Do Republicans Want a Fedual Society?

I remember the William Blake class I took in pursuit of my Master's Degree. I took it for purely nostalgic purposes. As an undergraduate, I did most of my course work in British Literature. So, returning back to the Romantic Era was like going back to my intellectual home.
Well, Blake, at first, was extremely difficult to understand. And the professor assigned this one book, Reflection on a Revolution in France by an Edmund Burke. Reading it was like watching paint dry, and my eyes began to fill with tears of sheer boredom. Besides, I thought, we live in America, why in the Hell are we reading something a British Whig Party member wrote about the French Revolution?
Over the years, as American politics have gotten crazier and dumber, I've come to appreciate that boring book. I've come to see it, the very long letter to a colleague, as the foundation for conservative thought.
Harshly critical of Populist political movements and anti-intellectual in tone, this long letter seemingly, advocates a two-class society: the very rich who Lord over the very poor. And ironically, this long letter has everything to do with modern American conservative thought. There are many allusions to Burke's original philosophical thought. If Republicans accuse Obama of secretly conspiring to turn America into a Socialist society, all we have to do is listen very carefully to John Boehner and conclude that Republicans are secretly conspiring to turn America into a feudal society: a society in which the richest two percent control both wealth and political power.
I don't have to waste time here quoting the grim economic statistics that would support my theory. As a nation, we've been looking at and experiencing this for the past eight years. For people in lower economic classes, the American Dream seems further and further out of reach, even with extensive education. We know, as actually finishing graduate school looms closer and closer, that we will be faced with massive student loan debt, and will have to delay home-ownership, retirement savings, and childbirth for several years, yet. Thus, the birthrate continues to decline, and the average age for first-time mothers keeps rising.
As Republicans continue to cloak their secret agendas in the rhetoric of "small-business" talk, how long will we shut our eyes to their truth. They want a modern-day feudal society, whatever that may look like. I wonder if they'll want to practice Enclosure in a few years?
Reader pick up Burke, and get back to me with your thoughts.

Mississippi is not a real place

Earlier this week, I read something in the Huffington Post about the poorest states in the nation. Not surprisingly, the poorest states were all red states, and mostly Southern. No argument there. The numbers don't lie, and of course, Mississippi is the poorest. It is not the reddest state in the South, the numbers show from the last presidential election that it was more Democratic-leaning than Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. But, like its neighbors, Mississippi does have a Republican governor who is testing the waters for a presidential run in 2012.

I was not offended at any of these things. What angered me the most, what really, really chapped my behind, was the number of times people used "uneducated" to describe the populace of Mississippi. People made these random assumptions that everybody from Mississippi is "uneducated" and "behind the times". A quick Google search would reveal that Mississippi actually has more universities and community colleges than states comparable in size and population. And even the most dilapidated school systems of Mississippi do not have the drop-out rate as high as Wayne County's of Detroit. Yet, nobody calls the populace of Detroit, or any other metropolitan area where the dropout rate is above 50%, "uneducated."

Then, I had this sudden realization: Mississippi is not a real place with real people in the minds of most of Americans. Mississippi is an idea. It is an ideological dumping ground for everything that America doesn't love about itself: homelessness, racism, uneducated masses who slavishly follow the Republican party against their own will, poverty, failing school systems, low-paying jobs that are non-unionized, teenage pregnancy, rises in sexually transmitted diseases and abortion rates among teens, sky-rocketing divorce rates, etc. All of these things are Mississippi's problems. I don't need to waste any space here outlining all of the "good ole' boy" and "cotton-picking" stereotypes about Mississippi that circulate in our national culture. According to Hollywood, there are no paved roads, it is never winter, and nobody has air-conditioning. We all talk lak Hai-leeeeeey Baaaaaaarbour (Whose accent is very questionable. Some people believe he has a coach so that he can appeal to his base. He certainly didn't talk like that at a commencement ceremony I once attended), and the state doesn't extend past the Delta region where white folks are forever night-riding with white sheets over their heads and Black folks are forever sitting on their porches singing the Blues about how miserable white folk done made them.

Mississippi exists as a psychological booster for the rest of the United States. When all else fails, when all looks bleak, when everything looks substandard and subpar, every state in the United States has the privilege of saying, "At least we're not Mississippi."