'This land was always ours, it was the proud land of our fathers
It belongs to us and them, not to any of the others' (with a reverential bow to Shane MacGowan)
From the Mississippi Delta, “the most Southern place on earth.”
A word from our patron saint: Shane MacGowan, backed by the Pogues.
A Memoir of the Occupation is the story of what happened to the Southern people, black and white, when the Americans came.
It’s not meant to promote a Grand Unifying Theory of man and society or a set of abstractions intended to show much better things will be once we’re in charge, by God!
I don’t have a theory. I humbly suggest, rather, that amid the ruin of the “exceptional nation” the most important duty is to remember. To remember means to dispel the fogs of bullshit; to remember is defiance; to remember means to reclaim yourself and your people from bullshitters of both the “right” and the “left.”
And it means a refusal to countenance the ahistorical gnostic myths America has used to justify its imperial ambitions.
Currently I’m engaged in an ethnogenesis, as it were, of the South and the peoples who combined to “create” (if that’s proper) the Southern people and Southern culture.
And this is the juncture at which I have to shuffle my feet with shame and ask you to humbly consider a subscription. I abandoned a Wall Street-type career, realizing that it was both fairly nasty and that if you’ve seen one private-equity flameout, you’ve seen them all. Right now I’m (very very) happily engaged in the multi-hustle gig economy, which beats the hell out of digging through the details of another bullshit report on consumer prices or the offering memorandum of some Apollo Global Management fiasco. One aspect of Southern culture is an unwillingness to ask for “help” of any sort, but I guess I gotta. I really, really don’t want to paywall anything, but then again I don’t want the county to come haul my belongings away:
So if you’d consider a subscription, then thank you. I’ll look at setting up those buy-me-a-sweet-tea buttons at some point.
Enoch Cade/Vicksburg, Mississippi (occupied)