First, I am an American. Second, I am a son of the South, and my pride in that and my forefathers who marched off to Virginia and Tennessee may well be beyond your comprehension, unless you share some of the berserker, dirt proud Scots-Irish dead poor blood that runs in my veins. Some of Sherman's troops burned the Hackney family home near Talledega, with my great-great great grandmother inside. The family legend is that she killed 8 of 16 before they fired the house, firing her great-grandfathers Brown Bess. They never owned a slave, just stubborn dirt farmers who still lived in the chinked log house the original running horse thief built near the Coosa with the gun slits to protect from the Creeks who resented them stealing the land. Think about the percentage of casualties the Soouthern population suffered versus total population. Decimated does not come close to describing it. We were gutted, burned out, starved out, and then robbed by Yankees. In my lifetime, while my wife worked for the Department of Pensions and Security in Alabama, they still paid Civil War pensions to the widows of veterans, in the 70's.
Crackers are poor whites from limited gene pools in rural southern GA and northern FL. They are pasty skinned, fair haired, sometimes mildly retarded due to a linked birth defect with a lack of melanin, the skin darkening pigment. Think of the banjo picker in Deliverance. A numerically inferior army of them won one of the last battles of the Civil War, When the Yankees tried to advance from Jacksonville, FL to Tallahassee, the capital, to capture that last confederate state capital not in Yankee hands. Those cold eyed, quete fierce and fearless crackers scared them so bad near Olustee that they ran all the way back to Jacksonville, and never really "captured" Tallahassee.
We're also kind of Shintoist in the South, and venerate our ancestors and the old ways and times and customs.
Take a look at decorations for valor in the US armed forces since the Spanish American War. Troops from the south have gotten the most, both based on percentage enlisted, AND in total. Now think about the blue painted berserkers you saw behind Mel Gibson, charging armored cavalry on foot, armed in part with farm implements. Same folks, and no, we haven't forgiven the English for those wars yet, either...
