The news that the great state of Mississippi only now, as result of gentle inquiry by some guy who happened to run across an asterisk on a website, is getting around to putting the final needed postage stamp on their ratification of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution of These United States (you know, the amendment nixing the keeping of humans as slaves as a valid American lifestyle choice, that amendment) is, let's face it, a good story. Even better is the required reminder that Mississippi only got around to an official head nod in the direction of maybe not keeping slaves in 1995, which by any stretch of charity is many, many decades past when such a thing ought to have been done, which in turn should give the youngsters these days a bit of insight into how long conservative white southern folks hold a grudge. If you're of voting age, kids, I've got news for you: At the time of your birth the state of Mississippi had still not gotten around to agreeing to the 13th Amendment. Screw segregation, the civil rights struggle, the Reagan dog-whistles, the fights over park names and certain flags and all the rest of it; Mississippi couldn't fully abide the thought of putting their legislative pens to a final ending of slavery itself until Bill Clinton's second term, an at-that-point sheepish ceremonial footnote wedged between such 1990s cultural milestones as the Tommy Lee-Pamela Anderson wedding and the release of a second Die Hard sequel. And even then, their final work got shoved in a drawer and forgotten, apparently nobody in the state or the country thinking much of it until some fellow, somewhere, saw the asterisk and, alone among us all, mind you, finally asked himself WTF was up with that.
Every time I hear the punditry ponder whether the mostly regional, almost-entirely-rural conservative movement will be able to properly pivot towards a legitimate embrace of Latino voters in the face of widespread base hostility towards the same, or every time I hear a debate over legitimate rape and whether or not the wommenfolks ought to be allowed to take certain pills without the menfolk's permission, and certainly every time I hear Karl Rove or other very important strategist-grifters mutter on about how well maybe the Republicans aren't going to be quite so open to the racist and/or bigoted and/or misogynist and/or anti-science, anti-knowledge, flat earth thickskulls that keep clogging up their primary races like so many sticks in a beaver dam, I'm just going to keep reminding myself that it was only this year, the year 2013, that the good and proper government of Mississippi finally got around to licking the final stamp on the 13th Amendment, and I am going to jot down that new promised declaration of conservative progress on my custom-printed calendar of things that will possibly happen at some point during or after the year 2060-ish or so, and that is if we're being optimistic about it.
None of it bodes well for the future, mind you. As side note to this pithy story, we've currently got Ramesh Ponnuru engaged in the hapless task of educating fellow conservatives about how the Reagan record was maybe not what all of conservatism is damn convinced the Reagan record was, so thoroughly have the movement fictions overtaken the actual Stuff That Happened. By the same token, it's going to be a whole mess of decades and many, many pundit retirements before True and Proper conservatives dare fess up about, say, the bungling nature of the fiscal crackpottery that has been inflicted upon us these last 30 years. And Lord help us'by the time that final last swath of the country figures out that maybe climate change was not, in fact, all just a U.N. sponsored hoax to make us all ride bicycles to our environmentalist reeducation camps, the entire city of Biloxi's going to consist of a half dozen rusted barges floating somewhere in the Gulf, all tied together with a good stout rope.
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