Uppity Yankee gets up in my redneck grill!

Once you factor out economics, I wonder if the South and Midwest really contribute the most people to the volunteer Army. Are there a lot of people from Texas because they are more patriotic, or because they have lower skills and are poorer. IOW, do elite Southern schools (Vanberbilt, Emory, Baylor, Rice) churn out graduates who go into the military?

Not sure how to do the html, but Larison has a post up about this at his blog. www.amconmag.com/larison

I am from Maine orignally, and in all my years of existence (31 now...) I had never been called a "Yankee" to my face; when I was last fall while living in Georgia, I was surprised to find that I was even mildly offended; I corrected my friend, however: "I, dear sir, am a Red Sock!"

"Obviously history and geography are foreign concepts in Louisiana."

Is that a joke?

Regional prejudice is the new racism.

Who in the San Francisco Bay Area can recall last seeing a military person (I include all defense branches) in uniform save for Fleet Week exposition in October? The men and women, too, are all gone with base closures. I understand the Defense Department had its rationale for closures but by stripping populated areas of all visible signs of a military presence, the military culture has condemned and confined itself to the regions where it makes itself visible. Once we had a military culture in a part of San Francisco which invited and received civilian participation. All gone now. Children living at the very edge of the Presidio have never seen a live soldier in their lives. [ My father as a child watched soldiers marching off to the Philippines at the Lombard St. gate in 1898.] Defense of America in the future is going to be a regional job with a regional officer class. Southern. My region has been dumped. I don't claim to be that in the know about the other regions. And if conscription is brought back, the revolution against it is going to be strongest in the regions where no one has litterally seen a live soldier in decades.

Hirsch misses the main problem with "Southernism": the drag the region has on our national economy. It's way bigger than mere politics.

Since 1865 the southern economy has basically been a gigantic scheme to fleece money from gullible yankees, rather than create any actual real value added.

You see it on the macro level, with northern money going to fund entire developments that somehow get destroyed by "natural disasters" (funny how you always here about towns in AR or MS that get obliterated by tornadoes or floods, but somehow settlements in MN or SD always recover), vast real estate swindles in Florida and the Gulf Coast from the 20s to today, the great WW2 effort to cause major military bases to be established in the South (an obvious subsidy plus enabling the locals to fleece green recruits every year during weekend liberty for six straight decades), the similar Cold War effort to place space program boondoggle money in Houston, Huntsville, Cape Canaveral, etc. Entire populations of towns in Dixie have been regularly implicated in mass insurance rip-off schemes. The two biggest corporate frauds in US history, Enron (HQ Houston, TX) and WorldCom (HQ Clinton, MS), are merely the latest chapters in this sorry tale of an entire region of grifters.

You see it on the micro level, with southern sheriffs flagging northern license plated cars for "speeding", southern juries leading the nation in astronomical "pain and suffering" awards against northern defendants (usually at the suggestion of Dixie-accented trial lawyers), and the tribute that southern-based "civil rights" groups demand of northern companies to avoid lawsuits.

Given that the entire postbellum system of the South is a "grifter economy," I'm surprised that Hirsh didn't flag this first.

Adding to what the Man from K Street said, the Southern states also tend to be parasite states: they take huge amounts of money from the federal government and pay little back in tax dollars. Despite all the complaining in the South about distrust of government, Southerners are always first in line with their hand out for government money, military bases, budget earmarks, and welfare.

By the way, if The Troll from K Street wants to be tongue-in-cheek, he should learn to write.

I shall never visit the South till the natives wear shirts.

the Rice University Unit (cross-town partners: University of Houston, Houston Baptist University, and Texas Southern University)

45 members from four colleges, including a historically black college. I'm betting only a few of these people are the sons and daughters of Southern elites who send their kids to Rice.

Can I have butter on my grits? ;-)

It was great great great Grandpa's fault! When he and those brave Illinois men were charging through the south with Billy Sherman they should have hanged every southerner they caught! (Assuming that they could catch any the way those rebels ran away at the first sight of them.)

Oh no! Father Abraham had other ideas. Bring the south back into the Union and be nice to them! Hah! Look what it got us!

Ok, I'm having too much fun.

Rice is an elite school for academic reasons, not for educating-rich-Southerners reasons. The student body is a national one, and it's very difficult to get into Rice. It isn't the sort of place where guys named Bo get in because their parents were rich folks in Birmingham. Also, the NROTC students there are a pretty elite group, who go off to bigger and better things in the military.

Fight for Rice! Rice fight on! Loyal sons of Rice...

Eleazer Williams:

Extra chromosome....what a bunch of bull...

The funny thing about this criticism of the South, and the attacks by the secular left on this board with respect to social economic and welfare, crime, etc is that implicitly, what you are criticizing, is the large black welfare class that lives in the South as 60% of Black Americans live in the 11 states of the ole confederacy. Where there is a growing black middle class in some Southern cities such as Baton Rouge where I live, New Orleans, for example (which is an hour away from Baton Rouge), is an example of a failed city where before Katrina, 30% of the black population lived in Federal Housing projects, and close to half the cities black population was on some federal assistance. The crime rate in that city is scary, as it is in many ubran areas in not only the South, but North as well. I will contend that secular relativism is the culprit for why this country has the problems it has. While you secular elites can live hedonistic lives without the consequences (live in your gated communities), the poor blacks in this country suffer from the libertine values of free sex, abortion on demand, drugs, moral relativism, etc, all which the secular left are responsible for.

Yet, the "liberal white neo-pagans" in this country can't bring themselves to criticize those aspects of black society (70% of black children born in single-family homes, violence in music and entertainment is seen a a cultural expression) that have caused so many of these problems or the secularist values that you all brought about which caused so many of these problems in the Black community. Before 1960, 75% of black familes were 2 parent households. What has happened since then. The 1960's and the leftist relativistic revolution have caused serious damange to the foundation of this country and it is the type of polices that secularist elites and the libertine society that you all have pushed on the country are largely responsible for the social chaos in this country. But again, it is traditionalist and Christians (Catholics and evangelicals) that get criticized by the likes of Mr. Hirsch. So typical.

Personally, I am one American of Sicilian ancestry that would love to see the South leave. Here in Louisiana, we still have plenty Oil, I would love to charge California and New York City, about $10 a gallon. In the winter, I could drive my SUV as much as can to freeze some of you secular lefties rear ends. Finally, since Canada, like many Northern states, and some Western European countries, seems intent on aborting themselves out of existence and promoting same sex marriage (can't reproduce), perhaps an Islamic state can come up in Canada and maybe in Dearborn, Michigan and spread across the Northern U.S.. Thus, when they impose Shiria law on you Yankees, and begin beheading pagans, secularists, etc, we southerners with our tradition of milatary service and support of second amendment rights will sit back and enjoy the show and not lift a hand to save your sorry butts and dare the Jihadist to invade the South.

Of course, my Catholic conscience is bothering me for writing this, but hey, Purgatory was made for hot headed folks of Sicilian ancestry like me. Still, I did feel good writing what I wrote.

Er...Wiess, it's been a while...

Almost everything Hirsh says about the Scotch-Irishmen of the South is echoed by James Webb. Webb fully agrees that the Scotch-Irish are proud to a fault, obsessed with "honor," and always spoiling for a fight. Webb agrees that thee are the people who've always been the backbone of the U.S. military.

The difference is, Webb is a Southern Scotch-Irishman himself, and he takes everything Hirsh says as a compliment.

Where Hirsh goes absurdly wrong is in supposing that, since Scotch-Irish Southerners are a dominant force in the military, they're ALSO a driving force in foreign policy. That hasn't been true since the Civil War.

Oh, it was true once. It wasn't the Yankees who pushed for the disastrous War of 1812 or the immoral Mexican War- it was the Southern Scotch-Irish. But it's been a mighty long time since Southerners were driving American foreign policy.

Nobody involved in this controversy seems to remember the enormous power wielded by the "solid South" between 1940 and 1968. FDR (the impeccable Yankee) used Southern allegiance to the Democratic Party to buttress his policies, in return for giving them a pass on Jim Crow. Johnson (the Texan) ultimately put a stop to that, at the cost of turning the white South solidly Republican. But in between, the South got far more than its share of military and federal infrastructure spending, and its senators and representatives chaired most of the powerful committees, where they could and did dominate the making of both foreign and domestic policy for nearly 30 years. Between that and the popularization of home air-conditioning, the South got back most of what it lost in the Civil War, including the population, and then some.

Many were Jacobite (mostly Catholic) Highland Scots who were transported by the English after the 1715 and 1745 rebellions. In the light of which, I have always found their enthusiasm for removing the Cherokees to be tragically ironic.

Ironic, perhaps, but hardly surprising. After all, when the Puritans migrated to Massachusetts in the name of religious freedom, they set up a state that denied religious freedom to everyone else.