Bookstores


Barbershops. Now they are all unisex beauty parlors, often staffed by immigrant Africans.


White picket fences


Comic books that were actually intended to be funny


When boys could play football in the street without fear or helmets


When a boy could explore the woods alone with a rifle (probably an old .22)


Old Fashioned service stations with 35 cent per gallon gas and air pumps that were free and actually worked


The Southern Methodist Church


I don’t miss it but it was certainly a better time when all young men went into the service instead of just poor men (and women).


A country too honourable to put women in harm’s way


Smokehouses and tobacco curing barns


Huge pots of Brunswick stew cooked and served outdoors


Old-time windup Southern orators in white suits. (My favourite was Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina.)


When abortions were done rarely and quietly and only for rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother.


When county courthouses and state buildings were not armed fortresses excluding citizens

Note: Next week we will resume the series A Short History of the South with an article about Reconstruction.

​Republican party leadership wants to keep the Deep State. After all, they collaborated with the Democrats in creating it and they find it profitable and comfortable. The Modus Operandi of Republican leadership has been for decades the avoidance of facing any difficult issues and making their positions out of advertising campaigns on short-term issues. They have picked out and groomed young congressmen to mouth the accepted PR material to get support and to avoid any real opinions.


It is hard to find any Republican Congressman does any real thinking rather than spouting the party slogans.


Republican leaders’ support for Trump is completely dishonest pretense. They can’t wait to get rid of him and his maverick populist notions and rhetoric and get back to the empty leadership of Jeb Bush.


The Founding Fathers could not have imagined a society with billionaires. In America, a dozen or so billionaires, many of them foreign, can any time call up a President, a bureaucrat, or a Congressperson and usually get what they want.


One of the many let-downs we have received from Trump is his apparent fondness for immigrants from India. We are told that we need these for IT, when many talented Americans experts are unemployed. The immigrants concerned are doubtless very bright—after all they come from a fraction of the top one percent of a huge population. Some already are holding high positions in American society.


My local phone book, the last time there was one, had an entire page of Patels and there seems to be a swarm of them in my area. They seem to own hotels even in small towns. I don’t think these are brilliant IT people. Sorry, but I don’t think this is a good thing. They are not a very attractive people. They seem to lack the potential for cordiality and sense of humour that are common in the West. They are big in internet crime, and even in legitimate companies one quickly tires of barely comprehensible sing-song English.


Why don’t they stay home and help their own struggling people? They have no loyalty to their homeland. Why expect them to have any loyalty to us? In justice, I admit that I have met two outstanding young men who are better than my general criticisms.


Trump is greatly discouraging his supporters with his preoccupation with foreign matters. This is probably caused by the Republican establishment, which is unable to learn anything, by Zionist influence, and by his own showbiz personality. He has not succeeded in any of his noisy foreign ventures - Ukraine and the phony Gaza ceasefire, and now the proposed attack on Venezuela. All these are failures and contrary to the program upon which he was elected.


And Trump is mostly ignoring the domestic situation which is vital to his voters. He is on the road to wrecking his administration. As a friend recently remarked, alas, he is the best we have and remains our only and last hope. His failure may mean there will never appear another populist President. His failure will doom the survival of the United States of America. One is tempted to think that is perhaps a good thing if some better things can be erected out of the rubble.


(“A Short History of the South” will resume in future weeks.)