campin' in the snow,
But I killed a chance of Yankees,
And I'd like to kill some mo'.
Three hundred thousand Yankees
Is stiff in Southern dust;
We got three hundred thousand
Before they conquered us;
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot,
I wish they was three million
Instead of what we got.
I can't take up my musket
And fight 'em now no more,
But I ain't gonna love 'em,
Now that is sarten sure;
And I don't want no pardon
For what I was and am,
I won't be reconstructed
And I do not give a damn.
On the flip side, while I understand and appreciate the feelings, it's also a little weird for TNC to have personal feelings of "we lost" when reading Jared Diamond based on where some of his ancestors were a couple of hundred years ago, when his current circumstances as US citizen place him pretty strongly on the "we won" side of the cultural equation.
TNC's larger point here is one that I really can't quite get my head around; what analogies can we draw between the feelings of failure and victimization that southern whites have vs. the similar feelings that many African Americans may feel based on long-ago history? (My own opinion is that they are very similar on a personal level, but play out very differently on a sociological group level).
]]>Also, they kept getting invaded by the French and Spanish. When you have to break all of your dikes to keep invaders out, it'll really put a damper on things.
]]>Insh'allah! Ive never seen a more orderly city than Amsterdam.
]]>The language that some transnational adoptees have used to describe what it felt like to learn that it's what literally happened to them personally, is 'feeling worthless'.
I've given this a lot of thought because I'm raising a child who was, best we can tell, transferred in just this fashion. So there are two ideas that flow from that, for me:
Is this what it feels like, in our emotionally-developed culture imbued with a language of entitlement, to be colonized?
and, How is this a heritable condition like skin color or hair texture?
I wonder these things, not to be an obtuse jackass, but genuinely they seem to be questions worth understanding if you wish to understand race.
]]>As a separate comment, I don't think there's any people that can claim not to have been conquered, debauched and sold cheap. It's just that eventually we all come back and make something else. Eventually the Anglo Saxons conquered by the Normans become the English bestriding the globe. Likewise the African Slaves became modern Americans, richer and more powerful by far than the descendants of the west African Kings that abducted and sold them, able to elect a skinny black man with a Muslim name. The wounds are deeper and more recent than all but a few post-Enlightenment reverses, but if one takes the grand view (19th century American slavery being much more totalizing and dehumanizing than essentially any other form of the peculiar institution) the African American's emergence from eclipse has actually been faster and more determined than about any that didn't involve the sacking of the 'conquering' people. In the face of terrorism, a 9 to 1 population ratio and only tepid support from a majority that mostly wanted to pretend nothing had happened, Black people have achieved a position of prominence in the culture and politics of the most powerful nation in the world that outstrips all but the Jews on a per-capita basis. African Americans are still not were they by rights should be in a nation the building of which they've had such a critical part, but in terms of progressively supplanting defeats with victories they've definitely set the example for the rest of the world.
Even when one takes away the myths, there's still so much that is so amazing, once you really look at it.
]]>There's me scrolling down to Linoleum Bonaparte's long quote and being reminded of the complete and utter garbage my forbears tried to pass off as grievances--and of all the TNC readers who just got reminded too.
Life's been like that since I was about 12. I've got no fairy godmother, and I'm not the long-lost heir to the throne of England. I'm from the intersection of the Trail of Tears and "won't be reconstructed/do not give a damn." And Nato's gracious offer above not withstanding, I can't even get up the strength to dig around 300 years back for a claim that my sorry people were "conquered, debauched and sold cheap." My people did the debauching.
Except...
I woke up a few weeks ago an NPR clip of Robert Gibbs saying "In their discussions, they talked about the theory of constitutional interpretation, generally, including her views on unenumerated rights in the Constitution and the theory of settled law.”
Barack Obama of Columbia/Harvard and Sonia Sotomayor of Princeton/Yale have been sitting in the office of FDR and LBJ sorting out “unenumerated rights,” the crown jewel of our darling ancient Jefferson-debating-Madison-about-Montesquieu Bill of Rights.
After the whole long ghastly story of slavery and Jim Crow and the Alamo and the Spanish-American War dreams of empire that got Puerto Rico half-in and half-out, I wake up one morning and find they’re in the Oval being us.
Closing in on 50, I'm the child of parents who helped make that possible and the mother of children who helped make it happen. It's better than being Hermione Grainger, raised by muggles and then discovering I'm part of a world of wizarding.
We are who we thought we were.
]]>Readiing your post about the quote made me realize that while some of us, namely me, do not have the national or ethnic history to deal with, we do have a similar kind of feeling that comes up. Who hasn't thought, "Why is THAT wanker the manager of this McDonalds, while I'm just the toilet scrubber? And if I take his shit and shine it up nice and pretty, what does that make me?"
Jay's quote gets at something else I wanted, but forgot, to mention--the initial twang of cheapness that takes you over, once you fully begin to grapple with being amongst the conquered. Robert Hayden's poem "Middle Passage" is one of the best meditations on slavery that I've ever read. The most poignant part, for me, is when uses the voice of a slave-trading sailor to mock the small-minded African chieftains:
I didn't want to bold any of this, less I ruin the beauty--but the part that always gets me is the image of "nigger Kings" who traded slaves for "tin crowns that shown with paste, red calico and German-silver trinkets."
It's like, "Damn, that's what I'm worth. Broken crowns, fabric, toys and parasols. Not even gold. It's like they gave us away for nothing."
I need to clarify that I am writing about how it feels, not how it is. It's the subjective emotions, perhaps native only to me, of coming into consciousness. It's about Neo waving off the blue pill, and reveling in the red.