Ivy League Elitism and Enlightenment
My daughter
asked me the other day why anyone would want to go to Yale or Harvard. A girl at her school had announced that she
had been accepted to Yale and so some of my daughter’s classmates proclaimed
they wanted to attend an Ivy League school.
Being born and raised in Prattville Alabama, my 6th grade daughter knows
little of collegiate echelons although her parents certainly have emphasized
education including instruction at a non-state funded private school. I attempted to explain to her that the Ivy
League schools and New England in a broader sense are controlled by elitists
who seek to propagate a higher standard of living literally thru a higher cost
of living (and tuition) with resultant higher salaries. This has resulted in the recent Yankee
migration to the South driving up real estate prices and furthering a continued
Reconstruction in our states as is readily evidenced by the political winds of
change in North Carolina and Virginia where state governments overtaken by
carpetbaggers and scalawags have infringed on the citizens Constitutional
rights and targeted Southern heritage removing Battle flags and Confederate war
memorials. I explained to her that this
can be illustrated by sororities and fraternities which among other functions
serve as business networks and that these organizations (and others such as
Skull and Bones) are particularly strong in Ivy League schools -
https://www.businessinsider.com/yales-wealthiest-secret-societies-2015-12. The saying is the rich get richer and the Ivy
League system is designed to ensure this as much as possible with post graduate
school and hiring preferences/nepotism.
I made the point that while Harvard medical school and John Hopkins are
renowned, UAB and Emory are obviously terrific medical institutions arguably on
a par excepting the aforementioned endowments.
This got me
thinking along a wider scope regarding the economic disadvantages of being a
Southerner today and I read with interest the article “Being Southern in an Age
of Radicalism” by Dr. Clyde Wilson in the recent SCV Camp 1640 “Traveller”
newsletter. “If you are Southern or
interested in the South you are the most deplorable of all the deplorables.
There is no place for you among the enlightened and virtuous people of 21st Century
America. The North or mainstream America
or the Age of Radicalism (has held the) South (as) an economic colony and a
cultural whipping boy since well before the War for Southern
Independence.” He used as an
illustration an “Ivy League savant (who) characterised the present truly
deplorable condition of once wealthy and productive Detroit as “an Alabama
ghetto.” We have now had three generations born and raised in Detroit, but if
there is something wrong, you see, it must be the fault of the South. To invoke
Alabama explains it all.” Yankees are
“diseased in mind and character. They imagine something they call the South
which does not exist. To identify this as the source of evil in an otherwise
pure and shining American society is for them a sign of superior intelligence
and virtue. This defect is present, I fear, in millions of Americans, including
some Southerners. American mainstream
society is devoid of religion and any real culture, as well as of
self-knowledge. It has no self except in
contrast that imaginary evil “other” that is standing in the way of
perfection. John C. Calhoun said that
the South was the balance wheel of the Union. Without the South, America would
go wild and fly apart. In this time when the South has lost almost all power
and influence, is not that exactly what has happened? Is that not why we are in
the “Age of Radicalism”? Southerners are
always being called upon to stop being themselves and become more like other
Americans. What civilized people would
want to keep up with the mainstream America that is sunk in materialism,
intellectual trivia, moral depravity, and that anti-culture called diversity?
Mel Bradford the South “As a vital and long-lasting bond, a corporate identity
assumed by those who have contributed to it.” It is a shared identity of values
and behaviour, perhaps even of personality, and it has lasted a long time and
is much more venerable, humane, and constructive than that artificial and
dubious creation known at the U.S. government.
Count Hermann Keyserling in 1929 said, “When the American nation finds
itself culturally, the hegemony will inevitably pass over to the South. There
alone can there be a question of enduring culture. The region below the Potomac
possesses the type that was truly responsible for America’s greatness in the
past. This is the type of the Southern gentleman, with the corresponding type
of woman. For these are the only types of complete souls that the United States
has yet produced.” “
“Everything
good about the South became American. In the mainstream understanding of
American history, the great Southerners who created and nourished the United
States were “Americans,” that is, they were honorary Yankees. So Washington and Jefferson were put on Mount
Rushmore along with Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to suggest some sort of
American, that is, Yankee tradition. In
fact Washington and Jefferson would have despised Lincoln and Roosevelt as
betrayers of the Founding. It seems now
that the lie is not working so well. It has come home that Washington and
Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were Southern slaveholders, so there is a rising
demand that they be expunged along with Confederates. Since Southern plantation owners were
Presidents for 50 out of the first 72 years of the United States, as were most
other significant leaders, American history must go. New Orleans can no longer
celebrate its greatest hero, a slaveholder. If we are to put under the ban all
slaveholders then we have wiped away all of the earliest and best part of
American history. That, of course, is exactly what is intended. As Dr. Livingston and Dr. McClanahan have
shown, from the beginning the South was America and America was the South. With
good will, the South gave all to build the United States. Southerners all along
thought of the Union as an agreement in good faith for mutual benefit of all
the States. They served it in a spirit of patriotism and honour. From the very
first day the ruling elements of the North considered the Union as a way to make
themselves some easy money. The Revolutionary
War was won in the South by Southerners, although New England historians lied
so industriously that most people see the winning of independence through a New
England lens. In both the colonial and antebellum eras, the South was the
productive part of the American economy, its products in great demand internationally.
And it was the most prosperous as well. The North could not produce anything
that Europe could not make for itself, thus the tariff that forced all American
consumers to guarantee profits to Northern industrialists and a national debt
that did the same for bankers. Remember,
in 1860 Lincoln was rejected by 60% of the American people. But he and his
party got control of the federal machinery and waged a brutal war of conquest
against the Southern people that no one previously could have imagined
possible. Philip Leigh’s SOUTHERN
RECONSTRUCTION and PUNISHED BY POVERTY by Ronald and Donald Kennedy show that
Reconstruction has never ended. We remain a colony of the ruling class of
mainstream America to be impoverished for their benefit and hectored for our
sins.” And the Ivy League elitists
proliferate their progressive enlightenment and the Southern economic
fiefdom.
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