[Vision2020] Southern Fantasy

[keely emerinemix]

Michael,

I trust you're wearing your Keds, because I see a good bit of backpedaling 
going on.  You were clearly idealizing the Southern past, and it's beyond me 
how anyone could have read your post and not come to the conclusion that you 
called Southern culture, pre-Civil War, more noble than our own.   I believe 
that's what you intended, certainly.  To top it off, you list "architecture" 
as one of the cultural glories of Dixie, as well as -- belatedly -- of the 
North at the time.

As in, "Well, sure -- in the name of Christ they stole and traded slaves, 
beat them, tore up families, raped the women, scattered the children, and 
denied the slaves the right to even minimal enfranchisement and civil 
protection.  But, hey --  those neo-Georgian rooflines were truly 
awe-inspiring and I love what they did with the cornices . . . "

It makes me wonder if the evils of Jim Crow nearly a century later were 
because of the pervasive racism it trumpeted, or because Southern people 
would make a most unmannerly fuss to keep Blacks from those lunch counters 
that, after all, were so poorly designed, and be ungentlemanly trying to bar 
them from those dreary, industrial-looking drinking fountains . . .

keely







From: "Michael" <metzler at moscow.com>
To: <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Subject: [Vision2020] Southern Fantasy
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 15:39:42 -0800

Jim,



Thanks for the note.  Idealizing the past is precisely what I intended not
to communicate in my short response.  I think that both the north and the
south had a more respectable culture than the one we live in now. This was
merely a weak comparison.   It was a time a bit more saturated with
fidelity, honor, morality, discipline, respect, love, chastity, beauty,
architecture, religion, love of God, etc.  The land was not as filled with
idolatry, hatred, bitterness, disloyalty, adultery, infidelity, dishonor,
laziness, paganism, immorality, relativism, general cultural breakdown,
statism, impiety, and just about any cultural non-good the western world
spent 1500 years enumerating. That's all I was referring to.



Half of my country came and destroyed another half of my country, and it is
not clear that we are better off because of it.



The North's propaganda for the war was able to continue since the North won
the war. The North was no utopia for blacks and the real primary motivation
for the war was not to extend mercy to blacks (says many historical scholars
as I understand it).  I would certainly call this a more balanced view of
the civil war.  The years Wilkins has spent researching primary documents
certainly puts him in a better position than many of the teachers who had
their way with us, including high school teachers, college teaching
assistants, and even history professors who's expertise was not the civil
war.  I don't privilege Wilkin's scholarship; however, I've heard enough
primary documentation to know the confederate flag is not the same thing as
the Nazi swastika.



Michael Metzler





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