Check 'em out. Great stuff.
Special mention goes to the cretinous Dan Riehl, who is apparently trying to snatch the coveted title of Dumbest Motherfucker On The Face Of The Planet away from Doug Feith. Riehl actually posited that George "Felix Macacawitz" Allen said "neighbor", contrary to a detractor's alleagation that he said "nigger", even after several college teammates had already come forth with similar allegations, including the infamous deer head stuffed into the mailbox of a family of, um, "neighbors".
If I were working up a parody of one of these guys, something like this seriously would not have occurred to me, it would have been too outlandish. And either I never saw that crazy-ass post when it first went up, or I'd forgotten it in the intervening months of escalating stupidity.
So thanks, The Editors, for bringing that little gem back to light. It's a great reminder, not only of the quality of rhetorical minds we're dealing with across the aisle, but also the ugly fact that only the narrowest majority of Virginians decided they were uncomfortable with someone so oafishly stupid as Felix Macacawitz. The guy looked into a video camera and lobbed an obscure racial slur that took about three seconds to trace back to his mother. That's a special brand of stupid, topped only by Riehl's inventive explanation of other allegations.
All you can say to these goofballs is neighbor please.
Dan's a compassionate dude, too.
ReplyDeleteAnd I apologize on behalf of my fellow Virginians, probably the same ones who damn near elected Ollie North back in '94. With the D.C. suburbs encroaching their way down the rest of the state, though, hopefully future elections will start trending leftward. Right now, my little Jeffersonian college town is holding the line against the Deliverance yokels from the southern part of the state until those reinforcements arrive.
No kidding either - a friend of mine who grew up in the southwestern corner, where it meets Kentucky and Tennessee, said he remembers little podunk towns with signs like Welcome to Skunklick Gultch with a little scrawled addendum underneath - Niggers Don't Let The Sun Set On Your Ass.
And yet, somehow Virginians often look down on West Virginians, who split from us to join the Union, as inbred yahoos. Go figure.
Jesus, I remember that. He projected his hostility and embarrassment so clearly, and then had the gall to jump everyone else over it, all while trying to cloak it in "humor".
ReplyDeleteHe didn't seem to get that no one really gave much of a shit if he told "pillow-biter" jokes or whatever, but that his behavior was driving the debate, that the issues of his brother dying in a flophouse, broke and alone, told the tale.
Riehl's problem is not that he's a weak writer, but that he's an incoherent and clueless thinker. He may actually be stupider than Jonah Goldberg, and that's saying something.
As for Virginia, I can only view it with an outsider's perspective, obviously. The state has a lot to be proud of -- it served to nurture some of our finest statesmen. But I think what southerners may not realize is how perplexing it is to the rest of us that their peculiar brand of yahooism is still so prevalent. They're still fighting the war they lost 150 years ago, except they fight it with ridiculous traitor flags and electoral choices borne of pure spite.
The Union was far too gracious in victory; they should have razed every fucking monument to animals like Nathan Bedford Forrest the second they were erected. This nonsense should have been stopped and marginalized a century ago; instead, we still have these doofuses infesting national politics, because they just can't get over themselves.
But hey, as with Ollie North, at least the right guy won this time around, however close the margin. I think you're right about the growth of the DC suburbs helping drive the state back toward the center, and helping to put the mossback vote back out on the fringe, where it belongs.
Oh, shit, you should take a trip through Lexington, home to V.M.I. and Stonewall Jackson. Statues everywhere, rebel flags flying. Most of the bumper stickers read "Heritage, Not Hate" which is just fucking stupid. Why celebrate a heritage unless you're specifically proud of it?
ReplyDeleteThough I did see a more honest sentiment on a truck in Lynchburg - "The Surgeon General Has Declared That Sickle-Cell Anemia Is Caused By Licking Food Stamps." And then I saw a guy I used to work with sporting a shirt from Dixie Outfitters that read "Jesus and the Confederate Battle Flag - Banned From Our Schools But Forever In Our Hearts".
That's the thing that surprises a lot of people about the whole neo-Confederate movement - many of the "intellectuals" of the movement list godlessness as the worst thing that the Yanks visited upon them in the War of Nawthun Aggression. Even more than keeping the uppity darkies in their place, making sure everyone is properly Gawd-fearin' is what they're most concerned about. Talibangelicals, indeed.
This was also a memorably sorry assed explanation for Felix' "slipup".
ReplyDeleteLenin:
ReplyDeleteThey sound like lovely people. We do have a few crackers even here in rural Northern CA. I recall one from a few years ago, beat-up piece-of-shit pickup, bumper sticker saying "If I knew then what I know now, I'd have picked my own cotton."
Not quite on par with the sickle-cell/food-stamp smackdown you describe, but still pretty bad.
Ron:
ReplyDeleteThat's a pretty good catch. I note also how Parker dismissively brushes off how Allen "was mean to his siblings in 1958". According to his sister Jennifer's book from several years ago, Felix put one brother through a plate-glass window, and broke another's jaw, and dangled Jennifer herself over the railing when the family was visiting Niagara Falls.
Perhaps Jennifer's allegations haven't (or can't) be corroborated well enough to stand up in a court of law, but that's no reason to breezily dismiss what jibed with other behavioral patterns from Felix' misspent youth.
Felix himself almost seemed to put himself forth in the wake of these substantive allegations as a sort of reformed sociopath. His defenders in the punditocracy preferred the more reliable tactic of downplaying the severity of the events in question, or questioning the legitimacy of Felix' accusers. Sure. Everyone's lying except Felix. Whatever. You can't really get into it with such people, since they make it so clear right upfront that any intellectual honesty on their part is entirely coincidental.
Forgot to throw these in the mix, as well, some recent examples of confederate revisionism, mostly from Joseph Sobran. Truly reprehensible stuff, couched in just enough intemellectual-sounding froth to give it the veneer of seriousness.
ReplyDeleteIf I'm in a good enough mood otherwise, I can almost find humor in watching the neo-Confederates desperately try to find one sliver of Southern life that had nothing to do with race, and explain all their nostalgic reveries by virtue of it.
ReplyDeleteThe war had nothing to do with slavery, it was about state's rights and Southern independence! And why were they trying to become independent? What was the big irreconcilable difference? Oh, yeah, right...
It was about preserving a rural Southern way of life, in contrast to those industrialized Northern businessmen! Yeah, it's easy to appreciate the rural life if you've got a whole shitload of other people to do the backbreaking labor for you.
Slaves were expensive! They wouldn't have mistreated them being that they cost so much to bring here! And furthermore, only the wealthiest fraction of Southerners could even afford to own slaves!
Then why didn't those astute businessmen just enslave the poor white crackers down the road and save a ton of money? Oh, yeah, the race thing again...
And I suppose the century of Jim Crow that followed was done purely to teach them meddlin' Yanks to mind their own business, not because
they had any prejudice towards their little dark brothers and sisters. Heaven forfend! It was heartbreaking to have to treat them that way, but you gotta stand up for your principles...
But judging by the fallacious arguments they put forth, they must hate straw as much as if not more than blacks, given how many strawmen they assemble and destroy. No history book I've read since maybe elementary school makes it seem like a simple question of Northern altruism vs. Southern evil. None of them pass over Lincoln's attitudes towards race that would make him look like David Duke today, and none of them pass over his infringements on civil liberties. It's like Jon Schwarz said recently re:Michelle Malkin/Holocaust denial - people like this just relentlessly pick at anything and everything, hoping to find one mistake or misleading item that they can then trumpet to the skies as proof that the whole thing is a fraud.