Frankly, my dear, Spengler doesn't give a damn

A forceful bit of commentary from Mr. Spengler. If you are a Neo-con(federate) it will probably make you very angry. Spengler equates the apologetic formulas used to justify the Confederacy with those used by black liberation theologians such as Barack Obama's minister, Jeremiah Wright. In making his case, he compares the narratives romanticizing the Civil War south in films such Gone with the Wind with the glamorization of drug-related crime in the urban community as evinced in gangsta rap videos and films such as Get Rich or Die Tryin'. Excerpt:

From this great suffering arise two genres of American popular culture, the Gone With the Wind ilk of Civil War epic, and the "Get Rich or Die Tryin'" brand of gangsta tale. Both try to take the edge off the revulsion and placate the dishonored dead by turning them into folk-heroes. That is understandable, but also unfortunate, for America still has a great deal of killing left to do around the world, and might as well get used to it.

"Get Rich or Die Tryin'" would have been a good epitaph for the Confederate dead, who fought for land and slaves, not for "states' rights" or the sanctity of their soil. Slave-owners along with want-to-be slave-owners had it coming. The Union general William Tecumseh Sherman who said after he burned Atlanta, "I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand, I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them."

Given the sad history of racial oppression in the South for a century after the Civil War, the only thing to regret is that Sherman didn't finish the job. I stopped watching the film version of Gone With the Wind after Scarlett O'Hara saved her plantation from the tax-collector. I wanted her to pick cotton until her back broke.

I know, I know... it's a Dixie-thang and I just wouldn't understand.

The biting a few paragraphs down is worthy of Hannibal Lector.

The self-pity of the South pervades American popular culture, from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, to The Band's bathetic song, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". It is best known in the cover version by Joan Baez, an old civil rights campaigner. Such is the pull of identity politics.

After reading the conclusion where he quotes one of the boldest, sanest and most clear-thinking black commentators out there, Bill Cosby, I was fairly convinced that the purpose of the rest of the article was just a two-by-four to get the attention of black racists and white racists alike, since they are all alike if not identical. Cosby is almost the anti-Wright, stressing personal responsibility as the answer to the black crime epidemic, not radical revolutionary ideology. Barack Obama was more apt to get in touch with his inner Cosby a year ago, and by most appraisals, that's what resulted in much of the support he received from moderate voters who are sick of the Jackson/Sharpton "challenger" model (Shelby Steele's word). Maybe the Illinois Senator should be asked what he thinks of Bill Cosby's message now that he's caught between the rock of personal responsibility and the hard place of black victimology.