Perspective by Incongruity, #1
Another distraction. . . .
I’m a Yankee living south of the Mason-Dixon line. A granddaughter of working class Polish immigrants. A Detroiter. Life’s different down here. I’ve adjusted to the fact that the peanuts are boiled, not roasted. And I actually like my BBQ as pulled pork and tangy instead of whole cuts of beef and sweet.
But when we visit Stone Mountain—that Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy—I honestly don’t know how to explain to my sons what happened there as we walk past the secessionist memorials alongside our African-American neighbors. We take our boys to living museums—something my family did every weekend at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. But these war re-enactments are almost always from the Civil War.
And when my sons ask during the battle, “Who are the good guys, Mommy?” I can only sigh. I saw all those confederate bumper stickers when we walked in. I hear the lilt in the accent around me. So, like the good Burkean, I whisper very quietly, “It’s complicated, honey. They are all Americans.”
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Comments
I had a similar experience a few years ago. My wife and I went through an exhibit at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, MI. It was a collection of artifacts and items from all our presidents to date.
We were proceeding through the exhibit, admiring all they had collected, when we turned the corner from the Lincoln collection to see things from Jefferson Davis. It struck me that he most certainly was an “American President” like the others, yet in a much darker time.
The largely oppressive nature of “Reconstruction” is too often the dirty little secret of that particular war. If you need any more evidence of just how ugly civil wars can get, go study what happened in the Congo in the 1950′s or even today in Iraq and elsewhere around the globe.
My own father was in General’s Headquarters in Tokyo after WW2. He didn’t speak of it much, but some of what he did say was very telling. The Japanese people were left to a pretty beaten down existence during the occupied period. I’ve got to think the South was very much the same thing.
Good post.
Posted by: Mark Moore | November 7th, 2009 11:19
“But these war re-enactments are almost always from the Civil War.”
Or, as I hear it called (I, too, am a Northerner transplanted to the South), “the War of Northern Aggression.”
Posted by: Amanda | November 7th, 2009 18:51
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Posted by: A Time to Laugh » Blog Archive » Perspective by Incongruity, #2 | November 9th, 2009 08:04
Hmmm, Grew up in the north and married a northerner. Our first task was to move back to the north. It just isn’t for us. I can’t handle all the subtly. I’d take a city full of “rude” northerners over a room filled with southerners.
Posted by: Mark Rosedale | November 9th, 2009 12:49
Or as Zeb Walton would always say…” it was the war between the states. There wasn’t nothin’ civil about it.”
Posted by: Roanna | November 14th, 2009 08:12