All Eyes On The Microcosm
I did a google search for "wakarusa war" and "arizona immigration," together. No hits (well, that's not true, Wakarusa, IN is talking about the same things as the rest of the internet.) I also tried "bleeding kansas" which got me this unexplored and decontextualized comment but I'm not particularly concerned. The Wakarusa War is often seen by serious historians as a microcosmic harbinger of the US civil war ten years later, and if anyone were drawing a connection to current events, I'd be worried about an analogous future cataclysm. Doesn't seem to be the case.
(odd, though, that it would be a rightist making that lone blog-comment remark, since the comparison isn't flattering to the right)
The history of "Bleeding Kansas" is fascinating. I'll try to summarize here, but really you should go read Jane Smiley's (fictional) The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton for a more vivid understanding. Briefly, Kansas was only dubiously north of the 36-60 Missouri Compromise line that marked the boundary between states that would enter the union as slaveholders and those that could not. In 1854, a states'-rights initiative known as "popular sovereignty" and championed by none other than Stephen Douglas (he of the "Lincoln and..." debates) led to the passage of the Kansas/Nebraska act which allowed those two new states to vote on whether they would be slave or free. Nebraska (which at the time was enormous) was too far north for slavery to be profitable (i.e. neither cotton nor tobacco would grow) but Kansas included cotton-able regions. Kansas was also next-door to slave-holding Missouri, which meant that fugitive slaves would have one more direction to run (at least, this is Wikipedia's theory.)
So, naturally, partisans from both sides attempted to squat as much of Kansas as possible, to tip the vote for or against slavery. Competing constitutions, land claims, capital cities, voter registration lists, and pretty much everything else came to a little bit of shooting and a lot of razing of buildings. History is never kind to slaveholders (nor should it be) but both sides here were looking for a fight, and got one.
Sb1070, in Arizona is not what it looks like. The critical fact that puts the new "stop if brown" law in context is that the three contenders to host the 2012 Republican National Convention are Salt Lake City, Tampa, and Phoenix. The right is divided between a nativist bloc and a globalist bloc, with the globalists in power and the nativists ascendant. A law like this one, widely supported by the (white) nativists, is basically a challenge: if you want to keep control of the GOP, prove us wrong on this bill. The supreme court will almost certainly kill it, Sarah Palin and the Democrats have already made their (diametrically opposed) positions clear, but the Karl Rove/Newt Gingrich wing of the Republican Party is quavering, afraid to dip their toes in the racist sewer. That's the point- they can't go along with this, and because of the convention they can't ignore it. They lose the P.R. war to the nativists, and Palin (or Huckabee, or Crist, or someone like them) gets the endorsement money. End of GOP.
Or, possibly, this is a shot across the bow for the battle for post-global, post-superpower America- the Wakarusa comparison. I'm sure Sarah Palin thinks she can win in 2012, and I can't see how the country would avoid domestic instability if she did... but that's just the thing: she'd lose and everyone knows it. So its not an issue.
A
(odd, though, that it would be a rightist making that lone blog-comment remark, since the comparison isn't flattering to the right)
The history of "Bleeding Kansas" is fascinating. I'll try to summarize here, but really you should go read Jane Smiley's (fictional) The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton for a more vivid understanding. Briefly, Kansas was only dubiously north of the 36-60 Missouri Compromise line that marked the boundary between states that would enter the union as slaveholders and those that could not. In 1854, a states'-rights initiative known as "popular sovereignty" and championed by none other than Stephen Douglas (he of the "Lincoln and..." debates) led to the passage of the Kansas/Nebraska act which allowed those two new states to vote on whether they would be slave or free. Nebraska (which at the time was enormous) was too far north for slavery to be profitable (i.e. neither cotton nor tobacco would grow) but Kansas included cotton-able regions. Kansas was also next-door to slave-holding Missouri, which meant that fugitive slaves would have one more direction to run (at least, this is Wikipedia's theory.)
So, naturally, partisans from both sides attempted to squat as much of Kansas as possible, to tip the vote for or against slavery. Competing constitutions, land claims, capital cities, voter registration lists, and pretty much everything else came to a little bit of shooting and a lot of razing of buildings. History is never kind to slaveholders (nor should it be) but both sides here were looking for a fight, and got one.
Sb1070, in Arizona is not what it looks like. The critical fact that puts the new "stop if brown" law in context is that the three contenders to host the 2012 Republican National Convention are Salt Lake City, Tampa, and Phoenix. The right is divided between a nativist bloc and a globalist bloc, with the globalists in power and the nativists ascendant. A law like this one, widely supported by the (white) nativists, is basically a challenge: if you want to keep control of the GOP, prove us wrong on this bill. The supreme court will almost certainly kill it, Sarah Palin and the Democrats have already made their (diametrically opposed) positions clear, but the Karl Rove/Newt Gingrich wing of the Republican Party is quavering, afraid to dip their toes in the racist sewer. That's the point- they can't go along with this, and because of the convention they can't ignore it. They lose the P.R. war to the nativists, and Palin (or Huckabee, or Crist, or someone like them) gets the endorsement money. End of GOP.
Or, possibly, this is a shot across the bow for the battle for post-global, post-superpower America- the Wakarusa comparison. I'm sure Sarah Palin thinks she can win in 2012, and I can't see how the country would avoid domestic instability if she did... but that's just the thing: she'd lose and everyone knows it. So its not an issue.
A