Posted on 11/03/2017 6:12:25 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
White House chief of staff John Kelly’s interview Monday night with Laura Ingraham, in which he expressed the mundane and historically straightforward view that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” has produced a spasm of simple-minded and myopic commentary. Our intellectual class, unable to think about the war between North and South in anything but the most reductive terms, has decided not only that Kelly suffers from “nostalgia” about the Confederacy, but that Ken Burns and Shelby Foote should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
Specifically, Kelly has been excoriated for daring to call Robert E. Lee an “honorable man” and expressing the same view of the Civil War put forward in Burns’ enormously popular 1990 Civil War documentary. Up until this week, Burns’ series had been a celebrated work—a restored version of the series aired on PBS just two years ago. But now, at least according to Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, Burns’ masterpiece is a “disaster,” mostly because it relied heavily on interviews with Foote.
Foote is, of course, the author of his own celebrated Civil War masterpiece, a three-volume narrative history of the war, each about a thousand pages long, that stands as a triumph of American history and literature. The trilogy, which began as a contract with Random House to write a short one-volume history to mark the war’s approaching centennial, took Foote 20 years to write.
The volumes, published between 1958 and 1974, were almost immediately hailed as a seminal contribution to American letters. Writing in The New Republic, literary scholar and critic Louis D. Rubin Jr. said Foote’s trilogy “is a model of what military history can be.” The New York Times Book Review called it “a remarkable achievement, prodigiously researched, vigorous, detailed, absorbing.”
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Communists and the Left in general regard any disagreement as wholly unacceptable and all bad and worthy of any and all adjectives and nouns that denote or connote evil.
have Shelby’s work....great work and read
So when will the left start its book burning? First the statues, then the books.
Shelby Foote, the master “Civil War” writer, that penned true masterpieces. Sad commentary in today’s America, populated by hateful, bigoted Black racist people that have no sense nor understanding of the value of AMERICAN history as it actually was. Bravo. & Many Kudos & Praises to you....Shelby Foote!!!
Reading an article like that makes me think of a few months ago, another Freeper mentioned to me that they visited China in the recent past and they went to see places that were either vandalized or completely destroyed during the 1960s Cultural Revolution. The recent antics of people concerning the Confederacy made that Freeper think a lot of what he saw in China on that occasion.
Revisionist journalism - instant shifts according to the way the wind blows. Not anything to be depended upon for any kind of certainty. built on sand that drifts to and fro, not on solid rock.
Jonathan Chait and his ilk are would be iconoclasts, they have a new direction and with the enthusiasm of fresh converts they want to sweep all before them BEFORE any longer term consideration.
I cold listen to Mr. Foote read a phone book. Loved his voice.
Shelby Foote is gone. It would be nice to have had his work recorded in audio with his voice.
“Reading an article like that makes me think of a few months ago, another Freeper mentioned to me that they visited China in the recent past and they went to see places that were either vandalized or completely destroyed during the 1960s Cultural Revolution. The recent antics of people concerning the Confederacy made that Freeper think a lot of what he saw in China on that occasion.”
Exactly right. These totalitarian leftists, who cannot brook any speech, literary work, or thought that does not fit their demented world view, are our version of the Taliban dynamiting 1,700 year old Buddha statues.
If anyone comes demanding “tolerance”, have your self defense plan in order.
For some reason, the audiobook version of Foote's masterpiece three volume narrative did not have the author narrate, but used a guy with a pronounced northern accent instead!
I really wanted to listen to the audiobook during my morning commute with my son (we have listened to some great works over the years like The Illiad, The Odyssey, and more recently Hillbilly Elegy). The grating Yankee voice, however, made that impossible!
Foote is a good read
All communists behave the same....it is a natural consequence of their mental illness
I know an elderly Chinese woman. She was showing me some family photos. I asked if she had any older photos such as wedding photos or photos of her parents. She sadly replied, “No.” They were all confiscated and destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
The vandals are of different races but the same mind set. Sometimes race really doesn’t count all that much; it’s character that counts.
I just watched the Ken Burns documentary for the first time last month.
I have to say that I thought it was as impartial as they come, considering Ken Burns is who he is.
And Foote’s comments were first rate.
OTR trucker wasn’t for me, but it was a heck of a way to see the country.
Yes that will Southern gentlemanly drawl.
There are plenty right here on this forum not one whit different than this nut in question
My homepage lists many of the,
My ancestors were Nazis in gray etc
One even loudly complained all slave owners and their families should have been hanged
They seek virtue signaling approval here
They are quieter than they used to be
But they pimp this southerners were Nazis meme same as the left does
Fresno should zot them with prejudice
Just my two cents
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