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Sweet Home Alabama

These must be agonizing days for what used to be the Republican Party.  Everything has turned on its head.  

 After the Civil War--everything in this nation has a deep root in the Civil War--it was the Republican Party that represented what the Party of Abraham Lincoln was.  The war was at least as much about the economics of the North and South as it was about slavery, but the Republicans inherited at least the raggedy honor of racial equality.  They screwed it up, of course, because we often manage to do that.  The Democrats were the Old Southerners.  

 Today all that is on its head.  When Martin Luther King and the Kennedys  and Lyndon Johnson managed to ignore our own Northern racism and passed the Civil Rights act--they were all Democrats--the Southerners who continued to represent the profoundly deep attitudes that persisted long after the war, became Republicans:  the other side.  

 Today, the people who have the attitudes of the Old South are not so much Democrats:  they are Southern Republicans.  The racial animosity is strong.  (A Kenyan, is he?)  And since then, we have seen many other races of people become strong and important members of our nation.  It is us against them!

 I do not know how the sexism that is probably older and deeper, even, than the racism that plagues us, but those people have found a home in the Republican Party, too.  "Legitimate rape?"  Declaring a fertilized egg a human being?  It is human (because it isn't a grape or a quail egg, but it isn't a person!  It is what might become a person.)  

 And the religious kooks--Yes!  Kooks!  We always have extremists!--seem to have decided that the Republican Party is a really nice place to settle down and create a Fundamentalist Christian Nation.  Even the Catholic Church, which used to know the difference between itself and those Bible-reciting enthusiasts, has become something like the Fundamentalists.  

 Add in the Conspiracy Theorists who hate government, hate taxes, hate universal medical care, despise Social Security and want guns and a little place up in the panhandle of Idaho, or Missouri or the House of Representatives, and you have a head cheese concoction in the Republican Party that must make Republicans with a longer memory of what they used to stand for cringe.  
*   *   *

To be fair, it is not just the Republican Party.  It is the nation.  Times, they are a'changing.  The economy is changing.  The population is changing.  The whole earth is changing.  The climate is changing.  As an example, think of the fact that Chef Marcus Samuelson is Black, and he is Swedish!  Oh, Lordy, Lordy!  Can we count on nothing?  The Democrats are swept up in what everybody is thinking, too, but the Republicans have become Sweet Home Alabama.  

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