Jim Webb’s Born Fighting made it to TV tonight on the Smithsonian Channel. Webb traces the history of the Scots Irish in this country. They are the people who settled past the mountains, past where the landed gentry lived. The Scots-Irish were the protestants who came from Ireland and really very little has been written about them as an immigration group.
Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, in the Huffington Post contributed the following that might explain much about our present day politics:
Born Fighting Reveals the Invisible Ink on the Pages of American History
As a Southern Democratic political operative and Scots-Irish hillbilly, I’ve been asked the same question a thousand times in a thousand different ways. In the summer of 2006, the question was condescendingly thrown at me by a sitting U.S. Senator in a luncheon buffet line at a Senate Democratic Caucus retreat. She asked, “How can your people in the South be so ignorant to go against their own economic self-interests and vote Republican?” Huh? I remember thinking that surely, in the name of Jesus, this woman (Senator or not) didn’t call my people “ignorant”.
Since I had been invited to the retreat by Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer, two guys I personally like, I was all cleaned up and on my very best behavior. But candidly, I still had to lock up every brake in my soul to not respond to her question with a bombardment of backwoods, “By God”, profanity. Somewhat to my own surprise, I overcame the urge and answered, “Has it ever crossed your mind that it might not be ignorance, but instead, a more powerful force called culture?”
