Posted on 07/07/2015 9:28:16 AM PDT by Kaslin
From across my small office I winked at Marse Robert. He winked back -- so his 7-by-6-inch portrait seemed to suggest -- white-bearded, gray-uniformed, arms folded serenely and confidently. When the nation whose future military leaders you trained at West Point mauls and mutilates the cause in which you trusted, serenity comes hard. Only a Robert Edward Lee type can pull it off, a type of which there aren't many, if any. This type exemplifies the workings of love in combination with moral firmness.
It turns out in 2015 that an angry slice of the population has made it an article of faith that nothing too bad can happen to the reputations of Marse Robert and that whole parcel of mangy, long-dead Confederates who deserve (if you take current rhetoric seriously) to burn in Hades.
Boo! Hiss! Fie on 'em! Away with the bloody rag they carried at Gettysburg and Shiloh! Yea, brothers and sisters -- uninspired by that blue-slashed banner, dim-witted, demon-driven Dylann Roof might never have contemplated slaughter and sacrilege at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Plainly, it's all the late Confederacy's fault. They did it! Someone get a piece of rope so the lynching party can begin. Best of all, they're dead, every one of 'em! And it's certainly easier to hang a dead man than a live one.
Calls resound, from right and left, for pulling down statues of Confederate heroes; for attainting them one and all as traitors and hound dogs; for renaming schools (such as my Robert E. Lee Elementary in Corsicana, Texas) and streets and highways and parks disgraced and defaced by their links with the hound dogs.
It's mass, if momentary, insanity: far more to do with feeling virtuous on the inside than with hitting a genuine lick for justice, far less to do with confronting and routing humanity's still-living demons, whose habitat is hell -- not, as is rumored, Charleston, South Carolina.
Not a few of us know these things. Bouts of insanity constantly torment the human race. Lynch parties form at the drop of a hat. Rope, rope -- hang 'em high!
Never mind subtleties -- the Old South's serious conviction, for instance, that the Yankees were out to nationalize, by force, their homegrown brand of racial justice; the North's role in marketing the slaves that later Northerners decided to liberate; the superb valor of Confederate troops outnumbered from the start, fighting on in rags and with empty stomachs; the ungodly cost of the war -- 750,000 lives lost on both sides and economic ruination for the South; post-1865 America's avid desire for a reconciliation based on mutual respect; the reconciliation that Southerners, black and white, more lately have furthered since the doomed and temporizing system of race relations adopted in the 1890s went away.
Such considerations, you might think, should calm post-Charleston ire. Evidently not. First come the tantrums and the laying about with language. Rope, rope -- where's the rope!
History -- the story of humans -- generally turns out to be more complex than humans suppose. We are always in for something new. The staunch Confederate pride that my parents, born in Texas approximately four decades after Appomattox, recalled as part of their early environment, was unsustainable. Taps for the Lost Cause has been sounding for decades. Many of us Southerners, believe it or not, go months without reflection on The War and its aftermath.
Better to meet the newest New South, with its car factories and Asian communities, in a spirit of genuine reconciliation than one of rage over its suddenly controversial symbols. You don't beat people into agreement; you coax them -- if agreement rather than political triumph is the point.
One can't know for sure whether it is or not. We're, as I say, a complicated race -- those carrying the rope, those resisting that particular manner of neck-adornment.
Marse Robert? I gaze with enduring respect upon his grave and dignified face, lined by a deep understanding of life's contradictions. I think he wonders -- he must! -- why now the present loud outcry. Are we not all Americans? Have we not died and cried together so that together we might live?
I was just pondering how the Confederate Flag became such a huge issue so quickly. I suspect the anger was birthed and fed by an agenda. Possibly directed from the White House with so-called "news" media connivance.
No doubt, else it would have been an issue when The Dukes of Hazard aired. Interesting that 150 years after the end of the Civil War that flags and monuments and football mascots supposedly offend people now. It is because "being offended" has been promoted from a minor annoyance to a major grievance so as to sow disharmony throughout the republic.
Democracy is mob rule with a ballot box.
absolutely. There's no doubt about it.
“Democracy is mob rule with a ballot box.”
How I wish people would learn that! True democracy is hell on Earth but people still push the lie that the USA was founded as a democracy. The word was not even used except as a warning against the evils of democracy until World War II. I suspect that less than ten percent of present day citizens of this country have any idea that there is a difference between a Republic and a Democracy.
Sorta like the “rash of black church burnings” hoax that’s being trotted out again.
It gets difficult to bear after the decades. The Rats squeeze every bit of fraud and propaganda out of each minute thing and the GOP sits ans watches...periodically scurrying for cover or occasionally rolling over for a biscuit.
Last time that tale was trotted out, seventy six people were incinerated near Waco. That was the only real church burning and the US government was the culprit.
It didn't. It's a boutique beef cobbled up for consumption in the black "Com-MUNE-a-tee" </off Sheila Jackson Lee>, bloody-shirt politicking and rhetoric ("CRAAAAAA-cka!") specially for the black voter.
Black voters vote in lockstep, rolling off from about 99% straight-ticket Democrat for the least-educated, most-bigoted blacks to about 60% for educated middle-class and professional blacks. However, the "blackest" voters are the least reliable, turning out less than 50% of the time to vote, even in national elections. Therefore the problem is to chum them up and get them to the polls, and the Democrats quietly (white voters don't usually see this stuff, and it is kept away from them, using billboards and personal-influence networks in the black community) demagogue each election, talking about "THEM" (white voters) like they were the new Ku Klux Klan.
The use of the Confederate flag as a bloody shirt dates to 1991 and the appearance in The New York Times of an article by Ray Garganus (a renegade Southern writer, the only kind esteemed or employed at The Slimes) calling for the final and universal disappearance of the Confederate flag. The NAACP has used the issue ever since. Ergo, there is an agenda there, related to Clinton/Democrat politics, of bullyragging Southern whites as the "new NIGRAS" of American society and politics. For further insights, look up online the term "Finkelstein Box".
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