The Fried Chickenization of American culture
(How America’s politics, culture and intellect has sunk into a Southern swamp of mediocrity and mendacity)
By David Gottfried
I submit that the decay of American democracy has been instigated by the Southernization of America.
The North won the Civil War, but not long after the war, the North felt guilty for winning:
A) In 1876, Reconstruction, the post civil war program to civilize the South and liberate blacks, was unceremoniously ditched, Northern troops were withdrawn and the malignant KKK and Jim Crow ruled the roost.
B) In 1907, Henry James, who is considered one of America’s most gifted and erudite writers, a Boston Brahmin through and through, betrayed his Yankee origins by writing the most noxious things about blacks and Jews in “The American Scene.” In this perverse 800-page travelogue (He spent the last twenty years of his life in England, but after a visit to America he wrote this book) he said that in a railroad station in Virginia he saw a slovenly, poorly dressed black man, was filled with revulsion toward his lower-class mannerisms, and wonders why on earth we fought to free such sub-human rubbish. He also tells us that in New York, he heard Jews speaking Yiddish, and wonders why and how they have the gall to utter their strange and dirty syllables in public. (This reminds me that my uncle expressed embarrassment at hearing Yiddish spoken on the NYC subways, but he was a prime example of what psychologists and sociologists call “internalization,” or the victim’s belief that his oppressor’s prejudices were valid.)
C) Some psychiatrists in the United States opined, in the 1920’s, that epilepsy was more common among blacks because of the end of slavery, which they said, as only haughty, horrible shrinks can, had provided blacks with security, discipline and order.
However, in the middle third of the Twentieth Century, or from the time the Great Depression made Americans realize the pitfalls of rule by the rich and reactionary, until the late 60’s, when Americans forgot what they had learned in the Great Depression, Southern gumption receded. FDR’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, was a strong supporter of civil rights, and after FDR’s 1936 re-election, when he won every state but Maine and Vermont, Republicans realized that they had to move to the center. World War Two taught Americans that the logical conclusion of racism was gas chambers. Finally, both Democrats and Republicans began, slowly and grudgingly, to recognize that it was time to finish what Lincoln had begun.
However, only four years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Richard Nixon, in his 1968 race for the presidency, campaigned on a Southern strategy. He decided that he could take Southern states away from the democrats by making racist noises. He won.
Soon we were swamped in a southernness that was all-enveloping.
Once the Republican party had intelligent, moderate and liberal luminaries such as Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, John Lindsay, Charles Goodell, Percy, Schweitzer, and it has been so long I can’t remember too many other names. Today it has men like Mitch McConnel and everyone in the party seems to be a clone of Mitch Mc Connell, or loons far to the right of Mitch, men so arrogant and morally empty that they remind me Scarlett Ohara’s Father, in “Gone with the Wind,” proudly announcing that he has invested his money in Confederate bonds.
Culturally, the Southernizing of America is evident in the bleach-blond, Texan mental vacuity that seems to pervade our nation. I think it started when Martha Mitchell, the wife of Nixon’s attorney general, said that Julia Child, who had a French Cooking Show on public television, ought to stop cooking fancy French food and learn to make Southern Fried Chicken.
Most of all the Southernization of America is exemplified by the intellectual degradation of the nation. Compare the speeches of FDR, JFK and Adlai Stevenson with the toddler-like gibberish of George Bush and the hysterical outbursts of fat, manifestly psychotic Donald Trump.
The South was beholden to a caste system, and this led, ineluctably, to a persecutorial legal system which is becoming the norm in America. There were, in the Southern world, four classes of people: The first class consisted of rich, white people drunk on delusions of defiant Dixie. The second class was the poor white trash. The third class was the “house niggers,” or black people who worked in the master’s home, cooked, were butlers and took care of the children. And the lowliest class was the “field niggers” who worked the land. I don’t want to offend people by using the n word, but to understand history we should not prettify it.
Obviously, when some people are deemed worthy of adoration, and others are fit for lynching, the legal system is quite a wicked thing to behold. I don’t think most people realize the extent to which the Law delighted in instilling misery and injustice. Let me give you a very short lesson on a legal rule known as the “negative pregnant,” which exemplifies legal tyranny. This was invented in Medieval England and lived on in this country well into the 19th or even 20th century. This is how the rule operated:
A) Plaintiff said that Defendant owes him 100 dollars.
B) Defendant says that he does not owe Plaintiff 100 dollars.
C) The Court would rule for Plaintiff, in the sum of 99 dollars and 99 cents because Defendant’s statement, that he did now owe 100 dollars, was “pregnant with the implicit admission” that he owed all lessor sums of money.
By means of the negative pregnant, millions of poor people, for hundreds of years, in England and America, lost everything they owned and were thrown into the poorhouse.
(Incidentally, this is the historical cause of the wretched verbosity of lawyers. We are terrified of legal traps. And so we write pleadings that sound like that old song “100 bottles of bear on the wall,” in which we note that first there were 100 bottles of beer, and then 99 and so on.)
Dixie is so backward that until recently the state of South Carolina endorsed a sort of deed, created in ancient England, that the Brits got rid of about two hundred years ago, the “fee tail male.” This provided that one’s land had to be inherited by one’s son, and one’s son had to pass the land on to his son, and so on until, as bible-belting preachers put it, “lo unto the fourth generation.”
Dixie Justice became American justice. In one State, not too long ago, a man was sentenced to thirty years in prison for stealing video games from K mart; this was his third stab at petty theft, and he was subject to some cockeyed “three strikes” law. In New York, when poor people are accused of minor offenses, the arresting officer often isn’t present at the time of the hearing so the case is adjourned, and the prosecution often successfully adjourns these cases dozens of times until the poor Defendant is fired from his job because he has had to take off so many days to go to Court. In New York, if you are accused of murder, and you have no money, the state will of course hire a public defender. That public defender is allotted a grand total of two hundred dollars to hire a private investigator to determine who might have committed the murder and to acquit his client. Twenty years ago, private investigators in New York would, for a fee of one hundred dollars, conduct “directory research,” or look through the phone book. One cannot possibly plausibly argue that poor criminal defendants are afforded equal protection of the laws. New York in many ways has a legal system that would give George Wallace and Lester Maddox warm, fuzzy feelings. And New York is considered a citadel of American liberalism.
Indeed, Trump’s lawyers have posited and praised a form of government perfectly devoid of freedom. Trump’s counsel said that Trump could not be indicted, while in office, even if he were to realize his wettest dream and start killing people on Fifth Avenue. And that execrable excuse for a lawyer, Mr. Dershowitz, said that anything the President did to get reelected is fine and dandy, and wholly legal, so long as it is, in his doubtlessly impartial judgment, in the public interest.
In Dixie America, we understand that the law is meant to exonerate the king, whether he sits on a throne in London or masquerades as the President of a dying Republic in Washington.