Ghosts, Part II

Mine eyes have seen the glory 
Of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage 
Where the grapes of wrath are stored
He has loosed the fateful lightning
Of his terrible, swift sword
His Truth is marching on.

I was screwing around on Twitter this morning, waiting for my friend to get done at the Dentist...when I saw this:

'Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) on Thursday defended President Trump's claim that "both sides" were responsible for the violence that erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend, comparing Confederate memorials to those put up to honor the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.'

Are you FUCKING KIDDING ME?

(While we're at it, I can think of few ideologies that might be more worth dropping a couple of fully-fueled jumbo jets on than the idea that one human being should have the right to own another human being, but I digress.)

I have seen Him in the watch-fires
Of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar
In the Evening dews and damps
I can read His righteous sentence
by the dim and flaring lamps
His Day is marching on.

Maine.

Of all the fucking places...

During the battle of Gettysburg on July 3rd of 1863 the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment, commanded by Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, held the far-left end of the Union line and repulsed multiple attacks by two Alabama regiments of the Confederate Army. Their ammunition was exhausted, and knowing...knowing...that the Enemy was coming back and there was no way his spent troops could withstand another assault...he ordered his men to fix bayonets and, executing some freewheeling, complex maneuvering to get the regiment back in formation...he ordered a damned-near suicidal downhill bayonet charge straight into the face of the oncoming enemy. In the process, one Confederate regiment was overwhelmed and captured...and with the men, their powder and shot...and another was broken and picked apart by a company of Union sharpshooters from another regiment that were under Chamberlain's operational control.

I have read a fiery Gospel
Writ in burnished rows of steel
As ye deal with my contemners 
So with you my grace shall deal
Let the hero born of Woman
Crush the serpent with His heel
Since God is marching on.

That takes balls, damned suicidal courage and nerves of steel to give an order like that. But more importantly, it takes bone-deep respect and trust...because those men went when and where they were ordered. That speaks to the character of the man himself, because respect is earned. Every action, every day. No mistakes. It's moments like that when you find out what you're made of. Respect, either you have it or you don't. His men? They didn't just go down that hill. By God, they did so with sufficient ferocity that they literally ripped victory from the jaws of certain defeat. Many historians credit Chamberlain and the 20th Maine with preventing a Confederate flanking maneuver and in so doing, saving the Union.

Joshua Chamberlain would go on to fight in many more battles, be severely wounded at Petersburg, resume command of the regiment...and ultimately receive the surrender of and order his men to render honors to the Confederate infantry at Appomattox. Thirty years later, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his role in the battle of Little Round Top.

Joshua Chamberlain would go on to be elected Governor of Maine (As a Republican, back when that meant you were something other than a bigot.) He would serve as President of Bowdoin College and serve in a variety of other government and charitable capacities before ultimately dying of his wounds over fifty years after he sustained them.

I had to look it up. Dude literally should not have even survived. He should have died at Petersburg.

Joshua Chamberlain made his state and the world a measurably better place while living on borrowed time and there are statues of him aplenty in Maine...and deservedly so.

Go ahead, tell me what Robert E. Lee or Thomas John "Stonewall" Jackson did that is comparable. I'll wait.

As I mentioned the other day, I've *Been* to Gettysburg. I was a little kid at the time, but I was there. I think it was 1979, my Dad's gray 1978 Jeep CJ7 was still pretty new...and for much of the trip I was sandwiched in the back with all the camping gear and stuff. It was a warm summer day under a clear, cloudless blue sky. We hiked around the park. We visited a number of sites that my Dad...all serious with his books and maps in his backpack...compass in hand and a notebook-which he used up most of by the end of the day-and pencils in his pocket...wanted to check out. We were there for a couple of days...the next day we drove more places, and walked less. The whole time my Dad thoroughly enjoyed his time in what had to be the equivalent of Disneyland for an amateur historian of the War Between the States. As I would be a decade later in Wyoming, that day...my Dad was feeling the ghosts, hearing the shouted orders and smelling the scents of black powder and blood on the wind, carried across time by his imagination.

I still have that notebook, and another that went with it, plus some papers left over from a talk he gave to members of his Civil War reenactment group.

I am steeped in this history. I have been studying it since I could read. Hell, a huge part of why I was a Republican or stood for the values of checks on the power of the State (because slavery or any other racist system cannot exist without the support of the State) international engagement, limited government, personal freedom, respect for the Constitution and the respect for diversity and tolerance that all that stuff entails are *Because* of people like Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglass and Joshua Chamberlain and Robert Gould Shaw.

He has sounded forth the trumpet
That shall never call retreat
He is sifting out the hearts of Men
Before His judgment Seat
O be swift my soul to answer Him
Be jubilant my feet
Our God is marching on.

Paul LePage wouldn't have been fit to hold Joshua Chamberlain's hat while he took a leak...And this goddamned motherfucker wants to compare the removal of the statues of fucking Traitors to the United States of America to the September 11th Attacks?

No. Just. No.

It doesn't work like that.

You know why I left the Republican Party? Because over the last nine years the Republican Party has ceased to be the party of Lincoln in any meaningful way. It has even ceased to be the party of George Wallace, who eventually became a born-again Christian, publicly and privately repented of his racism and appointed record numbers of African Americans to government positions in Alabama. No, the Republican Party...due to racism, stupidity, and just plain yellow-eyed hatred of Barack Hussein Obama...has pushed the refrain of "I'll never be out-niggered again" to the point where I honestly think the hate and the racism and the overall situation has even gotten away from Donald Trump...who is of course, too stupid to realize it. His own statements regarding Charlottesville appear to be continuing to do more harm than good.

Like I said, to hear these people tell it the primary value of America is and should be racism. If they can't own other people, damn it, they want to at least memorialize having once had the right to do so.

Yeah, about that...

So, Instead of Republicans being out of control, we have...well, Nazis, existing in the first place in the United States of America...and not being dead yet.

There can be only one solution to that problem.

As I feel certain that the ghost of Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain would tell us to do...

...Fix bayonets, and charge. Fight, speak, Prophetically. If you want a better nation, be better citizens. If you want a better world, be better people. If you want people to act in accordance with the Word of God and the Truth as you understand it...do so yourself. Be the change you wish to see in the world.

In the beauty of the Lillies
Christ was born across the sea
With a glory in His bosom
That transfigures you and me
As He died to make men holy
Let us die to make men free.
While God is marching on.

For those who don't know, the Battle Hymn of the Republic draws heavily on Apocalyptic themes from the Biblical Books of Isaiah and Revelation, and is rich with End Times imagery. It quotes and paraphrases a number of Bible verses and was written in a time when the use of Christian idiom and imagery was common in most spheres of life. In the hands of an artful speaker it could be and was used to powerful effect. As such, it was a common sentiment on (yes) both sides that the Armies were the forces of Revelation, defending against (or protecting, depending on which side you asked) the agency of the Anti-Christ. These currents still ebb and flow through American Christianity today in the struggles for civil rights, LGBT and racial equality and religious tolerance. The song was also quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. in his last public speech:

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live - a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain top. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

...And it wasn't just Black people he was talking about, it never was. It's all of us.

Ghosts, Part I