“Keep Asheville weird” has been the unofficial motto for this Western North Carolina city for as long as I can recall. But the once-quaint Blue Ridge town has become wearied. It’s tired and worn out in its progressive predictability.
This is really nothing new to Dixians who have been paying attention.
“Asheville is a tumour on the face of North Carolina.”
“I call it Trasheville.”
“A town full of fudge packers, smelly hippies, and dip shits.”
“Asheville is the western version of the People’s Republic of Chapel Hill.”
These comments came from a social-media post of mine after Asheville “apologized for its role in slavery and voted in favor of providing reparations to its African-American community” this past July. My friend William Estes’ family has been calling home that part of Southern Appalachia since the 1790s and his great-uncle designed the Buncombe County seal.
Below, he explains his theory as to why “The home of Zebulon Vance, Thomas Clingman, Thomas Wolfe, and Richard Weaver has been turned into a free-range lunatic asylum.”
But Asheville has amped up its lunacy, building off last summer’s BLM-Antifa terrorism and its institutional enabling and systemic sponsorship. So on Monday, the city began disassembling the 75-foot obelisk honoring Zebulon B. Vance, who was born in nearby Weaverville. “The process could take from 10 days to a month, [a city spokesperson] said. The contractor will take possession of all the materials, including the blocks.”
You heard that right. Asheville City Council members didn’t vote 6-1 in March to simply remove the statue honoring this NC legislator, US congressman, US senator, and two-time governor of North Carolina that has been a downtown centerpiece since 1897. They’re disassembling it, as in taking it apart granite block by granite block, and giving it to some government-approved grifter.
Other materials the contractor will “take possession of” include the scaffolding, which was erected around the monument in July in order to hold up the “shroud” masking the statue from the sensitive but unseeing eyes of Asheville automatons. A strong wind, however, tore the opaque covering in September and the city never replaced the malevolent mantle.
“We’re all in this together,” parroted a banal borg to the local News 13 TV station. But are we? After all, “temporary site restoration” will will include “a $25,535 landscaping contract to MS Lean Landscaping, an Asheville African American-owned business.” Whipty-do!
That ain’t love or emancipation, and ain’t even Marxist economic theory. It’s what ya call woke mercantilism, but really it’s the same ol’ crony-capitalist looting and grifting the South’s been subjected to by its conquerors since April 1865. Free at last, my ass.
Notice another gem of unity in this article from the Asheville Citizen Times, in which the word “white” is not capitalized, but “Black” is. For good cultural-Marxist measure, “African American” is also used, but never is “European American.” Maybe it’s because this White reporter’s degrees are in political science and anthropology that he so willingly spoon-feeds progressive agitprop to the masses. Creepy.
My mother in-law and William discuss what it’s like to live among the hubristic hegemons and shallow charlatans who’ve invaded much of their ancestral homeland.
Even some Western NC natives, like Oralene Simmons, will sell out home for fame as a “racial justice activist.” Bending like a Bolshevik reed in the globohomo wind, she proclaimed that “with other cities and states taking down monuments and statues, I just felt that we were in line to go that way.” So stunning and brave!
Simmons, “who is Black” (reminded the Citizen Times‘ critical-race-theory correspondent just in case you couldn’t tell by her photo), co-chaired the Asheville-Buncombe County Vance Monument Task Force, which was formed after last spring’s BLM-Antifa riots and the anarcho-tyrants’ attempted “autonomous zone.” Way to fight for the civil rights of property owners and non-leftist residents, Oralene.
Southern-without-apology folks won’t take a knee? Well, we’ll just take their history and try to erase it from memory. Conservatives don’t want to “dismantle racism”? Hell, we’ll dismantle their heroes, denigrate their heritage, and spit on their ancestors. Kumbaya, comrades!
This purge has nothing to do with “a national reckoning on race,” as the corporate media is wont to recite, but everything to do with power. Funny thing is the leftists depend on the civil, governmental, and social systems created by White men for their shakedown.
They rely upon do-gooders white-knighting for their forever-oppressed and always-morphing intersectional minorities. Dare I say this altruism smacks of chivalry, which is an outgrowth of the “whiteness” and tradition the lefties hate so much.
They twist the Gospel that radicals say is borne of white supremacy, yet still use Christianity’s precepts as a means to coerce the clueless and punish dissenters. I say it’s time to turn the tables.
And by that, I don’t mean to abuse faith or roots. But let’s simply take the progressives at their own words.
“Let’s take this as a new time,” babbled the borg. Yes, let’s.
If these pompous presentists are either unwilling or unable to grasp the nuances and complexities of history, and they refuse to live and let live, let them have none of the benevolent benefits of the heritage they so loathe. Like I wrote in 2019, “Ingrates should get nothing.”
Ron Swanson, Vance’s TV character lookalike, handmade a city permit that read, “I can do what I want. -Ron.” Likewise, Vance was an ardent proponent of individual rights and his rallying cry, like that of all Confederates, was “Let us alone!”
For instance, we could pretend to play along with clown world and force the left’s hand by encouraging them to change the name of Asheville and Buncombe County, since both Samuel Ashe and Edward Buncombe were slave owners. Maybe it could come to be known as city “Xe” in county “They/Them.” Then again, those words are comprised of the alphabet of the Latins, an “old dead white men” culture if there ever was one, so maybe Asheville should be a grunt.
One cheeky lawyer admitted the anti-whiteness inconsistency with the city’s moniker, so he proposed keeping “Asheville,” but changing the namesake to that of black tennis legend, Arthur Ashe. You can’t make this stuff up.
Thinking this would help with the retarded rebranding, he even suggested repurposing the Vance Monument into a giant tennis racket. But too this would’ve brought about a few progressive pitfalls.
First, tennis was an invention of the French and was codified by the Brits, both of which are known in post-modern parlance as white colonial oppressors, so that’s a no go. (This reminds me of when some Richmonders were oohing and ahhing over blacktivist ballerinas in their tutus and pointe shoes raising black-power fists while on the vandalized and disgraced Lee Monument there in Virginia’s capital.)
(“How symbolic,” they screeched! Well, what it really symbolizes is legit cultural appropriation. After all, ballet was invented by the Italians and flourished under the French and Russians, all of whom are considered “white folk,” and icky Europeans no less. You bes’ give up tennis and ballet, intersectional allies!)
Second, if Arthur Ashe had really cared about “racial justice,” he would have used his fame to Africanize his name like black militants did during his day. Better peg Asheville “Muhammed-Ali-ville” or “Mumia-Abu-Jamal-boro.” Or better yet, let’s play it super-safe and call it “New Georgia,” in honor of George Floyd, of course. Now we’re talking.
If progressives “wish Western Civilization gone, then it should ALL be gone,” William commented. “They deserve nothing, not even its bones to squat and benefit from. You want a new civilization, build one from scratch. Destroying is easy, building is another thing entirely.”
According to the aforementioned Citizen Times story, “Repurposing the monument was not appropriate, Simmons said, because if it continued to stand, people would continue to reflect on Vance and his views.”
So, who was Vance, and why do the totalitarians want to cancel him so badly? In short, he was an “evil Confederate,” serving as NC’s wartime governor, company commander in the “Rough and Ready Guards,” and as colonel in the 26th NC infantry.
Oh, and did I mention that the Vance family owned slaves? Yep, that guy had “traitor” written all over him.
But what Vance was really a “traitor” to was invasion and coercion, and selling out your kith and kin. He “objected strenuously to the Confederate conscription and impressment of property laws, the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, discrimination against North Carolinians in the appointment and promotion of commissioned officers, and the use of Virginia officers in the state.”
Vance was even a “staunch Unionist” but became a “diehard secessionist when his beloved home state was asked to supply troops to fight against neighboring South Carolina. It was 160 years ago today that he and all the other representatives at the NC Convention voted unanimously to secede from these United States. The date was May 20, 1861.
Post-bellum, Vance “opposed the protective tariff, the internal-revenue system, civil-service reform, and the repeal of the Sherman Silver Act” as a four-time elected US senator, although the “Radical Republicans refused to let him take his seat” during what would’ve been his first term in the early years of Reconstruction and all the disenfranchisement it entailed. “His name is not associated with any constructive legislation.” That’s my favorite kinda fed!
This is why Vance is so despised. His life is a reminder of resistance to centralization. Vance and his fellow Dixians’ cause was “the biggest and most authentic people’s movement in American history,” explains historian Clyde Wilson, and Tar Heels (the lion’s share of my paternal Confederate ancestors) were as central to the struggle as were any other brave and determined Rebs.
Political philosopher Richard Weaver, a native of Western NC and a descendant of the founders of Weaverville (where Vance was born), opined that “all questions resolve themselves ultimately into metaphysical problems.” Indeed, the Southern cultural genocide and its monument destruction isn’t about the rock or the obelisks themselves. It’s about ideas, and Asheville is void of any good ones. It’s about smashing beauty, and Asheville is ugly inside. It’s about elevating emptiness, and Asheville has that in spades.
Professor David Middleton wrote, “Weaver noted, the South — which once had been ‘in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds for its rightness’ but which nonetheless by this same unarticulated instinct for the permanent things had functioned as America’s ‘flywheel’ to check or urge on the country as a whole as it deviated from or approached traditional values.”
So, let the reprobates in Asheville and in other colonized cities littering the South be slaves to self, to the temporary and pedantic. Let them be not transcendent. Not interesting. Not enduring. Not deep. Let them be weary.
But the rebel remnant must be that flywheel again. We are the weird ones, who are “of strange or extraordinary character, odd, fantastic.” We Dixians are in opposition to all that is fashionable. We builders of lasting things have “weird” and God-honoring work to do. Let’s get to it.
Source: Dissident Mama – Keep Asheville wearied, keep the rebel remnant weird