It certainly wouldn't be anything like a Saturday-night rumble in the bowling alley parking lot. I wish Kinzinger had prepared a more articulate statement instead of speaking off the cuff, but I agree with all he says here:
A few things Kinzinger forgot to mention. In addition to the loss of electricity and running water, there would be no working toilets. Just sit with that thought a minute.
No air conditioning, either, which would be devastating across the South. Up north, the lack of heating in wintertime would be just as bad. Apart from military casualties, many millions of people - of all parties and persuasions - would be suffering and starving across the nation.
Also, there would be no front line, as in the wars we read about in history books. There would be numerous fronts and areas of conflict; and no safe place "behind the lines" anywhere.
But just exactly what army would be fighting what army? Think about that a moment. The rightwing boys show up with all their cool army gear and guns . . . and who shows up on the other side?
A moment's reflection shows that this whole idea of civil war is just a gung-ho fantasy - which, left unchecked, could become, God forbid, an excuse for wholesale manslaughter.
It is certainly a symptom of unreasoning hatred, not human decency, and certainly not Christianity: Remember the One who said, "Put your sword away. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword."
Much more likely, though hardly less horrible, would be for the federal authorities to find some flimsy excuse to declare a National Emergency and suspend the Constitution, the courts, and all state and local governments not directly subordinate to military rule from Washington. The few pockets of resistance that might spring up here or there would quickly be put down by military patrols, which are already occurring in some cities.
So no need for a war, which would disppoint the rank and file, but too bad. Life would go on and profits continue to fill the coffers of the ultra-wealthy. Which was only to be expected.
Let us hope that these dire situations never arise, and that all this stupid talk is just stupid talk. I have to believe that cooler heads and good sense will in time show us the way out of this dark tunnel. Please God.
Kicking off your July 4th with Little Stevie Wonder's first big hit from 1965, which still brings a crowd to its feet after all these years. And it says something about the American dream, if you listen carefully:
Here's wishing a very happy Independence Day to all my friends and truckbuddies. Regardless of all the screaming and shouting, ranting and raving, there's still a lot to be thankful for in this country, and we should be proud of how far we Americans have come and of all we have achieved in the last 247 years. Despite all the flaws, faults, and frailties of human nature, it's a magnificent story, seen in perspective and as a whole; and the long-term trend has always been upward, towards a more perfect union, with liberty and justice for all. We should keep it going that way.
I'm proud to be an American. Having done the genealogy work and spent several thousand dollars getting records transcribed, I know for a certain fact that my people have been part of the American story since at least 1688, starting back in Maryland and the Old Dominion. Generation after generation, as decades passed and families moved westward, they played their part in building up this country: farmers and planters, lawyers and judges, teachers and preachers, surveyors and soldiers, tavern keepers and taxi drivers, fathers and mothers of many children. As far as I know, they were all honest, God-fearing, hard-working men and women, whether upright Anglicans or backwoods Baptists. Some were rich and some were poor; one family attended the same church as General Washington and his lady.
Sign at the site of the home of one of my ancestors, who dined at Mount Vernon on at least one occasion, as recorded by Washington in his diary.
Other families were poor, living in log cabins far back in the woods and swamps, so poor that one boy had only a shirt to wear until he was 12 years old, about the time of the Civil War. Some made music, some were mathematically inclined . . . and I suspect some made mighty good moonshine. And there is definitely some Cherokee blood in the mix too, which unfortunately has left no written account but which perhaps can be glimpsed in my profile. Family stories allege that there was also French and Spanish blood somewhere back in time, though I could find no record of such. And perhaps there was even a drop of African blood - I learned that, contrary to popular belief, it happened even in the best of families way back there, sometimes.
My roots run deep. Through my research I was able to find all 32 great-great-grandparents, at least their names and dates, going back to about the year 1800 - and their many descendants, scattered between the Potomac and the Rio Grande. They were all Southerners, from the British Isles, and Protestants, so far as I know. I say that merely as a statement of fact. I would have been just as happy to find some French or Spanish, Catholics or Jews, but they were scarce on the ground when I went hunting. I found a few lines that stretched further back to the late 1600s, but of course they were only a fraction of the whole. (Ten generations back from me would include over a thousand ancestors: do the math yourself and see.) With the internet, it has become relatively easy - though still tedious - to find names and dates nowadays; but sadly, in most cases that's all there is to be found. One looks at the lists of names and wonders how many untold stories are there, how many boys and girls grew into men and women, laughed and wept and loved, had their day in the sun, and now sleep the long sleep.
Only a few stories have survived the passage of time; and they are quite interesting. One direct patriot ancestor, possibly of Swiss descent, was wounded in a North Carolina battle in 1776, several months before the Declaration of Independence was signed. A collateral uncle was a lieutenant in the War of 1812; and half a century later, a collateral cousin was a Confederate general. A pair of brothers rode with the celebrated Mosby's Rangers, and lived to tell about it. A more distant girl cousin was the Confederate spy Laura Ratcliffe, who counted both Mosby and J. E. B. Stuart among her admirers.
Another Virginia cousin, a high-spirited boy of 14, thought it would be great sport to ambush single-handedly a squad of Union soldiers passing by the family homestead en route to the Battle of Manassas. The result was that the enraged troops promptly went and burned down the house! The menfolks were all away at the time. Stupid boy; imagine what his poor mama must have said to him afterwards. A couple of years later he joined the Confederate Army, lost a leg in some battle, and returned home sadder but wiser. Eventually, he got an education and in later life was, I think, superintendent of the local schools.
It would have been quite exciting to learn these stories when I was a boy and fascinated with the Civil War, but I knew nothing of all this until I started my genealogical research at the turn of the present century. And of course, whatever wealth there may have been in the family was swept away by the War; none of it came down to me. The South lay devastated for a generation afterwards, having paid a very steep and painful price for being on the wrong side of history. All my grandparents were born in humble circumstances deep in the countryside.
Let me say clearly here that it was a bloody, futile, senseless war, started for all the wrong reasons, and should never have happened; but once it started, these my kinsmen did what they had to do to defend their homes and families from the Yankee invaders - who often took the opportunity to steal or destroy everything they could, including food supplies, crops, and livestock - the necessities of life. Civilians suffered greatly. That's how wars always are; and brave men and women all down through recorded history have done what they needed to do to protect their loved ones and repel the invaders; there is no shame in that. You would do it too, gentle reader, regardless of the cause.
In the early 20th century, one grandfather delivered the U. S. Mail on horseback through his rural county; the other was a fireman on a steam locomotive. A generation later, my dad was an Air Force mechanic who was bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Battle of the Bulge. He came through the war without a scratch, however, and went to college on the G.I. Bill, as millions of other veterans did. There he met my mother - the result being, eventually, me.
My great-great grandfather, drafted into the Confederate Army in 1862, aged about 36. Probably this picture was taken shortly before he went off to war. He died in the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., in December 1864, a few months before the war ended, leaving an impoverished wife and four children back in Mississippi.
My gggrandfather's younger cousin, who rode with Mosby's Rangers - notice the horseshoe emblem on his sleeve. After the war, he got an M. D, and became a highly respected physician in a small Texas town.
A younger brother of the above. He also rode with Mosby.
Yet another cousin was General Elkanah Greer, CSA, a wealthy planter in East Texas; at the time of his death in 1877, the Memphis newspaper remembered him as "a gallant soldier and an accomplished gentleman."
These are the kind of men your Head Trucker is descended from, Americans all - both before and after the War. My forefathers were brave, manly men who did the right thing as it seemed to them at that time - which is all anyone can do in any place or time. I wish I had inherited their toughness, but . . . I was cut from different cloth. My Texas uncles and cousins more nearly fit the family pattern.
So you see, I feel that in my veins flows the great mosaic of American life as it was lived, high and low, since the earliest settlements and peoples. I am the product of all who came before me; but I should be judged on what I have done in my life, not what they did or didn't do. Which is the only right way to judge anyone. To do otherwise would be pre-judging: prejudice. That is not the American way.
I say there's way too much blather these days about diversity, and not nearly enough talk about UNITY. Without which, we have nothing. And anybody who doesn't like it here is free to go live somewhere else. Good luck finding another country that will suit you better. Or just go . . . jump in the lake.
Here's some live cams from around the nation to show that life goes on in America, and not too badly, despite everything that upsets and divides us: just look at the living mosaic of races, sexes, and ages in these scenes. Everybody gets a chance. Everybody gets to dance. Rich or poor, old or young, gay or straight, everyone has a place in the sun. That's the American dream. And it's a good thing.
Memories live on: This is thought to be a prewar photograph of your Head Trucker's great-great grandfather, who joined a Mississippi infantry company and was killed in the War, probably at the disastrous Battle of Franklin, just about this time of year, 150 years ago. Click to enlarge.
Amazing but true: about 35 children of men who fought in the Civil War War Between the States are still living. Here are two of them remembering their fathers in a video posted today by the National Geographic Society:
While we're on the subject, here's a great clip from the Library of Congress of some Confederate veterans doing the rebel yell at a reunion in the 1930's - note that it's not at all a cowboy "yeehaw":
July 3rd was the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, the high-water mark of the Confederacy and the great turning point in our national history. All that came before flowed into that moment, and all that has happened in these United States since has flowed from it. Jay Ungar composed the haunting and lovely "Ashokan Farewell," which Ken Burns put to such memorable use in his masterpiece of filmmaking, The Civil War - a documentary every American should see at least once.
Why? Because, as Faulkner said, "The past is not dead. It's not even past."
You're going to be hearing a lot about the Civil War in the next four years, fellas, as we observe the sesquicentennial of that national ordeal. South Carolina, first state to secede, kicked off the festivities this week with a full-dress Secession Ball - I'm not making this up - to honor the men who took the Palmetto State out of the Union.
And not only a Secession Ball, but also a screening of Birth of a Nation? Yup. That's South Carolina all over, boys - Tory, aristocratic, and unrepentant to the last. Your no-count, poor-white Head Trucker lived there for a painful but mercifully short time, so take my word for it.
That old Southern saw that the War was not at all in any way about slavery, nossir - oh, your Head Trucker remembers that well from his childhood, and believed it till he was past grown.
But it's pure, unadulterated bullshit. And the men who started it did a devilish thing.
As Paul Finkelman wrote Monday in the New York Times Disunion blog:
One hundred and fifty years ago today South Carolina declared its independence from the United States. The move had been in the offing since early November, when Abraham Lincoln’s election led the state’s leaders to fear that Washington would begin to restrict slavery in the territories and in their own state. That was the proximate cause, at least; there was more to it. Beyond the election, South Carolina was no longer happy in a union with the free states, where northern opponents of slavery were allowed to openly denounce the “peculiar institution” in Congress and in their home states.
The New York Times is running Adam Goodheart's very interesting blog, Disunion, documenting day by day the Civil War period in this country, which was all set in train a century and a half ago by Abraham Lincoln's election.
In today's post, Goodheart makes a remarkable discovery: though there are no photographs of Lincoln himself on Election Day, there are two dated photographs in the Library of Congress of a column being raised into place on the Capitol, then under extensive reconstruction. Go check out the 1860 and 2010 comparison photographs that Goodheart has placed side by side: most interesting.
History buffs should also be aware that Chapel Hill's Documenting the American South collection has a complete online edition of Mary Boykin Chesnut's famous A Diary from Dixie, which is truly fascinating reading. Chesnut, a cultivated and insightful writer, was the wife of a Senator from South Carolina, and vividly recorded the political and personal triumphs and defeats of the Civil War years in her diary, which was first published in 1905. Had she lived in today's world, I could easily see her as an Elizabeth Edwards type - though to her good fortune, Mary had a devoted, not a philandering, husband.
Here's Chesnut's very first diary entry, beginning with the first news of the election results:
CHARLESTON, S. C., November 8, 1860. - Yesterday on the train, just before we reached Fernandina, a woman called out: "That settles the hash." Tanny touched me on the shoulder and said: "Lincoln's elected." "How do you know?" "The man over there has a telegram."
The excitement was very great. Everybody was talking at the same time. One, a little more moved than the others, stood up and said despondently: "The die is cast; no more vain regrets; sad forebodings are useless; the stake is life or death." "Did you ever!" was the prevailing exclamation, and some one cried out: "Now that the black radical Republicans have the power I suppose they will Brown us all." No doubt of it.
I have always kept a journal after a fashion of my own, with dates and a line of poetry or prose, mere quotations, which I understood and no one else, and I have kept letters and extracts from the papers. From to-day forward I will tell the story in my own way. I now wish I had a chronicle of the two delightful and eventful years that have just passed. Those delights have fled and one's breath is taken away to think what events have since crowded in. Like the woman's record in her journal, we have had "earthquakes, as usual" - daily shocks.
What I Say: As a native Southerner, with at least four great- or great-great-grandfathers who fought in the War, I could say many things here about history, identity, race, religion, and politics - and folly.
But for today, I'll say only that history keeps on repeating itself because we human beings are always the same inside, and unlike fashions in dress, speech, politics, and religion, human nature does not change.
Millions of people, then as now, can be completely, thoroughly, unshakeably convinced that they are divinely right about any number of matters - when they are, in fact, tragically misinformed and misguided.
And notice that our ancestors didn't need a 24-hour propaganda cycle broadcast on television to be so damn foolish and so very ignorant of what is good and true. It's just the long, sad story of mankind: Us versus Them.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Found on Joe.My.God.: Obama makes clear that slavery is not a negligible item in the history of this country.
What I Say: Ever since Appomatox and right down to this present moment, a great many Southerners, high and low, have been swearing that "slavery was not the cause of the Civil War." This was accepted truth, an article of faith during my childhood in the segregated South, a "fact" nobody questioned.
Which is pure and simple bullshit: a willful denial of the historical facts, a wishful thought that elevates the secessionists into great heroes of liberty rather than people whose consciences were calloused by the practice of a great evil.
If anybody ever tries to pull this argument on you, boys, all you have to do is refer them to the Declaration of Causes written by the Texas Secession Convention, where it is all laid out perfectly plain, and in passionate detail: the North wants to take our slaves away and by God we ain't a-gonna stand for it, oh hell no. An excerpt:
In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color--a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy [here, meaning the United States as a grouping that can be seceded from, not a permanent union], the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States. . . .
In view of these and many other facts, it is meet that our own views should be distinctly proclaimed.
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy [here, meaning the United States] itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.
By the secession of six of the slave-holding States, and the certainty that others will speedily do likewise, Texas has no alternative but to remain in an isolated connection with the North, or unite her destinies with the South. . . .
"The debasing doctrine of the equality of all men." And black slavery is the Will of God. Right.
And of course, this is but one of many, many documents in the historical record that prove the point.
But of course the biggest and deepest river in the South has always been Denial.
Even a century and a half after the whole rotten structure of slavery and secession was crushed by force of arms. And now this kind of fanatical, self-righteous, reactionary thinking is resurgent. Andrew Sullivan quotes Noah Millman on "Who Closed the Conservative Mind?", one answer to which is this:
--Blame the South. The argument, in a nutshell, is that a successful political coalition in America cannot be dominated by the South, as the GOP currently is. The South is a distinct region in America, significantly different in history and political culture from the rest of the country. Moreover, regional identity in the South is manifested substantially in opposition to the rest of the nation. A political movement dominated by the South will necessarily manifest a political culture that is more similar to that of the South than to that of the rest of the nation, and that political movement is also going to absorb this oppositional element of Southern identity, and will necessarily become overly invested in intellectual shibboleths. What looks like epistemic closure is really just identity politics.
I don’t think this explanation can be dismissed out of hand – in particular, dismissing it out of hand as “insulting” to the South would be an instance of precisely the dynamic I’m outlining. The South does have a distinct history and culture; that culture is substantially oppositional; and the American right is dominated by the South in a way that it has not been before. Dominance of a party by an atypical and oppositional region is just a structural problem. And, if this is a problem, it is going to be a hard one for the American right to solve, because the South is now large enough and strong enough, and remains cohesive enough, that its leaders should expect to lead any coalition of which they are a member.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. If you listen to the Teabagger crowd and nearly all the rest of the Republican leadership, they sound just like the guys who wrote the Declaration of Causes. Just like them.
Which brings all that boring old American history you learned in school into a whole new perspective, doesn't it?
And here's a vision of the future history of this country coming straight at you, boys, the overthrow of everything Obama and the current Congress will have done. Newt Gingrich at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference:
A Republican President and Congress in 2013: if that doesn't scare you shitless, what will?
From an essay by Allen C. Guelzo, Director of Civil War Era Studies and the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Pennsylvania’s Gettysburg College:
Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday is celebrated February 12, never kept a diary, and never lived to write an autobiography. He was so utterly private a man that even his best friends frequently admitted that there were regions of his mind to which they were never granted access. He was a “terribly reticent, secretive, shut mouth man,” said his law-partner of fourteen years, William Henry Herndon, “and close-minded as to his plans, wishes, hopes, and fears.”
That was particularly true about religion. “I don't know anything about Lincoln's Religion,” grumbled David Davis, Lincoln’s personal attorney and his first appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court, and “don’t think anybody knew.” . . .
Lincoln’s election to the presidency, just in time to see the country fall into civil war, presented him with a different set of challenges to his meager stock of religious belief. Lincoln expected a quick and direct restoration of the Union. But in battle after battle, the Union armies were handed humiliating defeats. The president could make no logical sense of this apparent contradiction of progress. After a year-and-a-half of seemingly fruitless bloodshed, he concluded that God had taken a direct hand in events to stymie the war’s progress so long as it was waged for purely political purposes, and to force Lincoln to recognize that the war must be turned in a moral direction that spoke directly to the crime of slavery.
This insight is what eventually drove Lincoln to depart from the policy direction with which he had begun the war, and to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. To the astonishment of his Cabinet, Lincoln explained that his decision to issue the Proclamation was a “vow” he had made “to myself, and...to my Maker.”
In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln came as close to preaching a sermon as any U.S. President has ever dared utter. The war, he said, was not a struggle between a righteous Union and evil slaveholders – both North and South had been complicit in the crime of slavery, and the war was a judgment that God had chosen to bring on the entire nation “until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Only by submitting to that national judgment, Lincoln told his audience, could “malice toward none” and “charity for all” follow.
Lincoln’s public role as president embodied a profound struggle to preserve a “government of the people” that nevertheless still respected a core of moral truth which not even “the people” could repeal. And in that role, he reminds us that religion is neither alien to public life (to be locked up in private) nor a jack-in-the-box (ready to jump into every situation). It is, instead, a reminder of the feebleness of our own wisdom, and of the costliness of truth.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, harmony; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
and welcome to the Blue Truck, a blog for mature gay men with news and views on gay rights, history, art, humor, and whatever comes to mind. Plus a few hot men. The truck's all washed and gassed up, so hop in buddy, let's go.
CAUTION: For mature gay men only beyond this point. Some posts and links may not be suitable for children or the unco guid. You have been warned.
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My Story
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Churches say that the expression of love in a heterosexual monogamous relationship includes the physical, the touching, embracing, kissing, the genital act - the totality of our love makes each of us grow to become increasingly godlike and compassionate. If this is so for the heterosexual, what earthly reason have we to say that it is not the case with the homosexual?
It is a perversion if you say to me that a person chooses to be homosexual. You must be crazy to choose a way of life that exposes you to a kind of hatred. It's like saying you choose to be black in a race-infected society.
If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God.
