Zell Miller's keynote address to the Republican National Convention, taken with his 1992 keynoter at the Democratic Convention was indeed historic, and should be remembered as the iconic representation of the great realignment in American politics that has taken an entire generation.
In this context, Zell stands like a petrified giant in the the great river of our culture, unmoved while the currents of history pass him by.
For Zell has not changed.
There is no zig and no zag in Zell; he supported the Southerner in 1992, and he supports the Southerner today.
Thus he spans, but does not bridge, the final phase of the Great Re-Alignment of the parties that began when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act, and ended last night when the last Dixiecrat set his last cross alight in the very lair of the Yankee invader.
A former acolyte of Lester Maddox, Miller returned to his roots a few years ago when he nearly lost an election over his tepid support of the Confederate flag. He was, to quote another famous Dixiecrat; nearly 'outniggered', and So Help us God, he will never be outniggered again.
Georgia has been the last refuge of the Dixiecrats; all the other states of the Old Confederacy have either realigned with the modern world, like Florida, or joined the new party of the Plantation owners; the Republicans.
That is what makes this the most important election since 1932; in one sense it will finally resolve the outcome of the Civil War.
Will Missouri join the Progressive Upper Midwest or retreat to its' Southern roots? Will Ohio at last recognize that the party it gave Grant, Taft, Harding, and Garfield no longer exists? Or, in more archaic terms,will it cast its' lot with the industrial North or the agrarian South? It is those industrial workers who will decide this election.
This is a very hopeful election. For the first time, the party lines and the issues are clearly drawn. Our Democratic party has finally, after five generations, been purged of the Dixiecrat racists.
We finally have a chance to build a true progressive coalition to fight what has always been the real enemy; corporate power, unaccountable personal wealth, and the aristocratic elite that has been the enemy of our Democracy since they were called Tories.
The same ones who sold grain at a thousand per cent profit to my own great times seven grandfather, Corporal Samuel Brown, as he sat starving in the snow at Valley Forge.
The slave owners and their Northern cotton merchant allies, the war profiteers, railroad barons, stock speculators, land-grabbers, whiskey traders, yellow journalists, war-mongers, oil monopolists, tobacco executives, race-baiters, water thieves, Indian killers, timber tycoons, HMO penny-pinchers, insurance scammers, agri-business boosters, pharmaceutical CEO's, arbitragers, outsourcers, union-busters, corporate welfare queens, gay-bashers, Jew-haters, bible-thumpers, farm foreclosers, Nixon revisionists, claim jumpers, revivalists, lynch mobbers, hanging judges, blacklisters, apartheid apologists, and all their excreble ilk.
I understand why it is impossible for Zell to leave the Democratic party. It's in his genes, just like it is in mine. I was raised in a Union household, and couldn't face my parents in heaven if I voted Republican.
In the same way, Zell was raised in a Racist household, and so he couldn't face his parents in heaven if he voted Republican.
But at last, that unholy alliance is coming to an end. Hurry up and die, Zell, and leave us our party, purged of your putrid philosophies.