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TRIPLE COWARDICE

A kind friend telephoned me last night to say, "Quick! Turn on Fox right now! There's the topic for your next column." Happily for me, I don't have television, so she described the scenario: Professor Jonathan Farley of Vanderbiltwas ranting about the Confederacy, those who fought for it, and those who still honor them. He was saying something to the effect that all those Confederates should be shot.

Memo to the Ivory Tower: most Confederates already did get shot. Didn't they teach you anything in school?

The average Johnnie Reb was poor, and didn't own slaves, and even if the Confederacy had won the war, he was going to remain poor and slaveless. What he fought for was not riches and control of other human beings; he was fighting for his homeland and way of life. It may be that some aspects of that way of life were wrong, but nonetheless he was fighting for pretty much the same reasons Americans have always fought. And he did so brilliantly, against overwhelming odds, in the face of incredible privation and hardship, never surrendering until he was completely beaten. I would like to point out to the professor that whether a man was fighting for Mr. Lincoln or to save his plantation, it took equal courage, because when the bullet, shell fragment, or bayonet found him he was going to be just as dead whatever the color of his uniform. The Rebels were fighting for America too, and if the professor cannot recognize the honor which is due them, that's because he cannot understand honor -- or America, for that matter.

There is something especially cheap about this kind of display from academics. These are people who didn't graduate and then move out into the real world; they've never really left school, just moved to the other end of the classroom, staying close to mommy's apron strings. Once they have tenure, they are set for life however shoddy their work. In academia they are insulated from the give and take of political debate, since the academic world is so uniformly leftist. No annoying conservative thought will spoil the atmosphere, because free speech is not allowed on campus. It takes no kind of integrity or backbone to be a leftist professor; today's brave academic is conservative.

Then, safe in his university, secure among like-thinking minds, he screws up the courage to attack what? An enemy who was defeated 147 years ago. Defeated by someone else's blood and sacrifice. An enemy who doesn't even exist anymore. The fatuity of such talk, coming from a man who doesn't even have to be good at his job, is breathtaking.

Cheap isn't the word for this. I call it triple cowardice.

Michael R. Bowen M.D.