southern discomfort

sorry for the long no post period faithful readers. This weekend was one shopping bonanza after another. The Apple Store came to Salt Lake and my wife had her birthday on Monday. In between long errand runs, I have been working on a paper for Judge McConnell's course on the constitution 1793-1861.

The thesis I have come up with is that all these debates after the first few Congresses were little more than Kabuki theater to protect slavery. It is amazing the lengths to which smart men wasted their brains trying to come up with arguments and rationales for doing something that they belived would preserve their immoral and backwards system. Thousands and thousands of men lost their lives in the Civil War because of this as well.

It seems the U.S. has been placating southerns for quite some time. Our modern version of this is that presidents can't get elected unless they win southern states. Majority leaders in the Senate and House and President Bush all claim former slave states as their homes. How has the south been so sucessful in maintaining its disportionate dominance of the country since the birth of the nation? As big as Florida and Texas are, most of their growth is coming from Middle and South America, and not white flight.

Don't get me wrong, I have been to many parts of the South and have friends from places like Georgia and North Carolina and I like most of it. Heck, my parents in law live in Virginia. Yet I could never see myself living there. And it isn't just the weather that bothers me, no there is some general feeling that I don't belong there, even though I am a red head and from a state that sided with the Confederacy.