Yesterday I posted some comments about the Governor of Virginia and his pathetic attempts at replicating Ronald Reagan's kow-kowing to the conservative white trash largely in the South (yes, there are plenty north of the Mason-Dixon line, but the fact Reagan spoke at Philadelphia, Mississippi about 'states rights' right after his nomination was an unmistakable message to Southern Dixiecrats).
After posting some comments about the celebration of Confederacy Month in Virginia yesterday, I thought a long time about Asheville, NC native Thomas Wolfe's book LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL and his writings on the Confederacy, and decided over night to research those writings. They are reproduced here. The author is referring to himself in this introspective look at the myth of the Confederacy:
His feeling for the South was not so much historic, as it was of the core and desire of dark romanticism . . .and this desire was unquestionably enhanced by all he had read and visioned by the romantic halo that his school history cast over the section, by the whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to 'live in mansions,' and slavery was a benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largess of the colonel and the shuffle of his happy dependents where all the women were pure, gentle, and beautiful, and all men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking cavaliers. Years later when he could no longer think of the barren spiritual wilderness, the hostile and the murderous intrenchment against all new life--when their cheap mythology, their legend of the charm of their manner, the aristocratic culture of their lives, the quaint sweetness of their drawl--made him writhe.
George W. Bush refused to make any adverse comments about South Carolina's insistence on flying the Stars and Bars at their capital in Columbia when he was running for President. He could or would not muster the courage to call this nonsense what it is: wallowing in a cause that has long since been lost. GONE WITH THE WIND is bullshit. The Confederates were traitors. The Sons of Confederacy are traitors AND insensitive bigots. There is no middle ground here.
Hurrah for the Union.
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