Sunday, August 18, 2013
Pardon, Sam: A Slight Amendment
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
A Little Rebellion
By Clyde N. Wilson
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.” A lack of rebelliousness among the people would demonstrate “a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . . And what country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?”
Monday, June 13, 2011
Clyde N. Wilson: A Great Southern Patriot
From Chronicles
By Clyde N. Wilson
Well, Old Man, 70 today. Who’d have thought? And still in pretty good condition, considering how little care I have taken of the old carcass. I understand now how the accumulation of minor miseries in aging is mercifully designed to let us down slow and easy till we are ready.
The children are OK. I still haven’t accepted that they are grown and responsible for themselves. However much I long to protect and help them, there is not much I can do now.
And that grandboy is something! Smart, fearless, and a winning personality. Lord, for this blessing I am truly grateful. But Lord, please don’t let that winning personality make him grow up to be a politician. Give him a useful, hands-on vocation. No need to worry. Son-in-law is a good man, another blessing, and will see the boy right.
And my other children OK, too. The young men who, to my surprise, came to study history with me—honest, courageous, Christian, and with a true vocation every one. A completely unexpected and undeserved blessing that has enriched and cheered me beyond measure. Now middle-aged, some of them, believe it or not. Not much more I can do for them either, but will do what I can. Ripples in the water.
The world seems an entirely different place now than when I was a child. Once ubiquitous, there is not a mule, a cotton field, a spittoon, or a lady’s fan left in Carolina. But it is more than that—the slow Southern contentment shared by black and white is gone. The world now is always promiscuously fast and noisy and full of strangers.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Maxims for American Intellectuals
(good for putting down right-wing bigots at cocktail parties or in the classroom)
From Chronicles
By Clyde N. Wilson
Taking off your shoes at the airport is patriotic and makes you safer.
If college athletes fail academically it is obviously society’s fault.
HIV is an unfortunate virus and not caused by human behaviour.
Presidents are good and do what is best for us, except Nixon.
Poverty causes crime and if we eliminate poverty we can eliminate crime.
America has always been a nation of immigrants.
Diversity is a wonderful thing. Everybody should be required to accept it.
Excellence in education and equality in education are the same thing.
We are bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan. We ought to be, and soon will be, doing the same for Iran.
Freedom means that all forms of non-coercive sexual activity are equally acceptable, as is declared in the Constitution.
In our Constitution, the Founding Fathers established for all time that “all men are created equal.”
Our Constitution demands a “wall of separation” between church and state. Churches should never interfere in politics unless it is to support progressive causes.
There is no such thing as race, but some races deserve special advantages.
Crime and social dysfunction in Northern metropolises are caused by slavery in the South that ended a century and a half ago.
Slavery in the South was the greatest atrocity in history except for Hitler’s killing of the Jews.
People oppose Obama only because he is black.
Bigotry is totally unacceptable except anti-Catholicism and anti-Arabism.
Terrorism mostly is to be feared from right-wing bigots.
The volcano eruption in Iceland was caused by rising right-wing extremism.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
It’s True What They Say About Dixie
From Chronicles
By Clyde N. Wilson
Yet the notorious squeak vote on the ObamaCare bill shows that the old reality still exists and that the South is still the core and mainstay of any viable American conservatism. My friend Bill Cawthon has run down the statistics on the House of Representatives vote. Of the four census regions, the South was the only one to vote against the federal takeover of medicine. The South (the Confederacy plus Kentucky and Oklahoma) voted 71 per cent against the bill; the Northeast 75 per cent in favour; the West 61 per cent aye; and the Midwest divided evenly.
Every Southern State voted a majority negative. The no vote included 19 Democrats from the South. If you remove the four sparsely populated Plains States of the western Midwest, the Midwest total moves to a majority in favour of ObamaCare, even allowing for the no-vote of the Southern border State Missouri.
This pattern has held on every major piece of legislation since 1965, even allowing that Southern Congressional districts are designed by federal lawyers and judges to maximise the minority vote. Immigration, balanced budget, public prayer, women in combat—the South has provided the brake on the leftist agenda of federal grasp. Of the 212 nay votes on ObamaCare nearly half (100) came from the South.
A century and a half ago, John C. Calhoun, one of the most prescient observers of the American regime, remarked that the South was the balance wheel of the Union which prevented
the whole from flying apart under the stress of the manias that regularly seized hold of the mainstream. It looks as though that is still true, though our ability to control the machine grows weaker year by year.
Clyde N. Wilson is a contributing editor to Chronicles. A retired professor of history at the University of South Carolina, he is the author of numerous books, including Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew and Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Professor Clyde Wilson's Definition of "A Republican"
A South Carolinian for whom we have great admiration is Clyde N. Wilson. He is a contributing editor to Chronicles, a retired professor of history at the University of South Carolina, an author of many great books, including Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew and Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture, and the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.
Today Professor Wilson published in Chronicles his definition of a Republican. It is a painfully true definition of too many Republicans, particularly many Wilson has probably encountered in the South Carolina General Assembly, as well as in the previous national administration. However, we think there is growing resistance among Republicans and independents to just such "Republicans." Indeed, Professor Wilson's definition will be useful to us in weeding out precisely those Rockefeller-Whitman-Romney-Leatherman Republicans we will always and everywhere oppose.
*That unemployment compensation for laid-off workers is socialism and multibillion-dollar bailouts for banking and stock swindlers is capitalism.
*That killing women and children with high explosives in remote corners of the earth is defending “our way of life.”
*That the purpose of education is to train good workers.
*That immigration is good because it supplies good cheap workers.
*That Earl Warren, Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Colin Powell, and Mitt Romney are great American statesmen.
*That the main reason not to train women for combat is that it is inefficient.
*That the 10th Amendment means that the federal government should tell the States what to do rather than do it itself.
*That criticism of Lincoln is near treason.
*That the President is “Commander-in-Chief” of the country, especially when he is a Republican.
*That freedom is protected by undeclared wars and military tribunals.
*That “right to life” is a good campaign gimmick, but not to be taken seriously.
*That any campaign promise or slogan should gull the saps who are not in the know but is not to be taken seriously.
*That the way to beat the Democrats is to take up whatever they propose and promise to do it better.
Monday, February 1, 2010
Differences
By Clyde N. Wilson
How much better off the American people would be if they could learn the difference between:
I am not holding my breath.investors and speculators
the Constitution ratified by the people of the States and the one promulgated by federal judges
education and training
necessary taxation and an oppressive burden
national defense and foreign interventionism
law enforcement and war
justifiable borrowing and destructive, irresponsible debt
entertainment and moral debasement
celebrity and worth
status and wisdom
status and virtue
affirmative action and equal treatment under the law
a citizen and a non-citizen
a guest and an invader
a “conservative” and a conservative
public life informed by Christianity and politicized churchmen
And especially the American people would profit if they learned not to believe that politics is the realm of doing good. Politics is the realm of vanity, greed, lust, deception, and force.
Monday, March 16, 2009
It Can’t Be Repeated Too Often (Until It Sinks In), Again
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” —Orwell
(Things that are known but which Americans do not acknowledge or discuss.)
Ruby Ridge. Your President George H.W. Bush sent a foreign assassin to murder (from hiding) an American woman standing in the door of her own home holding her baby.
Waco. Your President Clinton sent a military expedition to incinerate children who were unfortunate enough to be in company of adults who had offended the federal police apparatus.
9/11. Your federal government, with a $30 billion intelligence budget, could not prevent a bunch of unarmed felaheen (who should not even have been in the country to begin with) from killing over 3,000 people in our economic capital and destroying part of the military headquarters of our vaunted global empire.
Iraq. Your President Bush Minor lied to justify a failed war of agression. He sent the forces into an unnecessary war with inadequate equipment, despite a multibillion-dollar “defense” budget, and without a viable plan.
Many American citizens, probably in the thousands, have been murdered and otherwise victimised by illegal aliens because of your presidents’ deliberate decision not to enforce the laws, in order to put the interests of foreign politicians and domestic rich people over the welfare of citizens.
The Supreme Court and the federal bench for more than a half-century now have been dominated by evil people, unscrupulous petty tyrants, who have subverted the Constitution and laws, protected criminals from punishment, interfered in countless matters that are none of their business, overturned solemn decisions of the majority, and placed unjust burdens upon the people.
Nobody has ever been reprimanded (as far as I know), much less fired or punished for the above.
Clyde N. Wilson is a contributing editor to Chronicles. A retired professor of history at the University of South Carolina, he is the author of numerous books, including Carolina Cavalier: The Life and Mind of James Johnston Pettigrew and Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture. He is the editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun.