"...eventually all empires unravel, no matter how big and prosperous they become. What we are seeing in front of our eyes is what I believe to be unraveling of the American empire. It has just become too big, too cumbersome, special interests have become too vested for the country to go on. The misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan show that American military might has its limits and the Wall street crisis has shown that the economic might of US is at its end. Maybe the steps that you point out delay the end of the empire, but it wont be able to overcome the march of history. Maybe the steps that you point out delay the end of the empire, but it won't be able to overcome the march of history..."

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^ Every time I see a variation on this theme, I want to scream.

All empires do not eventually unravel. Primitive, unable-to-integrate-territories-beyond-their-geographic-core empires have unraveled. (The Mesopotamian empires; Egypt.) Quick-to-rise empires with unsustainable structures have unraveled. (Rome; the Islamic empires; the Mongols.) Empires that over-exploit their natural resources have unraveled. (The Mayans.)

Having none of those faults, China has been an empire for thousands of years. France has been an empire for more than a thousand years. Japan and England have been empires for almost a thousand years, at least. All of them have had their armies and economies destroyed (to a greater extent than we ever have), more than once. All of them have recovered, more than once.

There is no quasi-mystical point in an empire's history at which it can no longer "go on". Enough of this fatalistic self-lacerating.

...

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"Oh, by the way, racial relationships are a lot better in the South than in the North. A near-Northern city like my childhood home, Saint Louis, still contains racial hostility that left me cringing. In Central Florida there's a lot healthier mutual respect between the races"

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I've encountered a not-too-small number of Southerners (on the internet and in real life) who seem compelled to announce that "racial relations are REALLY better in the South than in the North now". Over and over and over again.

This doesn't help you guys. First, because any Northerner who's actually lived in the South can simply counter your anecdotes with anecdotes of his own. Second, because it makes you look desperate.

Also...

Are you genuinely unaware of the irony of placing this complaint --->

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"If the North really wants to pull off a third Reconstruction, their intellectual leaders had better start reconstructing themselves and their cheap, easy stereotypes of what people of the South and small towns are like."

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...next to these two paragraphs --->

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"For decades, the intellectual left - basically Gore Vidal and his imitators - have written off the South. They refused to even believe that a Southerner could not be a racist, could not be anything but an ignorant mill worker or a plantation owner, could not create art, and could not write or read tolerable English.

In reality, this was their admission that they couldn't or didn't want to communicate with the South. They didn't see Southerners as people. They were only good for farmin' the cotton and pickin' the tobacco enjoyed by the sophisticates of the New York Times Review of Books. White Southerners were, in a very censored word, the "n-words" of the North."

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...?

General note 1: Half the South-bashing comments here are just paraphrases of the "---- the South" manifesto that got passed around the internet after the 2004 election. Come on. If you're going to trash your compatriots, at least be original.

General note 2: The posters who are trying to defend the honor of the South here would be more convincing if their comments didn't seem to evince some kind of inferiority complex. ("Who still think that the South is some sort of third world country, desperately in need of New Englanders to come down and show them the light.")

gusanocomemuerto - "Yes, Detroit is in thrall to the unions, and the South is not. Thanks to that, and to incentives (not poor social services or minimum wage laws) the South was able to..." ...compel the rest of the country to reduce wages in order to compete with an entity on which they can't even impose tariffs.

JHRS07 - Interesting. I am aware that the reputation of the Big Three is worse than the reality.

thesoutherner - Feigned nonchalance is also a sign of defensiveness.

"Yes, Detroit is in thrall to the unions, and the South is not. Thanks to that, and to incentives (not poor social services or minimum wage laws) the South was able to..." compell the rest of the country to reduce wages in order to compete with an entity on which they can't even impose tariffs.

Acknowledging the reputation of American manufacturers for (1) producing low quality cars and (2) being un-green doesn't preclude acknowledging that "Southern" labor practices may result in lowered wages throughout the United States.

It doesn't preclude DIPSUTING the second point either, of course.

But I think this comment section would benefit from posters addressing the two points separately.

"What we southerners can't stand, and part of the ways y'all can't come down here and convince us to vote for y'all, is condescendin' attitudes. Y'all ain't not better than us! Y'all is jus' as racist, backwards, anti-labor, anti-immigrant, anti-edumacating..."

..........................................

*cut* paste*

It is, of course, slanderous to portray the South as a place populated exclusively by uneducated racists. But if you want to eradicate such slander, stop whining about it on an internet talk-back page, and start shouting down that small minority of Southerners who have given your part of the country such a reputation in the first place.

Sarcasm is a sign of defensiveness.