Dear America: Just Go

Written by a shamed South Carolina

Dear America,

I think we both knew this was coming. Sure, we've had some rough spots in our relationship before.  There was that time we tried to secede in 1832. And 1850. And that time we actually did, and let you know by opening fire. But we haven't been happy for a while. As a matter of fact, we've been trying to get you to do our dirty work and dump us before we had to secede. Couldn't you tell? 

You keep electing Democrats, and "trying to do the right thing" and letting wild-ass progressives like Alan Grayson win in swing districts. And we can't abide by that. You got a Democratic majority in 2006, and we wanted out, so we let the state Treasurer do so much blow that he did 10 months on a distribution charge. You didn't care.

So we started spending more of your money than we were paying in. Letting Californians take up the slack for children enrolled in our failing schools, which we don't fund because the corporate income tax here is zero. You didn't seem to mind; as a matter of fact, you elected more Democrats, who wanted to put more money into our failing schools, because children are our future or some bullshit.

We knew we had to raise our game to get you to leave us. So we had our Governor redefine "hiking the Appalachian trail." Even then, you still stood by us. We knew we had to go to the mattresses. 

One of our jackass Congressmen shout at the President, which we're pretty sure was the tipping point in the Tea Party going from "woooo, we're crazy!" to "wooo, let's spit on John Lewis and call him racist names!"

We let Jim-- you know Jim, he lives in that place on C Street-- go endorse some dude for Senate who takes money from neo-Nazis, and disagrees with the Civil Rights Act, and wants to tell our handicapped veterans that they don't need the Americans With Disabilities Act to protect them, because they can get offices on the first floor. After all, who could have foreseen that Rand Paul was a crazy racist? Well, we did. We knew you'd finally leave us then. 

And still, you stood by us, and waited for us to get our act together. 

Well, we'll show you. We'll take America's Princess Sarah Palin and let her endorse a candidate for governor. And then we'll let it become public that that candidate-- who happens to be Governor Argentina's favorite-- was schtupping Governor Argentina's spokesman before he got fired for a domestic violence charge. We've soiled Sarah Palin, America. We're sorry, but you just weren't paying attention.

What we're saying, America, is go. Just go. We cause too much chaos, and too much pain, and we're holding you back. We don't want somebody to help us, or make us better, we want somebody to hate poor people and black people and the foreigners with. Remember the good times? Like with Strom. But they're so far gone, now.

If Rand Paul wins, Kentucky's coming with us. 

Don't call us, we'll call you.

South Carolina

PS, this is from Stephen Budiansky's book, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War:

A footnote, but a telling one: To white conservative Southerners, the outrage was never the acts they committed, only the effrontery of having those acts held against them. The outrage was never the “manly” inflicting of “well-deserved” punishment on poltroons, only the craven and sniveling whines of the recipients of their wrath. And the outrage was never the violent defense of “honor” by the aristocrat, only the vulgar rabble-rousing by his social inferior. “The only article the North can retain for herself is that white feather which she has won in every skirmish,” declared one Southerner, speaking of the Sumner–Brooks affair. Only a coward would revel in a token of his own defeat.

The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.

If it was incomprehensible to many Northerners, it made perfect sense to those same white Southerners who, on more than one occasion, blamed the “cowardly negroes” for their unmanliness in having permitted themselves to be massacred by bands of armed white men: it only showed, they argued in complete earnest, that black men lacked the Anglo Saxon virtues indispensable to free men who would exercise the lofty privilege of self-government. Any people who allowed their vote to be taken from them at gunpoint didn’t deserve to keep it. (Of course, when African Americans did fight back, the fury of their white assailants knew no bounds.)

One white South Carolinian, of an old aristocratic family, uttered the truth in 1877. From the safety of anonymity, this voice in the wilderness spoke plainly:

The most horrible tales of negro murders that have ever appeared in radical sheets at the North would pale before the relation of incidents known to every white man in the South. The intimidation of the negroes is a stern and awful fact. Yet what do Southerners say about it? It is the bloody shirt, the lying inventions of unscrupulous politicians, the last gasp of carpet-baggery and radical deviltry. So bitterly do Southerners hate to have the truth come out that it is at the risk of his life that any man dares to speak it. When a political crime is committed, they palliate it, smooth over everything, charge the blame on the murdered victims.

A generation later, a few elder statesmen of the South uttered the truth too. “We had to shoot negroes to get relief from the galling tyranny to which we had been subjected,” baldly declared South Carolina’s “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, former governor, current United States senator. He was speaking at a 1909 reunion of the ageing “Red Shirts” and white “rifle club” members who had roamed the state as young men in ’76, sixteen-shooter Winchester rifles at their sides and a couple of huge navy pistols stuck in their belts; assassinating African American legislators and town constables, seizing ballot boxes, firing potshots at field hands as a general warning they’d better behave themselves. “It had been the settled purpose of the leading white men,” Tillman went on, to “teach the negroes a lesson; as it was generally believed that nothing but bloodshed and a good deal of it could answer the purpose of redeeming the state from negro and carpet bag rule.”

Another generation on, in the 1920s, one conservative Southern white historian dared break ranks with the lockstep judgment of his peers, and let a bit more of the truth slip out: the 1876 election that had “redeemed” South Carolina, he wrote, “was little more than a ratification of the seizure of power by the rifle clubs in the previous months.”

Such gasps of truth were as rare in the South as polar bears, and as out of place. So thoroughly did Southern myth-making bury the bald facts, turn the blame on the victims, pass off a terrorist coup d’etat as an affair of honor, a restoration—a “redemption”—of the South by its “natural leaders,” that even today, even after a half century of relentless revision by historians determined to bring out what had been repressed, the truth remains furtive, a sly and scared animal skulking through thickets of deception.

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”