Hallway to Nowhere

Tag: The Lost Cause

  • The Glorious Lost Cause: Not Glorious, Just LOST

    The Glorious Lost Cause: Not Glorious, Just LOST

    This is my second blog post on this topic. But I feel it needs to be addressed again and again, LOUDLY, as by as many people as possible. The Glorious Lost Cause needs to be dismantled. The Civil War was NOT glorious, and the South LOST. It was not a war over “states’ rights” but a war stage-managed by the slave owners to protect their right to own and use human-beings as chattel. It was a class and culture war, true. Many of the poor whites, i.e. those not coming directly from plantation families, were fighting on behalf of an ideal that benefitted them little. Fake news was indeed in play during this time, largely spread to inveigle those same poor whites into fighting this war. “States’ Rights”, “The War Of Northern Agression”,  and “the happy slave” were just some of the terms used at the time to cajol people into fighting. But slave-owners in truth placed poor whites on much the same socio-economic place as their African American slaves and saw them as only a little above the beasts they claimed their slaves to be. Cannon fodder, indeed!

    So to all those who decry the recent taking down of Confederate statues and fly the battle flags of the Confederacy, I suggest you do some reading of history before you go proudly embracing the white supremacy of the Neo-Confederates. Find out who your ancestors were and look into their past. Get a DNA test done (gotta have prof of that white blood, right?) I would recommend Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History Of Class In America. After that wake-up call, then read Michael Eric’s Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon To White America.

    To my Anglo-Saxon aquaintances here in Abingdon who love their Confederate Soldier  statue and Confederate Dead section of the cemetary: should you wish to be proud of relics of a war fought not for you nor for your ancestors, go right ahead. But the time has come for these NOT to be in the public eye. The South lost a war it fought for a intolerable ideal. These reminders which glorify that heritage need to be removed and either  publicly destroyed (my hope) or placed into private venues. Like it or not-and I know many of you don’t- the South alongside the rest of America is now multicultural and multiracial. We need to embrace that reality, not cling to some mythical past.

  • Statues, Memory, And Soil

    Statues, Memory, And Soil

    I’ve been reading lately about the heated atmosphere surrounding the removal of statues of Confederate figures in New Orleans. I know those statues and have often used them to give directions to people attempting to get to various places in the French Quarter.  I’ve followed the story of their plight with some interest, as I am from the South and this IS a particularly and peculiarly Southern problem.  The South is dotted with statues, obelisks, plaques, and other monuments to the glorious heroes and fighters of the Lost Cause. Now, mind you, when you grow up in the South, as a young child it can be a LONG TIME before anyone ever tells you THAT THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO LOST THE WAR! I had extraordinary parents who did do and at an early age. I reasonably asked,”Then why are there statues of them everywhere?” My father sighed and replied, “This is the South; that is a difficult question; you’re much too young for hard liquor.”

    Personal history aside, I’ve heard the arguments that we should leave these things up for the sake of history and as some sort of teaching instuments. I find those argument totally and completely spurious. For the sake of history? Like the entire South is going to have a complete bout of amnesia, should the monuments get taken down? The battles of the Civil War and the struggles upon which it was based-that of slavery and man’s oh-so-human urge to trample wholesale on the rights of others based on skincolor-are soaked into the very soil of the Southern states. Southerners, whether there by birth or geographical accident and whatever their race-are confronted with the legacy of the slavery every day, like it or not. I hardly think that the absence of some statues will make us forget. Not when we’ve got neighbors who persist in flying the Confederate flag from their pick-up truck or porch. Not when we’ve got the legacy of Jim Crow lingering in our voting districts, our laws and our attitudes. Not when when we’ve got a resurgence of white supremacists looking back fondly to a society that exists only in fiction and calling it the South. I’m not sorry to see the statues et al. coming down.  As for the “Never forget!” contingent, some of us are busy trying to build a new society, not hark back to the Old Dixie that lives mainly in your beer cans and fevered imagination.