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Endless complaints. |
Posted on 12/31/2004 2:21:30 PM PST by Caipirabob
What's wrong about this photo? Or if you're a true-born Southerner, what's right?
While scanning through some of the up and coming movies in 2005, I ran across this intriguing title; "CSA: Confederate States of America (2005)". It's an "alternate universe" take on what would the country be like had the South won the civil war.
Stars with bars:
Suffice to say anything from Hollywood on this topic is sure to to bring about all sorts of controversial ideas and discussions. I was surprised that they are approaching such subject matter, and I'm more than a little interested.
Some things are better left dead in the past:
For myself, I was more than pleased with the homage paid to General "Stonewall" Jackson in Turner's "Gods and Generals". Like him, I should have like to believe that the South would have been compelled to end slavery out of Christian dignity rather than continue to enslave their brothers of the freedom that belong equally to all men. Obviously it didn't happen that way.
Would I fight for a South that believed in Slavery today? I have to ask first, would I know any better back then? I don't know. I honestly don't know. My pride for my South and my heritage would have most likely doomed me as it did so many others. I won't skirt the issue, in all likelyhood, slavery may have been an afterthought. Had they been the staple of what I considered property, I possibly would have already been past the point of moral struggle on the point and preparing to kill Northern invaders.
Compelling story or KKK wet dream?:
So what do I feel about this? The photo above nearly brings me to tears, as I highly respect Abraham Lincoln. I don't care if they kick me out of the South. Imagine if GW was in prayer over what to do about a seperatist leftist California. That's how I imagine Lincoln. A great man. I wonder sometimes what my family would have been like today. How many more of us would there be? Would we have held onto the property and prosperity that sustained them before the war? Would I have double the amount of family in the area? How many would I have had to cook for last week for Christmas? Would I have needed to make more "Pate De Fois Gras"?
Well, dunno about that either. Depending on what the previous for this movie are like, I may or may not see it. If they portray it as the United Confederacy of the KKK I won't be attending.
This generation of our clan speaks some 5 languages in addition to English, those being of recent immigrants to this nation. All of them are good Americans. I believe the south would have succombed to the same forces that affected the North. Immigration, war, economics and other huma forces that have changed the map of the world since history began.
Whatever. At least in this alternate universe, it's safe for me to believe that we would have grown to be the benevolent and humane South that I know it is in my heart. I can believe that slavery would have died shortly before or after that lost victory. I can believe that Southern gentlemen would have served the world as the model for behavior. In my alternate universe, it's ok that Spock has a beard. It's my alternate universe after all, it can be what I want.
At any rate, I lived up North for many years. Wonderful people and difficult people. I will always sing their praises as a land full of beautiful Italian girls, maple syrup and Birch beer. My uncle ribbed us once before we left on how we were going up North to live "with all the Yankees". Afterwards I always refered to him as royalty. He is, really. He's "King of the Rednecks". I suppose I'm his court jester.
So what do you think of this movie?
Open forum. But you knew that.
As for the rest, I don't like it when people go around sticking washers in parking meters, and I don't like it when they go around offering Declarationist propaganda, justifications and excuses and pretending it's all the uncut historical truth, when the difference amounts to raking kitty litter over 600,000 dead.
So I'm going to say something, for the same reason I said something 25 years ago when I saw a shortchange artist try to snow a young checkout clerk.
If you don't like it, that's really too bad.
When necessary, the men must be filed through the woods and along the river bank. The bridges once secured, and the prisoners loose and over the river, the bridges will be secured and the city destroyed. The men must keep together and well in hand, and once in the city it must be destroyed and Jeff. Davis and cabinet killed.Pioneers will go along with combustible material. The officer must use his discretion about the time of assisting us. Horses and cattle which we do not need immediately must be shot rather than left. Everything on the canal and elsewhere of service to the rebels must be destroyed.
What does gripe me is the uproar that yankees make over the incident, while IGNORING the murder of hundreds and thousands of Confederate men, women and children by union forces.
Double standards - it's the yankee revisionist way.
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
free dixie,sw
One unspoken benefit of a Northern loss in the Civil War is that there almost certainly would have been no Spanish-American War, and likely no U.S. entry into World War I. Without extensive Philippine possessions in the Western Pacific, likely no U.S./Japanese War in the 1940's. (It is almost inconceivable that CSA - without a Pacific coast - would have entered into war with Japan. ) The U.S. and C.S.A. might eye each other warily across the Mason-Dixon line, but neither would be inclined to entry into needless foreign wars.
And, yes, slavery would have ended in the South before 1900, although, perhaps with forced repatriation of the Negro slaves to Africa, which was Lincoln's preferred solution.
or the BRAVE lads of the 54th Mass for that matter.
OR better yet, the Mescaleros! they could teach "osama the crazed" a LOT about guerrilla warfare.
free dixie,sw
btw, did someone forget to administer "x"'s meds????
he/she/it seems a little worse for wear.
free dixie,sw
!!!!!!!!!
Well, I'm certainly glad to hear you say so, because that's what often is transacted here. I just think it's terribly important that people not allow that to happen -- and yet that is what passes for historicity in popular culture, through film and TV storytelling.
Amistad is a case in point: there was a lot there that was historical, and yet the film was speaking to 20th-century moral and ethical values and not to historiographical values. To try to elucidate what I mean, compare Amistad with Ashanti, a box-office flop back in 1979 that told a story about the modern recrudescence of the African slave trade. Peter Ustinov and Omar Sharif put the film together (and brought William Holden briefly out of retirement) because they wanted, laudably, to shine a klieg light on the return of African slavery -- Sharif because he reportedly felt morally impelled to do so because so many of the customers for slave labor were his fellow Arabs, whom he wanted to rally against the trade.
Fictional and arguably less veristic than Amistad in its treatment of slavery, which was based on documentation -- Anthony Hopkins supposedly portrayed John Quincy Adams's pleading before the Supreme Court line for line and word for word, even at the risk that director Spielberg might not be able to help it "go over" cinematically -- Ashanti was nevertheless more valid in this, that the things described and the cause advocated were all on a level playing field. The advocates appeared as advocates and storytellers, not as Straussian false guides cobbling together a confection of opinion management from bits of "usable history", in Farber's telling phrase. "Usable history" belongs with the term "teachable moment" as exhibits for the prosecution garnered from the Delphic vocabulary, at the trial of the Straussians on charges of cynicism and nihilism.
The kind of radical historicism that you espouse can be dangerous though, as it may lead some to deny that there are lasting moral values.
The moral values, in an intellectually free environment, must make their own way through the forum under their own propulsive power. People have to be free to come to wrong conclusions, if they are to be really free. The bet that our ancestors made in launching the American Experiment is that people will get it right in the end, without pedagogues or other Hobbesian keepers. I'm as concerned as you are about the consequences of conduct founded on amoral interests and values, but free people have to come to their moral choices unfettered for their choices really to mean anything; and trusting the people, instructed by ancient sources of moral authority and then loosed on the stage of life, is the essence of the American Experiment.
Why is it "cheesy" to refrain from laying moral judgments against people who operated in a different moral environment? I'm always free to draw conclusions from history and to apply its lessons to the present. I shouldn't like President Bush to be surrounded by a crowd of eunuchs like the one that hovered around the Roman Emperor Arcadius, but so to say doesn't convey that I have reached a firm judgment of the character and institutions of the fifth century and its players.
Likewise, consider the absurdity of using history lessons about factional strife in Constantinople in the time of Justinian to mount a moral attack on someone living today who wears green, because of my modern moral judgment of the equities involved in the political struggle between the Blues and the Greens.
For it is also "morally bankrupt" to argue that some era or cause is beyond question or judgment. If eternal moral values justify condemnation of our era for some reasons, it's hard to see how antebellum America could be permanently excepted from similar censure for its own faults.
Your question answers itself. How can we be judged and found wanting on the question of hyperborean delimitability, if the term hasn't even been defined yet, let alone the issues explored?
The question of chattel slavery in the 19th century represents a more mature state of the argument, in that many of the moral arguments that we might make against it today were well-known in 1860; but a number of moral decisions had not yet been reached, among them the validity of claims of Biblical sanction for slavery such as I posted upthread, here. For contemporaries of the Civil War, this sanction was still valid and operable, though we wouldn't consider it so today. The references and implicit "endorsement" of slavery are still there in the Old Testament, but we now have a settled social judgment (made in innocent men's blood) that we don't countenance slavery among us even on that authority, as a matter of law and custom.
Why? Your sheets missing?
So are you an agent of a Marxist NGO, or just take it upon yourself in "slaying" every cracker you see or think you see?
You check under your bed each morning for Marxists? Since apparently anyone who disagrees with you is one, you must see them everywhere.
Translation: you just can't stand it when someone disagrees with you. If you don't like that then it's really too bad, too.
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