[Note from Steve: This article continues my series of posts about the FSA, the “Fascist States of America.” There are so many now that it will take a while to get through them!]
Call them the antebellum wasteland, the Deep South, Dixie, or part of the FSA, I’ve avoided these three states for good reasons. I was only in New Orleans back in the seventies, not for Mardi Gras but for an academic conference, sent there by my South American universtity. No, I wasn’t in the Peace Corps, but at the time, more so now, these states could have used some help from that illustrious organization because the whole area is like a needy Third World country.
In New Orleans, I took a streetcar probably not named “Desire” to visit Bourbon Street where Dixieland, one of my favorite music genres, was born. Because I went in the afternoon I arrived, I didn’t get a chance to see the nightlife—my talk was early the next morning—but I didn’t want to be in the Big Easy without paying homage to Kid Ory (he played my instrument), Louis Armstrong, B. B. King, and other Dixieland greats.
After hearing about alarming tales from friends who’d visited these states and others in the South during the civil rights movements of the sixties (I didn’t join them because I was busy protesting against LBJ and Nixon’s Vietnam War), I already knew that these states weren’t places I wanted to visit for any length of time, and there’s absolutely nothing that’s happened since to change my mind. They’re worse now, all one huge, stinking armpit of the South. (I’m speaking in generalities, of course. Any place on the planet has some good people, even these states, and some of them might even be white.
All three of these states have treated blacks like second-class citizens ever since that first Civil War. They can’t call them slaves after that, thank God, because Lincoln, ironically the founder of today’s Fascist Party of America aka the Republican Party, freed the slaves but allowed them to still be treated as second-class citizens, a policy that continued by the FPA, especially in the South.
One state, Mississippi, continues its discrimination against blacks started in the antebellum South long before the Civil War. It’s so poor and poorly run by the 20% white minority that the 80% black majority takes more of the brunt of incompentence and poverty on their shoulders than in other southern FSA states. I pity any sane person who has decided to live there—not its white fascist leaders, though, whose incompetence exacerabates situations like the recent flooding. You can bet those leaders have drinking water and can flush their toilets. And they dare to blame the federal government for their plight!
Centuries of racism are like lead blankets suffocating blacks in Mississippi. No surprise that still exists in the FSA. Racism is all too often an integral part of fascism, just another tool mostly white fascists are quick to use, especially when they’re in the minority like in Mississippi. If there are Asians, Hispanics, Muslims, and other groups fascists love to hate in these states, God help them! They can all fit under that broad racist umbrella of the FPA.
These three states also have some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the US, so strict that doctors and other medical professionals are afraid to peform an abortion even when it’s medically indicated. A recent case in Louisiana is evidence for that. A pregnant black woman in Louisiana (what a double whaammy, being a black female in the FSA!) was told her unborn child wouldn’t be viable, but no one would do the abortion! That’s about as absurd as the Ohio eleven-year-old who had to go to Indiana so she wouldn’t have to give birth to her rapist’s child! These victims of the white, far-right, SBC and Catholic fanatics (the latter group including too many SCOTUS judges as legislative accomplices, I might add) don’t want women to have any rights, especially in these three states in the FSA.
These states are so backward that most sane people just try to ignore them because it’s too embarrassing that they’re even in the US. Their governors are incompetent hacks, to say the least. Fascist governors and legislatures usually don’t reflect the will of their states’ populations because many of the people are blacks trapped in the FSA’s hell. You can bet their votes won’t be counted in 2022 and 2024; their leaders will make sure of that!
I’ve seen the old fascist hag who’s governor of Alabama and the beady-eyed bigot who incompetently runs Mississippi in the news more often than I like. God knows why CNN etc. think they’re providing “the other side’s view” by inviting these fascists to appear, because they’re all MAGA minions, of course, who hang on to Il Duce’s diapers and try to explain the atrocious shit that comes from both ends of their fearless leader. And I don’t even know who the governor of Louisiana is, and I don’t care. These states had nothing going for them back in the nineteenth century, and that’s now become a tradition that’s carried over to the twenty-first. They’re ignorable because the FSA represents insanity.
Is there anything positive I can say about these states? Not much! I suspect all the sane people there will flee the sinking ship called the FSA if there’s another civil war fought to quarantine their insanity this time. I can state I like some Cajun food and love Dixieland music, though. That’s positive, isn’t it?