Hard to refute xkcd on Christmas music:
December 19, 2019
Repost – “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
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December 4, 2019
Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam
David Warren on discovering Erasmus as a teenager:
Erasmus makes an adequate hero for the adolescent boy. He was mine, for a time, even more than his friend Thomas More, who was forced on our consciousness in the late ‘sixties by Robert Bolt’s play-cum-movie (A Man for All Seasons). We were all herded from the High School to the Cinema, and rolled home in our yellow schoolbus full of something — youthful idealism — that could then be applied to various dubious causes. There was this Penguin with the title, Utopia. Without reading it, even in this pop translation, we became wise in our conceit, which is to say, conceited little wiseacres. I don’t “look back in anger,” however. That was for the ‘fifties. I look back through a fog of marijuana smoke, from the Age of Hippies.
Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) with Renaissance Pilaster
Hans Holbein (1497-1543) via Wikimedia Commons.Drugs saved us. Had it not been for them, we might have accomplished worse horrors. By the ‘seventies, when a new nadir was being established for Western Civ, another, visibly duller generation was coming along. Ours was the first to be perpetually schooled (I would not say “educated”). I left high school, home and Canada, in the year of grace 1969, now half a century ago; and when I returned to settle in the 1980s, I found my old schoolmates still in college. To be fair, at least some were homemakers by then, or garage mechanics. It was so long ago that this word, “homemakers,” could still be used without feminist “irony,” if you came from a small town.
But the Erasmus who had appealed to me, as teenager, was the author of the Colloquies, and the Praise of Folly (a keepsake from his friendship with More). I imagined him gentle, humorous, wise, yet full of righteous fire. Too, apparently, a bit of a whiner. I was dazzled by his production of the first printed edition of the Greek Testament, and did not yet realize that it was a slapdash performance, rushed to beat the version of Cardinal Ximenes, already set in type but not yet bound — a proof that there is nothing new under the sun.
Erasmus’ obsessive struggle against the reputation of Saint Jerome, whose central rôle in the history of our Vulgate he tried to deny, and whom he presumptuously corrected on innumerable points — himself straying in and out of heresy — ended in repeated embarrassments for him. But to my adolescent mind, he must always be the hero, beating furiously against the hidebound.
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July 9, 2019
“Why can’t America have great trains?”
At the very end of his recent book Romance of the Rails, Randal O’Toole regretfully (he really, genuinely is a train fan) answers the question three ways … none of which bolster the hopes that the United States will go back to great passenger railway service:
First, when we had great trains, they were used mainly by the elite, and that remains true of great trains in other countries today. Before 1910, it is likely that a majority of Americans had never traveled more than 50 miles from home, and most had never been on a train, while many others had taken only one or two train trips in their life. As James Hill observed, “the so-called ‘travelling public’ forms in reality but a small, and the more fortunate class of the community.” If he was prejudiced against passenger trains, as some claim, it may have been for altruistic reasons, as the people who relied on freight trains “direct and indirect, include all. Hence justice requires that railway systems … should be cautious not to favor passenger traffic at the necessary expense of freight payers.” It is neither sensible nor fair fo the government to subsidize transportation catering mainly to the wealthy.
Second, new transportation technologies have replaced trains and streetcars. Planes are faster and less expensive for long distances; cars and buses are more convenient and less expensive for short distances; and there is no midrange distance at which passenger rail has an advantage over both cars and planes.
Third, and just as important, other new technologies, including the moving assembly line, telecommunications and the electrical grid, have reshaped our cities so the urban patterns that once made rail convenient to large numbers (though never a majority) of people have been replaced by patterns in which rail makes no sense for passenger travel.
Although we might want great trains in our fantasy of what the world should be like, the reality is we don’t need trains. Most Americans don’t ride the trains we have, nor would they ride them even if they met some arbitrary devinition of “great.” We love passenger trains, and we will remember them in museums and tourist lines. But if the government stays involved in transportation at all, it should be to prepare for the next revolution in transportation, not to try to reverse the previous one.
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June 2, 2019
Andrew Heaton defends Basil Fawlty John Cleese
In his latest newsletter (subscribe here), Andrew Heaton takes up the cudgels to defend John Cleese against accusations of racism, sexism, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, etc., etc. and suggests that the answer is that he’s “just old”:
First, “Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city anymore.” Well, he’s right. London is geographically English, but other than its physical proximity to Surrey, it’s not English — it’s global. Its last census reports that 36.7% of its denizens are foreign-born. About 45% of the people who live there are White British (Welsh, Irish, English, Scottish). Which is to say, less than half of London is English [a lot less than half — the Welsh, Irish and “porridge wogs” don’t appreciate being called “English”, nearly as much as Canadians don’t like being called “Americans”]. The rest are a mélange of Europeans, non-Europeans, first and second generation immigrants, Klingons, Vulcans, Wookis, and folks from elsewhere in the Commonwealth and/or Narnia.
It’s a global city, like New York. It is richly diverse and cosmopolitan, which is a strength and draw to millions of people who live there. However I will argue that it’s difficult to be ethnically diverse and cosmopolitan while simultaneously being homogeneously English. Mutually exclusive, in fact.
Although to be fair, people aren’t mad at Cleese for observing that London isn’t English, they’re mad because he wishes it were. Cleese appears to prefer Englishness over multiculturalism. (Note the distinction between “culture” and “race.” Following the media storm, he tweeted, “… I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation. Will this will be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them – on someone else’s behalf, naturally.” [Sic.])
My read on the situation is that Cleese is not racist, he’s old. What I mean by that is: life is always in flux, cities are by nature dynamic, society is fluid. People tend to want things to stay static, and they don’t, and that’s irksome for many, particularly as they grow elderly and nostalgic. I question when London was last really “English,” given that it was the imperial capital of half the globe well before he was born, and no doubt had several pockets of Indians and Jamaicans and Vulcans living there by the time he showed up.
All the same, is John Cleese allowed to prefer English over polyglot? Because I think that’s the root heresy at work here: saying that English culture might be superior to some others, and preferring it to them.
New York City is far, far more diverse and multicultural than, say, Portland, Oregon. Portland is so overwhelmingly white that it’s basically a giant bleach commercial with some craft breweries and street buskers thrown in. Ethnicity aside, can Portlanders prefer their cultural homogeneity over the vastly more polyglot city of Houston? So long as people agree that immigration is positive and we should be neighborly and welcoming to newcomers, I’m disinclined to hound people for their personal preferences.
I don’t know whether or not John Cleese meets that threshold. We know that he favored Brexit. I suspect, based on scattershot Cleese musings, that wants a Britain which is open and welcoming to foreigners, but that he would also like them to become polite, uptight, tea-drinking gardeners once they’ve moved there.
I could be wrong. I don’t know the depths of John Cleese’s heart, and whether or not his pro-Brexit stance comes from hatred of distant bureacurats (good) or dislike of foreigners and immigrants (bad). I suspect most of the people shouting at him on Twitter have no idea either.
Which is my main and final point. Maybe a single isolated tweet isn’t sufficient information to psychically intuit whether someone is a bigot or not? We’re all on the same page here: bigotry is bad. Don’t be a racist. Don’t be a homophobe. But if we’re going to champion the idea that the worst non-criminal thing you can be in our culture is a bigot, then we should also be at least a tad reserved about passing out scarlet letters just because there’s a slow news day and we spot a fun Twitter pile-on to get worked up about.
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May 17, 2019
Convincing Children That Airfix Is Still Fun | James May’s Toy Stories | Spark
Spark
Published on 6 Apr 2019James May subjects traditional toys to spectacular, supersize challenges. Children have taken their attention by video games and mobile phones since they became heavily accesible, can they be convinced that outdated Airfix’s models are still fun?
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Content licensed from Plum Pictures to Little Dot Studios. Any queries, please contact us at: owned-enquiries@littledotstudios.com
#toys #Airfix #JamesMay #spark #sparkdocumentary #sciencedocumentary
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January 10, 2019
What Happened to America’s Passenger Trains?! The Truth – from Class to Crap!
American Rail Club
Published on 1 Jul 2017Did America’s once industrious and world-famous passenger rail system fall because of “fair and equal” competition – or did the federal government tax it to death? Did America’s shift from rails to roads come out naturally – or from lobbying from General Motors? We visit two of America’s passenger rail cars from a bygone era to reminisce and then dive into the history and truth behind the decline of America’s passenger railroad system.
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December 19, 2018
Repost – “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute the latest xkcd take on Christmas music:
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November 28, 2018
The bitter economics of North American passenger railways
Earlier this month, I posted an excerpt from The Romance of the Rails, by Randal O’Toole. It’s a book I haven’t yet read, but based on what I’ve heard, his analysis of the state of US and Canadian passenger rail is both savage and accurate — as in, we’re insane to subsidize long-distance or high-speed rail for the wealthy out of the taxes levied on the poor. Recently, Trains columnist Fred Frailey got a chance to chat with O’Toole about his work:
Amtrak Acela passing through Old Saybrook, CT
Photo by Chasesmith via Wikimedia Commons
That was one of the pleasures of reading your book, to discover you are a lover of trains and railroads, and that you marry this with a contrarian way of thinking. Do you take perverse pleasure in that combination? Oh, not at all. To me, it’s really sad. I wish I could support passenger trains, and I do support them as far as riding them and things like that. But I know enough about government subsidies to know that they reduce overall productivity and usually end up taking from the poor and giving to the rich. The people who are riding the Acela are not people in need of government handouts. The people who are riding light rail and things like that are not the poor, by and large.
What is the future of the long-distance trains? The role they fulfill is giving people access to scenery they can’t see in any other way, and really, it ends up being something for the wealthy. I think the Rocky Mountaineer model is the future of long-distance trains, and if you look at the United States, where can we have a Rocky Mountaineer? Certainly, Oakland to Denver, probably Oakland to Los Angeles, and after that, it gets pretty iffy. They would become cruise trains.
You seem almost as uncharitable towards the short-distance passenger trains. Amtrak does its best to deceive people about how well these trains do, for example, counting state subsidies as “passenger revenues,” in order to make itself eligible for more subsidies. I wouldn’t mind short-distance trains if they worked, but the Cascades, the California service, those trains aren’t really doing anything. A lot of money is spent carrying not that many people.
[…]
Statistics of yours that struck me are that public transit paid 90 percent of operating costs in 1964 from fares and just 32 percent today. Why not try to make the rail part of public transit more viable? You don’t address that in your book. You can’t make it more economically viable, simply because buses are so much better in every respect than rails. If you take the rail lines, and pave them over, and turn them into busways, you’ll be able to move more people, faster and cheaper and with far lower maintenance costs. Even if you could make the rails pay for themselves, since the buses are so much cheaper, why would we bother?
You seem most upset at places like Orlando and Dallas and Nashville, where commuter rail or light rail began but so few seem to ride. It this money thrown to the wind? I think so. Why is it that we allowed steam to change to diesel, sailing ships to steam ships — all these different technological evolutions to take place — but when it came to passenger rail, we said, “Halt, we don’t want more technological change.” The answer is threefold. It’s nostalgia. It’s people who are making money from wasting money, such as contactors — crony capitalism. And it’s accidents of history. The accident of history affecting urban rail transit was in 1973. Governor Francis Sargent of Massachusetts asked Congress to let cities substitute capital investments in transit for interstate highway grants. Congress said yes, but you can’t spend that amount of money on new busses. Instead, cities such as Buffalo, Portland, and San Jose built new rail lines with money from cancelled freeways because they are expensive and could use up those federal dollars. That’s what started the light-rail revolution, not because it was cheap, but because it was expensive.
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November 15, 2018
The Romance of the Rails
Randal O’Toole’s new book on North American railways goes straight to my “wish list”. He’s also a long-time fan of railways, but has been forced to admit that attempts to bring back the golden age of rail are wasted effort because railways — especially US and Canadian lines — are built to carry bulk freight efficiently and economically but attempts to also carry large numbers of passengers quickly cannot be successful without building entirely separate (high-speed) lines. This is from the introduction to The Romance of the Rails [PDF]:
Amtrak’s
Eastbound Empire Builder crossing Two Medicine Trestle at East Glacier MT on 20 July 2011.
Photo by Steve Wilson via Wikimedia Commons.
Early in my career, I joined the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) and supported more funding for Amtrak. Later, I realized Amtrak was poorly managed and supported Amtrak reform. More recently, along with NARP founder Anthony Haswell — who is sometimes called the Father of Amtrak — I became completely disillusioned with the idea of government-run trains and have argued for abolishing the heavily subsidized federal passenger rail corporation.
My attitudes toward urban transit have also undergone a transition. In 1972, as an undergraduate student, I wrote a paper for the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group (OSPIRG) advocating low-cost transit improvements in Portland aimed at attracting people out of their automobiles and reducing air pollution. When the director of OSPIRG later became general manager of TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, he implemented some of those improvements, and transit ridership surged. To be honest, I didn’t propose rail transit reform in 1972 simply because I didn’t think there was much chance of that happening. However, I later became more skeptical of rail transit when Portland built an expensive light-rail line, followed by more lines that were even more expensive.
That skepticism has led some people to call me “anti-transit” and “anti-passenger train.” But I’m not. If someone could design a rail system that attracted riders and efficiently moved them from place to place, I’d be the first to endorse it. As this book will show, however, this is no more likely to happen than the freight railroads converting back to steam power. The next technology replacement will not be people trading in their cars for high-speed trains and light rail. Rather, it will be people trading in their human-driven cars for increasingly autonomous cars that drive themselves.
The short answer to the question of why passenger trains and streetcars have been replaced by planes, cars, and buses is that rails are more expensive and less flexible than the alternatives. To understand why, the first 10 chapters of this book will delve deep into the history of rail to show how passenger rail transportation once worked, who it worked for, and what has changed so that it no longer works today. This history demonstrates why statements such as, “High-speed trains have faster downtown-to-downtown times than flying” or “Light rail provides an alternative to congested roads going to work” are not relevant. Chapter 11 discusses the question of why passenger rail seems to work in Europe and Asia but not in North America.
Chapters 12 through 17 will each focus on a different kind of passenger rail, from streetcars to high-speed rail. Finally, Chapter 18 will demonstrate why we love trains, but also why we can’t expect them to do for us what they did in the 19th century.
Passenger rail was once an important part of our history, but today it represents a drag on our economy. I still love passenger trains, but I don’t think other people should have to subsidize my hobby.
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September 24, 2018
Verity Stob on early GUI experiences
“Verity Stob” began writing about technology issues three decades back. She reminisces about some things that have changed and others that are still irritatingly the same:
It’s 30 years since .EXE Magazine carried the first Stob column; this is its
pearlPerl anniversary. Rereading article #1, a spoof self-tester in the Cosmo style, I was struck by how distant the world it invoked seemed. For example:
Your program requires a disk to have been put in the floppy drive, but it hasn’t. What happens next?
The original answers, such as:
e) the program crashes out into DOS, leaving dozens of files open
would now need to be supplemented by
f) what’s ‘the floppy drive’ already, Grandma? And while you’re at it, what is DOS? Part of some sort of DOS and DON’TS list?
I say: sufficient excuse to present some Then and Now comparisons with those primordial days of programming, to show how much things have changed – or not.
1988: Drag-and-drop was a showy-offy but not-quite-satisfactory technology.
My first DnD encounter was by proxy. In about 1985 my then boss, a wise and cynical old Brummie engineer, attended a promotional demo, free wine and nibbles, of an exciting new WIMP technology called GEM. Part of the demo was to demonstrate the use of the on-screen trash icon for deleting files.
According to Graham’s gleeful report, he stuck up his hand at this point. “What happens if you drag the clock into the wastepaper basket?’
The answer turned out to be: the machine crashed hard on its arse, and it needed about 10 minutes embarrassed fiddling to coax it back onto its feet. At which point Graham’s arm went up again. “What happens if you drop the wastepaper basket into the clock?’
Drag-ons ‘n’ drag-offs
GEM may have been primitive, but it was at least consistent.
The point became moot a few months later, when Apple won a look-and-feel lawsuit and banned the GEM trashcan outright.
2018: Not that much has changed. Windows Explorer users: how often has your mouse finger proved insufficiently strong to grasp the file? And you have accidentally dropped the document you wanted into a deep thicket of nested server directories?
Or how about touch interface DnD on a phone, where your skimming pinkie exactly masks from view the dragged thing?
Well then.
However, I do confess admiration for this JavaScript library that aims to make a dragging and dropping accessible to the blind. Can’t fault its ambition.
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August 11, 2018
Second-hand bookshops
An old Theodore Dalrymple article on the disappearing treasures (to some of us, anyway) of the second-hand book trade:
My love of money is so far unrequited, perhaps because I do not love it quite enough, which is to say to the exclusion of all other possible objects of adoration and devotion. Likewise I remain firm in my admiration of those who do not work exclusively or even principally for money; and among the latter must surely be English provincial sellers of second-hand books
Theirs is indeed a dying trade, and entering their shops – now, alas, fewer and fewer – one cannot help but wonder whether it ever truly lived. As long as I can remember, which is now quite a long time, they have been cold with a kind of irredeemable cold, an absence of warmth upon which no paraffin heater, no pre-war single bar electric heater (of the kind favoured by booksellers), no clement weather, can make the slightest impression. When you take a book from a shelf of one of these bookshops you get a puff of cold air in the face, as well as of dust, as if you had opened a mediaeval tomb complete with a curse against grave-robbers. One associates dust with dry heat, but this, at least where English provincial second-hand bookshops is concerned, is a mistake. They contrive to be cold, dusty and damp at the same time.
It is all the more remarkable, then, that in so materialistic an age as our own people can be found who not only spend, but want to spend, and cannot conceive of not spending, their working lives in such conditions, and all for little monetary reward. True, they are more or less protected by their avocation from the seamier and more violent side of modern society; burglars and armed robbers in even the worst areas for crime do not think to break into second-hand bookshops; and the comings and going of governments do not trouble them. Not for them, either, the shadow-boxing of modern party politics, in which one political mountebank sets himself up as the last bastion against the depredations of another, in truth not very dissimilar, mountebank. Rather they concern themselves with the eternal verities of light foxing, cocking, small tears to dust jackets, and the like. The worst that can happen to them is a gentle slide into insolvency as rents rise (all such shops are now found in the unlikeliest places because they can survive only where rents are low) and readers decline – both in number and in discrimination. For my money (of which, incidentally, they have taken a lot down the ages) they are the unsung heroes of our culture.
Their lives are precarious. For example, the other day I went into one such bookshop in the North of England, run by a husband and wife team, and bought for a sum that nowadays no one – no bourgeois that is – would hesitate to lay out for lunch, a slimmish volume published in 1857, that was in almost pristine condition. The lady was almost pathetically grateful: she said that by my single purchase I had paid half her rent for the day. I felt as if I had almost done a good deed.
Image via Google Maps street view
The majority of my own collection has been bought at used book shops, especially Gryphon Books in Port Hope and Willow Books and Books Galore in Port Perry. I haven’t been travelling much outside my immediate local area for the last several years, so Abebooks has been a very useful addition to my virtual book-buying range. I note, with mild sorrow, a few of my other favourite book shops have disappeared: especially the best military used book store in Ontario, Grenadier Books in Port Perry (moved to Montreal after the death of the founder), and the Book Vault in Stratford (the seasonal tourist traffic wasn’t enough to cope with rising rent).
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November 1, 2017
James May’s Top Toys
railwayman2013
Published on 2 Jan 2013I love hornby trains !!!
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September 22, 2017
Fifteen years later
Craig Tomashoff talks to several of the cast and crew of Firefly:
In the Beginning
Minear: I knew this show felt special and important, but I didn’t realize what it was going to be at that early stage. It really wasn’t until we were into the making of it that it hit me. Once the show was cast and the spaceship (Serenity) was built, then it was a different story. It has been a very complicated process up to that point because Fox didn’t like the pilot. They made Joss go back and add some humor. He did what he could without damaging the pilot, but they never really understood what Firefly was and never loved it. This was all happening right before the 2002 upfronts, and the network was trying to decide if it was going to go for another season of their sci-fi show Dark Angel or pick up this Joss Whedon space show. They couldn’t see in their head what an hour of this show would look like and told us they weren’t sure we’d get a pickup. Joss and I said we’d write a first episode over that weekend before the announcements and they said OK. Then we asked ourselves, “Are we crazy? Can we do this in two days?” But we spent two days at Joss’ Mutant Enemy office, where we broke the story and each wrote half of the episode. And by Monday morning, we had written the “Train Job” episode [which was written as the show’s second episode but aired as the pilot Sept. 20, 2002] and the network liked it. And we got picked up.
Berman: Firefly had an incredibly good pilot script, very ahead of its time. I remember it generating a lot of excitement inside the company and we were hopeful it was going to be a brand-new franchise for us. And when it came to casting, Joss was also very forward thinking as he always was. He put together a remarkably intelligent and diverse group.
Getting to Know You
Gina Torres (Zoe Washburne): I was given an outline, but no script, when I auditioned. It was a detailed outline from Joss, and it ran through the big strokes and pieces of scenes that would potentially be in the actual script. I remember thinking, at the very end of reading the outline, though this was a sci-fi show, there were no aliens and no mutants. It was an intriguing take, a sci-fi Western. So I said, “OK, I’ll meet.” Buffy and Angel weren’t a part of my world, but I knew that the guy who created them had had great success. When Joss called me in to read, he said I was just coming in to see producers. Right from the beginning, this show was unlike anything I had experienced. There was no script and one guy auditioning me.
Sean Maher (Simon Tam): The material I was given was the scene from the pilot where Simon explains to the crew what had happened to his sister — the “I am very smart” speech. Given that there wasn’t a script, my first question when I met Joss to audition was, “Can you tell me about the show?” He proceeded to paint this extraordinary picture of this wonderfully unique world he had created. I was sold.
Alan Tudyk (Hoban Washburne): I was doing a play in New York when my agent sent me a description of the pilot. I had a friend who’d done a Buffy episode, and when I asked about Joss and if I should go in for a show of his, the answer was the most emphatic “yes” you could get. I did a test on DVD but then forgot about it. Then, I ended up out in Los Angeles for another audition and was about to come home when my agent said they wanted to test me for this show Firefly. I’d forgotten what it even was at that point, figuring that if my audition DVD wasn’t in the trash it was at least trash adjacent. But a week after I went in, I got the part.
Adam Baldwin (Jayne Cobb): I knew nothing about the show until I auditioned. I loved Westerns and shoot-’em-ups when I was little. I would watch them with my dad, so that was great. I put on a grumbly voice in my audition, kind of like in those old movies, and they let me just go with it in the show.
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September 20, 2017
In the 60s and 70s, “Confederate Chic escaped the modern odium that often had been accorded the Lost Cause revisionism”
Victor Davis Hanson on the era when the progressive left embraced the “Lost Cause” imagery of the South:
Leftists love Johnnie Reb in movies and songs. But statues? Not so much. How exactly did the Left romanticize the Lost Cause Confederacy, and by extension its secession and efforts to preserve slavery? To use a shopworn phrase, “It’s complicated.”
Good Ol’ Rebels
Well before the end of Jim Crow, post-war leftist Hollywood still largely continued its soft mythologies of the Confederate Lost Cause. Perhaps the cinematic romance arose because of the lucrative fumes of earlier Gone with the Wind fantasies, which themselves might’ve come from an understandable desire to play a part in “binding up the nation’s wounds.”
[…]
The supposedly left-wing 1960s and 1970s, in fact, were the heyday of Confederate Chic. True, there were plenty of In the Heat of the Night portraits of the now-familiar racist white Neanderthals, but with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow segregation, the romance of the Old South reappeared, updated and tweaked for the era of counterculture protest.
The contemporary hippie style of long hair, beards and mustaches, resistance to government authority, twangy folk-song strains, and hard-edged metal all fed into the rural, down-home Confederate romance. Notions of slavery, segregation, and secession mysteriously disappeared. Southern attitude was no longer Bull Connor but airbrushed Sixties-era resistance, at least at the superficial level of pop culture.
In Walter Hill’s post-Vietnam The Long Riders (1980), the murderous Jesse James gang morphs into a sort of mix of Lynyrd Skynyrd with Bonnie and Clyde — noble outlaws fighting the grasping northern banks and the railroad companies’ “Pinkerton Men.” David Carradine and his siblings, playing members of the gang, appear like Woodstock rockers, with exaggerated southern accents, long unkempt hair, hippie buckskin, and a don’t-give-a-damn Bay Area resistance attitude.
[…]
The unlikely common denominator that brought together left-wing Sixties popular culture with Confederate cool was a mutual hatred of a supposedly big, square, soulless, and powerful Washington, hated for its insolence in Vietnam and for stifling the individual — as if the poor lost South had been once as defenseless as the Vietnamese in the face of such a godless steamroller, or as if the Carradine clan were like the Allman Brothers with six-shooters.
Southern pop-music angst, hard metal, and crossover country and western channeled southern and Confederate themes, supposedly adding authenticity to mostly mainstream northern suburban American pop. Were rockers from the South popular versions of the 1920s and ’30s Southern Agrarians (“I’ll take my stand”) critics?
Few pop icons (but see Neil Young’s “Southern Man”) dared in the 1980s to suggest that southern chic was somehow blind to the racism of the Confederacy rather than just defiant and anti-government. The Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd (“Sweet Home Alabama”), the Marshall Tucker Band, Charlie Daniels (“The South’s Gonna Do It”), Confederate Railroad (“Summer in Dixie”), and even REM squared the circle of grafting old-style Confederate attitudes with hip counterculture, even if superficially and often nonsensically.
In other words, Confederate Chic escaped the modern odium that often had been accorded the Lost Cause revisionism sweeping the country from 1890 to 1920, in part fueled by rising nativism and renewed commitment to Jim Crow.
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