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Since Bob McDonnell took office, I think—seriously—we haven't been able to go for two weeks without becoming a national laughingstock, a punchline on The Daily Show or Leno. Now it's slavery just up and slipping McDonnell's mind when declaring it Confederate History Month. (Of course, he had to remove Gilmore's language from the declaration that called up that small matter of slavery.) It wasn't a mistake—it's dog-whistle politics. Turns out the rest of us have better hearing than he thought.
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"'I could give a flying crap about the political process.' Making money, on the other hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage. 'We're an entertainment company,' Beck says."
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Pictures of little critters hatching: ostrich, penguin, tortoise, and chicken. The tortoise is my favorite—I've never seen one of those hatch.
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Air Marshals costs $200M per arrest. Far more Air Marshals have been arrested than people arrested by air marshals. I think it's fair to say this isn't working out.
Comments are closed.
Me and John Duncan on the same page. Huh.
President Obama reached out from Prague to give Gov. Haircut a spanking. “an unacceptable omission”
I’m moving my flag to West Virginia.
As a non-Virginian, I didn’t see anything about the McDonnell story until the apology was issued, at which point the apology became a top headline on CNN, et al. I think the apology was the right move, but I wonder if the story would have reached national status had McDonnell not gone that route.
It actually did get national attention prior to McDonnell amending the resolution—for example, Morning Edition reported on it during their headlines on Wednesday (here’s a mention of it on their blog from that morning). What’s not clear to me is whether his amendment caused the further coverage, or whether he was just getting ahead of what was clearly a mushrooming story.
All I know is that it was a friend in London who alerted me to the Confederate History Month story, BEFORE he apologized.
The next time we have an official recognition of WWII, like a memorial or commemoration of those who fought in it and lived through it, there’d better be a prominent apology for what we did to Japanese Americans. Otherwise, I’m sure all the same people who are outraged now will be vocal and outraged then. I won’t hold my breath.
World War II was a) not fought over Japanese Americans b) won by the U.S. The Civil War was a) instigated by slavery and b) lost by the Confederacy, an entity that no longer exists. These are essential distinctions.
Better metaphor: Germany naming April “National Nazi Month,” to commemorate those who fought and died to preserve the Nazi regime, and not mentioning Jews.
Of course, the idea of Germany doing such a thing is unfathomable—it runs against the very grain of their post-WWII culture—a lesson that perhaps we should consider here.
What happened to “malice toward none?”
Ahhh… the post-modern revisionist notion that the Civil War was fought over slavery is still alive and well. How sad.
Listen, you’re not going to find a modern Democrat who is much more sympathetic to the viewpoint that it’s reductionist to declare that the Civil War was about slavery. And World War II wasn’t about Jews, either. Scholars are fundamentally unanimous on this: the cause of the Civil War was slavery, manifested in secession. This isn’t a topic that is debated among experts in the field. It’s as ignorant and ridiculous to claim that the Civil War was about slavery—period—as it is to claim that it wasn’t.
BTW, “post-modern”? The first decade of Virginia Quarterly Review is filled with articles about slavery as a significant cause of the Civil War. (Exhibits A, B, C come to mind immediately. Those articles are from 1926, 1934, and 1925, respectively.) The term “post-modern” dates to the 1870s, so unless you’re complaining that my perspective is that of the entire nation in the days immediately after the Civil War, I suspect what you really mean is “new-fangled,” which we can see this viewpoint is decidedly not.
That’s right, folks, it was fought over the always important property rights! (Now just you nevermind that the “property” in question was human beings . . .).
Seriously, why pay attention to the Texas Declaration of Secession when you’ve got an intellectual giant like Publius to tell you how it is?
The Civil War was fought over state’s rights. Specifically, a state’s right to continue to allow certain human beings to own other human beings and force them to do all the hard work around the plantation.
That’s so post-modern of you, Cecil.
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Highly recommended: Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club. http://www.amazon.com/Metaphysical-Club-Story-Ideas-America/dp/0374528497
I’m glad that that we’ve figured out that thinking the Civil War had anything to do with slavery makes you a “post-modern revisionist.” If it weren’t for I Publius, I think I might’ve been confused about who has been rewriting history.
I see that you’ve done a quick google on the term “post-modern.” Understanding the concept is a little more involved than just slapping a date-stamp on it.
This is patently false, but you appear to be thoroughly convinced of it. Saying that “the cause” was any one single thing is as silly as saying that WWI “was caused” by the assassination of the Austrian archduke.
To Ben — of course slavery was an issue, but it is simplistic and ignorant to say that the Civil War was “fought over slavery.”
There were numerous states and territories that were either in or allied with the North where slavery was legal — both during and after the war. The Emancipation Proclamation freed ONLY slaves in the Confederacy, while leaving slaves in the North unaffected. I pity people who can fool themselves into reconciling those facts with the “it was all about slavery” notion.
I have a recent degree in liberal arts from an American university. Every class was, to a greater or lesser degree, about postmodernism. I’ve learned about “pomo” until I wished my eyes would bleed so I’d have an excuse to walk out of the room. But, please, enlighten all of us ignorant fools, for whom years of schooling has been insufficient to understand this topic: In what way is the attribution of the Civil War to slavery “postmodern”?
You’ll find it’s a tough battle for you to argue that this perspective is “postmodern”—or, as I assume you meant, recent. You’ll have to argue with these guys:
CSA Vice President Alexander Stephens in 1861:
Senator Charles Sumner, 1863:
Abraham Lincoln, 1865:
All emphases mine.
Really, the world “overwhelming” doesn’t do justice to reality that the evidence is unanimous that the cause of the Civil War was slavery. It wasn’t entirely about slavery, but it was caused by slavery. The Simpsons, in “Much Apu About Nothing,” put it well, when Apu was taking his citizenship test:
I Publius,
You put quotes around “fought over slavery,” but you’re the only one, in a previous post, who actually used that phrase in this discussion. Also, it’s not really the point. Like Waldo said, World War II wasn’t “fought over Jews,” but does that mean it’d be alright for Germany to have a Nazi History Month and just ignore that part of it? I feel comfortable in saying no.
Also, your smug self-satisfaction with regard to the term “post-modernism” isn’t really helping your case.
Until you can reconcile the fact that slavery was left intact in the Union after emancipation, it is absolutely laughable to claim that the war was fought over slavery.
In other words — if the Union fought a war to end slavery, why was it allowed to exist in the Union?
Good luck with that.
The Emancipation Proclamation was a pair of executive orders, in 1862 and 1863, which prohibited slavery in the CSA. That left slaves held legally in Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Maryland (which is to say border states), since they were all basically under Union control, and Lincoln presumably didn’t want to give them any more encouragement to join the CSA. (Maryland in particular, of course.) Slavery was prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment. The Senate passed it in April 1864, the House passed it in January 1865. Lee surrendered in Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Lincoln was assassinated April 14. Between February 1 and December 6, 27 states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. (Georgia was the final one to do so, on December 6. Nine more states subsequently ratified it. Mississippi didn’t get around to it until 1995.)
So your complaint is, as I understand it, that by not immediately prohibiting slavery in every state in the USA and the CSA, that therefore the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. Of course, this ignores the reality of the situation—that the president freed the slaves in the CSA (thus making them free as each state was conquered by union troops), and then used a constitutional amendment to secure the freedom of all slaves in the nation (since it was in no way clear that an executive order would do the trick), which took about a year and a half, as constitutional amendments tend to. And, of course, he left the border states alone during the war, because the alternative would have been an enormous tactical blunder.
That’s not “absolutely laughable.” That’s common sense.
Tell me—what do you think was the cause of the Civil War? What was it that happened between 1850-1860 that caused a slowly increasing drumbeat for secession? Was it…taxes? Tariffs? Free speech? What was the factor that united all of the states that seceded? That is, what trait did they have in common that caused them to band together if not—by some amazing coincidence—that they all had economies premised on slavery, and the anti-slavery Lincoln, from the anti-slavery Republican Party, had just been elected on an anti-slavery ticket?
Because, so far, I’ve offered cascade of evidence demonstrating quite clearly that the basic cause of the Civil War was slavery, and you’ve offered nothing more than some pretty weak comments in response, the rhetorical equivalent of “well, yeah…but still…”
Unless and until you (or anyone) can explain why the Union allowed slavery to exist in areas it controlled during and after the war, it is futile (and moronic) to assert that the Civil War was fought to end slavery.
I’ll save you the trouble. You can’t do that, because it clearly wasn’t fought to end slavery. Lincoln said so himself.
That would’ve been a lot more convincing an argument if you’d addressed any points that anyone made, even if to prove that they’re irrelevant.
Every one of those points are shot to hell by Lincoln. And you know it.
“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.”
So your point, Publius, isn’t so much that the Confederacy wasn’t a borne of an appalling failure of morality, but that the other side wasn’t that great, either?
You’ve convinced me!
I don’t think anybody has ever claimed that the USA went to war with the CSA over slavery. The USA went to war with the CSA because the CSA seceded. As far as Lincoln was concerned, of course it wasn’t about slavery, it was about treason, the treason of secession. (If the south hadn’t seceded, the Union would never have invaded, of course.) But from the south’s perspective, it was all about slavery—that was why they seceded.
Since when has what a President said about why we went to war been the real reason we went to war?