Southern Discomfort

That the Civil War ended in 1865 is a "factoid" taught in virtually every grade/high school history class since not long after that dark period.   The end of the Confederacy, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Mason-Dixon line, and on and on, are accessories to that central piece of information.  

But how "factual" is it really? 
I think the veil of ignorance about whether substantial racism exists in this country, however thin it was in parts,  has been ripped away to a large extent by the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency, and the reaction of conservative whites and the corporate (read: Koch Brothers) backed "Tea Party".    The sustained hostility towards this president, mostly based on pure lies, can only be attributed to this discordant thread in our nation's fabric.   Indeed, one of the sickest aspects of the last three years and the "tea party" movement is how conservative billionaire puppet masters like the Kochs use those with this affliction like marionettes - a couple of pulls of their emotional strings and they will sing any tune the Kochs and their compatriots and henchmen put in front of them.     

This article in Alternet  describes, in vivid detail,  how the victors of the Civil War - the Northern-state aristocrats - have now been supplanted by a more vicious aristocracy - the Southern-state variety.    These two groups could not be more different in their world views or M.O.s.    The Northern state aristocracy's tendency to live lives that understated their wealth, to subscribe to the concept of "noblesse oblige", and in general, to subscribe to the ideas of human relations put forth in the philosophers of the Enlightenment age, contrasts mightily to that of the Southern brand.    The article describes this brand, having risen to power within the last thirty years or so, as a far more brutish, authoritarian breed of oligarch (and their scions).    Indeed, I would suspect that Nixon's "Southern Strategy", combined with the humiliation of having the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed and signed into law by - gasp! - a Southerner - contributed greatly to this rise.  The term "freedom" means something very different that what I was taught during my formative years - namely, that economic freedom supplanted personal freedom.   This economic freedom, then, also meant the freedom to own people - and you all know what that means, both back in the 1800s and today.   

So maybe the shooting in the Civil War ended that day in 1865 - but the Civil War had been with us since centuries before, and now centuries after, those four years of rifles and blood-soaked battlefields.  I won't divulge more of the article's contents than that.    Read it.