Posted on 07/18/2015 3:27:50 PM PDT by EveningStar
When Americans think about the Confederacy, they often think about Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 classic, Gone With the Wind. Inspired by recent debates over the Confederate flag, I decided to give the book a try. I confess that I did not have high hopes. I expected to be appalled by its politics and racism, and to be bored by the melodrama. (Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes? Really?) About twenty pages, I thought, would be enough. I could not have been more wrong. The book is enthralling, and it casts a spell.
Does it make a plausible argument for continuing to display the Confederate flag? Not even close. But it does raise a host of questions—about winners’ narratives, about honor and humiliation, about memory, about innocence and guilt, about men and women, about what’s taken for granted, about the particularity of human lives, and about parallel worlds. Teeming with life, it offers surprising insights into the Confederacy and the Old South. To be sure, its presentation of slavery is appalling. But at its core, it’s much less about politics than it is about the human heart. On that count, it has a lot to say, not least about how to come to terms with history.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
ping
It is a fantastic book and an excellent movie. It captures a time and a place. That doesn’t mean everything was great about the time or the place.
I'll pass
later
I think every November, Gone With the Wind is broadcast.
Will they black out the Confederate flags and uniforms?
In a scene that still chokes me up, Steiner uses "Dixie" in a minor key, "Taps," "The Old Folks at Home" with a minor key cadence, and finishes with "Taps" as the whole horror unfolds as far as the eyes can see.
"Gone With the Wind" (The Hospital at the Atlanta Rail Yard)
Read “Gone With The Wind” when I was 14 years old. Always one of my favorites!
It’s been a long time since I read the book. But I agree with most of what is written here. It was a fascinating book. It’s not about the way the author thought things should be, but the way they were.
Wow, a liberal picked up a book and discovered something called “reading classics”, something not advocated by liberals in academia today.
What Liberal Dictate does Cass want to twist out of this old story? There must be some new IM-moral of the story that has been overlooked till now.
Gone with the Wind is written by a women from the 20th century. It is not at all meant to be held up to historical accuracy, however it is pretty sharp on conjuring up the time but as far as the plight of the slaves I don’t think she delved into that much. It was more a romance focus.
Faded Glory. Not just an advertising slogan for a retail chain.
Real glory, the romantic appeal of a failed idealism, that believed more in the original intent of the words of the Declaration of Independence and the meaning of the US Constitution as it was then written, than the harsh righteousness of the “reformers” of the early and mid-19th Century.
The revolution that failed, and has been wrongly portrayed ever since. Slavery, as an economic proposition, was already failing, and would have collapsed of its own inadequacies, had there been no Civil War. The decision to tie the right to own slaves to the doctrine of States’ Rights was probably the one inflammatory factor that could not be defused.
He finds feminist themes, brings approving attention to the sex as mild as it is, nearly goes to the fainting couch over the depiction of slaves, and declares that the Confederate flag needs to come down hinting strongly that its display is rooted in racism. But he does show some pity for the people who have reverence for that flag and admits that the reverence can be honorable, which is more than you’ll get from most liberals. I think his main intent here is to tie the flag to a vanquished past.
I thought at this late date that the O'Hara's would have been Catholic. Apparently they were but there was no religion I remember except one quote by Scarlett, "As God is my witness, as God is my witness, they're not going to lick me. I'm going to get through this, and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again."
With no pre-conceptions of the war, I felt a deep empathy for the suffering of the South, not to the point of taking sides as my Yankee heritage includes an ancestor who helped with the underground railroad in Pennsylvania.
I have a little Southern heritage but only one family member I've found so far served in the Civil War. My great grandfather's father-in-law in Illinois was a man of means and purchased a surrogate to fight in the war in his place. It was family lore but it fits. The Irish man who went in his place I sent for his war records, and he died of disease in the swamps of Louisiana. He is buried in the Baton Rouge National Cemetery.
That sacrifice left a huge impression on me. I might not be here if my great grandfather had served. They had another boy a few months after the surrogate's death and named him the surrogate's name, Alonzo, which is not a family name.
That would be my great great uncle; he never married and went to prospect for gold in Alaska. My father met him there during WWII.
Just some impressions and anecdotal happenings rerlated to the war.
Ashley was a fictional prisoner in the infamous Rock Island Confederate prison now known as Arsenal Island and which became the place I worked for many years, going back three generations.
Ultralib Jewish
Thinks dixie hates Jews....is ignorant
Hates white southerners on principle given we stand for all he hates
Three times as many Jews like him as like Levin or Horowitz
There is no cure
Cass’s ancestors were likely making boots or watches in Poland where’s mine were living that era
He cannot understand my perspective nor would he want to
Your explanation was thoughtful and incisive. You must have some familiarity with how Cass and his wife Sam think.
I love the book and movie. It’s a classic.
Spot on my friend. This guy could care less about anything South of the Mason Dixon line.
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