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Old May 15th, 2012 #1
Alex Linder
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Default Yankees/Puritans - Cultural-Political Observations

I decided to check it out again, and it was written by Dr. Clyde Wilson and it seems it only said, "Gore prevailed in the power- and plunder-seeking Deep North (Northeast, Upper Midwest, Pacific Coast) and Bush in the regions inhabited by productive and decent Americans."

So that's more about Gore than it is about Bush, and not exactly a Bush praise. I remembered wrong.

A very fun part of this piece says that New England was a barren land and no sane person would stick around and stay there. And none did. Only New England born people eventually stayed in New England, and this reminds me of some writings by Lovecraft where he said that many early New Englanders stuck around as isolated hermits in the wilderness and kept feeding upon their dark Puritan melancholy in loneliness. To imagine the anger, mania, misanthropy, and self-righteousness that kind of living would produce is not possible.


[Turning everything into a freighted moral decision. And if you don't use the same (condiment), you are evil, going to hell, in inexorable need of being done to, adjusted, gooded into shape]
 
Old May 15th, 2012 #2
Alex Linder
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Prateek Sanjay
October 10, 2010 • 8:59 PM

Jake's post reminds me of a really good, decade-old piece in LRC titled The Yankee Problem in America, which I believe was written somebody who also writes for Chronicles. I don't remember who. It was written during the time of Bush vs. Gore election.

It said the same things, but only in more detail. The executive summary is that Yankees never really have compassion or sympathy but only a sense of moral superiority. In the name of this moral superiority, they will destroy the way of living of millions of people for supposedly saving the oppressed, even though they care little for the oppressors and oppressed. It is "immoral", they would always deem, when opposing anything.

Of course, while this amazing, amazing historical perspective was pretty enlightening, I found one problem. The piece was written by an avid Bush supporter, who said that only people of the Yankee world support Gore, while the regions of the humble, hardworking masses support Bush. Actually, now I am not entirely sure if The Yankee Problem In America was written by a Chronicles writer, because Chronicles writers aren't fond of Bush, but the style and similarity was there.


[they don't leave anyone else any room to breathe in. they aren't comfortable in their skin, and thoughtfully share their neurasthenia with human folk via moral crusades against every known pleasure by means up to and certainly includig bloody mass-murderous war]
 
Old May 15th, 2012 #3
Alex Linder
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Yankee/Puritan qualities:

intelligent, dedicated, fanatical, persevering, hard, frugal, well organized

merciless, fanatical, hateful, self-righteous, intolerant (in the correct sense), flat, vicious, hypocritical, hysterical, neurasthenic
 
Old May 15th, 2012 #4
Steven L. Akins
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Alex Linder View Post
Yankee/Puritan qualities:

intelligent, dedicated, fanatical, persevering, hard, frugal, well organized

merciless, fanatical, hateful, self-righteous, intolerant (in the correct sense), flat, vicious, hypocritical, hysterical, neurasthenic
Yankees.....



Actually the guy in Grant Wood's "American Gothic" painting looks an awful lot like Alabama's current governor, Robert Bentley:


Last edited by Steven L. Akins; May 15th, 2012 at 08:42 PM.
 
Old November 28th, 2012 #5
Alex Linder
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[Jethro post in other thread]

Here's how the James Fenimore Cooper illustrated the cultural differences between Southerners and Yankees back in 1821. Harvey Birch could be Greg Johnson:

Quote:"While taking the measure of the American gentlemen, Cooper had the happy sense to introduce Harvey Birch. Harvey possesses all the traits which characterized the Yankee in folklore. He is shrewd, acquisitive and mysterious in his movements. He always travels alone, pack on back. He is thought to be in league with the devil. His superior intelligence, Cooper hints, might mean that his family "had known better fortunes in the land of their nativity," but he arrives on the scene devoid of gentility. He spits tobacco juice into the fireplace, talks straight and bargains hard, even with his "friends" the Whartons. He has "the common manners of the country." In particular, he is characterized by his overt and unabashed love of money. He receives payment for a sale of tobacco in a fetishistic ritual:

Quote:"Harvey's eyes twinkled as he contemplated the reward; and rolling over in his mouth a large quantity of the article in question, coolly stretched forth his hand, into which the dollars fell with a most agreeable sound; but not satisfied with the transient music of their fall, the peddler gave each piece in succession a stepping stone on the ring of the piazza, before he consigned it to the safe keeping of a huge deer-skin purse, which vanished from the sign of the spectators so dexterously, that not one of them could have told about what part of his person it was secreted."

"I am afraid," Mr. Wharton commented sadly, "[Harvey's] love of money is a stronger passion than love of his kin."

...

"Toward the end of the novel he attempts to pay Harvey for his services, but Harvey refuses the money without hesitation. "Does your excellency think," he asks, "that I have exposed my life, and blasted my character, for money?' Mr. Harper expresses amazement. "If not for money," he asks the acquisitive Yankee, "what then?" Harvey terminates the conversation with another question. "What has brought your excellency into the field"?

http://vnnforum.com/showpost.php?p=1...postcount=1507
 
Old November 28th, 2012 #6
Alex Linder
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Neat as Cooper's solution to the problem of American acquisitiveness might seem, his transcendent Yankee represented no real solution to America's social problem. The first commitment of the gentlemen, Cooper suggests, is to the society of gentlemen; the transcendent Yankee like Harvey remains and must remain outside of society. As Harvey's dying father had told him, he must be "a Pilgrim through life. The bruised reed may endure, but it will never rise." ...

The romance by convention begins and ends in the everyday world of organized society. In a certain kind of romance the central figure sets out from society, has his adventure and returns to the everyday world at the end. The adventure is measured against the values of society, seen in relation to them. No matter how far afield the romancer may take his hero, whether he is made to move from Nantucket to the South Seas or from a nineteenth-century customhouse to the Puritan past, the action of romance begins and terminates in the familiar social world where the gentleman has his place. Cooper's various gentlemen, like Mr. Harper, Mr. Wharton and Judge Temple, stand for a kind of social order the romancer could not dispense with. They stand for the fixed values of an older culture with which Cooper and other romancers wished to remain in touch. They stood for Europe and continuity with the past.

In a sense, only the gentlemen believed in society, and only Harvey believed in America. Yet you could not make up a society of Birches and Bumppos, because their very function in fiction was to interpret wilderness to civilization, novelty to tradition. Once removed from their mediating lookout on the periphery of civilization, they become comic boors, a source of comedy. Besides, they are far too acquisitive and predatory, appearances to the contrary, that they end in having no aggressions at all. They seldom marry or make love. They are incapable of reproducing themselves, because they are sexless and sterile.

This, of course, was the ideal, the ideal that a Yankee nation wanted, in fact needed, to believe in - and to convince others to believe in. This was the transcendent Yankee who chased the White Whale of the sea or the White Stallion of the plains - it hardly mattered which - while his alter ego, alas, turned sperm oil into bullion, and rich Indian lands into prosperous real estate holdings, and shipped ice from Walden to the Ganges.

The real Yankee, whose appearance only is given to Harvey Birch, is an unpleasant type: hypocrite, chiseler, fiend. He rarely shows his undisguised face in good company. He is an outcast of sort, an Ishmael, whose grasping hand is turned against everyone. If the transcendent Yankee is kept in the woods or at sea, the real Yankee is kept in the cellar or locked in the woodshed like an idiot kinsmen. He is always apt to break out.

His footfalls haunt the family household like an ancestral ghost. Occasionally he does break out. When he does, the American family is his target of destruction, as Americans were to learn with shocked surprise when they encountered Simon Legree from Vermont. Meanwhile, all ingenuity is devoted to barring the door against his threatened irruptions. He is to the benign, transcendent Yankee what the fire-eater is to the selfless gentleman, the Lawton to the Dunwoodie, the Randolph to the Washington.

Between the transcendent Yankee and his hellish twin lay a whole spectrum of motivation. The transcendent Yankee only seemed to be self interested and acquisitive. Like Harvey Birch, he had to be acquisitive in order to "pass" in American society. He had to remain above suspicion, and to create an air of vraiseblance. The admirable quality about the transcendent Yankee was his real aloofness from the competitive swirl. He believed neither in success or progress. Rather than go up, he preferred to go out, to go back. Like Thoreau at Walden, he cultivated the primitive. By reducing his material needs to a minimum, he could attain a degree of self sufficiency which provided him a fresh perspective on an acquisitive society. He could be as the gentlemen only pretended to be: disinterested.

Harvey, whose virtues remain undisguised, sets the pattern for a familiar type of American hero, the man whose motives are cloaked by a mask of toughness and practicality, the man who seems so much less selfish, so much more generous, than he seems. The real Yankee, the man who values the dollar above everything else, has provided us with our most legendary villains. These are men who do not bother to conceal their depredations behind a front of virtue and genteel honor. Both were types of the Yankee, because they were both defined by their relation to money. Both types fascinated Americans because the problem of acquisitiveness bulked so large in American consciousness. ...

http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=148179&page=80
 
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