"You gotta fight for your right to be an AAAAAAASSSSSHOOOOOOOLE!"
Happened to catch one of the Washington Post's stories covering the sesquicentennial of the U.S. Civil War yesterday; it's slated to appear in this Sunday's edition (7 November), but it's already on their website.
Philip Kennicott's "The Civil War taught us to fight for the right to be wrong" is an interesting essay that doesn't try to make a plaster saint out of Lincoln (which would doubtless not annoy, if not out-and-out please, Gore Vidal), but what really made me sit up and take notice was, first, the headline, and second, the concluding paragraphs:
"It seems there's never been a good time to consider properly what Lincoln really accomplished, which was to lead the country during its primal encounter with modernity. The country is again polarized, and the easy default will be to fall back on the bromides of the war: that it brought suffering to all, that all were complicit in the sin of slavery, that no matter the causes or the ideas behind them, we always have the comforting narratives of bravery and leadership.
"If one reads the annals closely, however, it becomes clear that the Civil War legitimized something essential, and dark, that remains with us. Ultimately, the South was fighting for the right to be wrong, for the right to retain (and expand) something ugly and indefensible. It lost the war, and slavery was abolished. But the right to be wrong, the right to resist the progress of freedom, the right to say 'no, thank you' to modernity, to leave the fences in disrepair and retreat into a world of private conviction, remains as much a part of the American character as the blood spilled to preserve the Union. Nothing great has been accomplished in America since the Civil War -- not footsteps on the moon, or women's suffrage, or the right (if not the reality) of equal, unsegregated education -- without people also passionately fighting for that dark right, too."
I don't know how uniquely American self-destructive, regressive impulses are -- it seems to me that even a cursory acquaintance with history shows that this is one of man's more universal impulses -- but Kennicott's essay dovetails with my own thinking (and I forget precisely which writer inspired it) that, in many respects, the North's victory over the South resembles nothing so much as a poison pill merger. Oh, there were cultural and political cleavages in the U.S. well before the Civil War, but, especially in the absence of a uniform, credible threat from the outside, the festering wounds that prompted armed conflict in the first place have become increasingly visible. That Allen Drury's nigh-unreadable fairy tale of senatorial comity and decency, Advise and Consent, should have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960 (and inspired a hit Broadway play and then a major movie in 1962) seems nothing short of incredible in today's political climate; one might as well read one of Trollope's Palliser novels for as much relevance as Advise and Consent has for our current politics.
It seems to me that the old North/South divide was largely subsumed by the East/West divide as described in Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate (1976). I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't have been better if the North had simply said, "You really want to go? Fine; then go. Don't let the door hit you in the ass." Odds are what followed would have still been ugly, brutal, and tragic; but perhaps, just perhaps, we -- the "we" south of the 49th parallel and north of the Rio Grande, any way -- would've been in a better spot than we are now.
Unfortunately counterfactual history, if scrupulously practiced, doesn't offer any more happy endings than actual history does.
Philip Kennicott's "The Civil War taught us to fight for the right to be wrong" is an interesting essay that doesn't try to make a plaster saint out of Lincoln (which would doubtless not annoy, if not out-and-out please, Gore Vidal), but what really made me sit up and take notice was, first, the headline, and second, the concluding paragraphs:
"It seems there's never been a good time to consider properly what Lincoln really accomplished, which was to lead the country during its primal encounter with modernity. The country is again polarized, and the easy default will be to fall back on the bromides of the war: that it brought suffering to all, that all were complicit in the sin of slavery, that no matter the causes or the ideas behind them, we always have the comforting narratives of bravery and leadership.
"If one reads the annals closely, however, it becomes clear that the Civil War legitimized something essential, and dark, that remains with us. Ultimately, the South was fighting for the right to be wrong, for the right to retain (and expand) something ugly and indefensible. It lost the war, and slavery was abolished. But the right to be wrong, the right to resist the progress of freedom, the right to say 'no, thank you' to modernity, to leave the fences in disrepair and retreat into a world of private conviction, remains as much a part of the American character as the blood spilled to preserve the Union. Nothing great has been accomplished in America since the Civil War -- not footsteps on the moon, or women's suffrage, or the right (if not the reality) of equal, unsegregated education -- without people also passionately fighting for that dark right, too."
I don't know how uniquely American self-destructive, regressive impulses are -- it seems to me that even a cursory acquaintance with history shows that this is one of man's more universal impulses -- but Kennicott's essay dovetails with my own thinking (and I forget precisely which writer inspired it) that, in many respects, the North's victory over the South resembles nothing so much as a poison pill merger. Oh, there were cultural and political cleavages in the U.S. well before the Civil War, but, especially in the absence of a uniform, credible threat from the outside, the festering wounds that prompted armed conflict in the first place have become increasingly visible. That Allen Drury's nigh-unreadable fairy tale of senatorial comity and decency, Advise and Consent, should have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1960 (and inspired a hit Broadway play and then a major movie in 1962) seems nothing short of incredible in today's political climate; one might as well read one of Trollope's Palliser novels for as much relevance as Advise and Consent has for our current politics.
It seems to me that the old North/South divide was largely subsumed by the East/West divide as described in Carl Oglesby's The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate (1976). I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't have been better if the North had simply said, "You really want to go? Fine; then go. Don't let the door hit you in the ass." Odds are what followed would have still been ugly, brutal, and tragic; but perhaps, just perhaps, we -- the "we" south of the 49th parallel and north of the Rio Grande, any way -- would've been in a better spot than we are now.
Unfortunately counterfactual history, if scrupulously practiced, doesn't offer any more happy endings than actual history does.