Americas

Under the Radar

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I guess it must matter to the elite class who seem to manage and report in our established American national main-line media that no one notice the very ugly and violent racial war which is breaking out. Unless, of course, it is a case of a white, or nearly white, or almost-sort-of white in a confrontation with a member of the black thug class; there, I said it the black thug class. This is a totally different class from the striving and generally hardworking and patriotic black middle and working class. And this I know very well, as a veteran, and through residence in a working-to-middle-class Texas suburb; a fellow military veteran once quoted to me something which one of his military comrades had said “There is black and there is white, and then there is just trash.” The comrade was black, and he was quoting his grandmother, a lady of certain years years sufficient to permit a degree of blunt honesty regarding matters racial. There is black, and there is white, and then there is trash.

The elite class appears to believe that anyone of Anglo pallor who points this out must therefore be a racist, especially if in reference to the unsavory, thuggish habits of the black variety of trash.

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History Friday: The Southern Belle Spy

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(An archive post for Friday – I wrote this for the Unusual Historicals website last year.)

She was the very last person in the world whom anyone in Richmond, Virginia, would have suspected of being a spy … well, almost the last person, as her abolitionist sympathies were not a secret. But she was a genteel lady of certain years and a very Southern sense of gentlemanly chivalry ensured that her activities went unsuspected and unhampered all during the Civil War. Elizabeth van Lew, if not a classical Southern belle in the Scarlett O’Hara mode was pious, eccentrically addicted to doing good works, and from a wealthy and well-established old Richmond family. Of course she couldn’t possibly be up to anything more than visiting the captive Union officers held as prisoners of war in a comfortless converted tobacco warehouse, bearing genteel gifts of food, books, clothing and writing materials, or being a regular Lady Bountiful towards the families of Richmond’s freed slaves. Everyone knew of her families’ eccentricities her mother was a Quaker from Philadelphia, don’t-cha-know.

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Walls of Businesses – #2 – “Braaaaack!”

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For Jonathon – another in a continuing series to amuse and delight those who are amused by ornamentation of blank walls.

It’s a fried chicken restaurant in Abilene, Texas, for those who are curious.

Archival Post – Tory Green

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(from my 2010 archives at NCO Brief – a meditation on class, rebellion and independence – which has new relevance in the light of this administration’s efforts to hobble and break the middle class of this country by essentially erasing the border.)

Nononono . . . not the kinda-sorta-conservative political part of that entity formerly known as Great Britain, and usually prefaced with the adjectives ‘hidebound’ and ‘reactionary’ . . . but those citizens of the 13 British colonies distributed along the east coast of the North American continent, two centuries and change ago. Those who disliked the thought of independence, of having their comfortable apple-cart upset, who liked the way of things as they were, and trusted above all that the Crown divinely appointed, of course. They trusted the Crown, of course. They trusted the Crown’s duly selected, and properly credentialed authorities to Know What Is Best for All, most especially what is best for the upstart, uncultured and amateur rabble. Who, being poor, unwashed, uneducated and singularly bereft of connection to as well as the friendship of Important People at Court, as well as their Pet Intellectuals (certified to have had all their shots and been properly neutered and de-clawed) were in desperate need of the guidance of their betters.

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The Rough Beast, Slouching Towards Destination Unknown

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Adrift without a map, we are, in the sea of current events. Especially after this last week, which brought us a ground war in Gaza and the shoot-down of a passenger airliner over Ukraine; both situations a little out of the depth of the past experience of Chicago community organizer, even one who spent his grade school years in Indonesia. Quite a large number of the blogs and commenters that I follow have speculated over the last couple of months at least since last year and have predicted disaster. They know not the day nor the hour, but they have read the various augurs according to their inclinations, suspicions and particular expertise, and gloomily speculate on the odds of various events occurring. There is something bad coming, the air is thick and heavy with signs and portents, never mind the cheery cast that the current administration and its public affairs division attempts to put on it. It’s like a makeup artist, plying the art on a six-months-dead corpse; it’s just not working.

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