Ghosts Of Little Round Top (American Revelation IV, Part Five, Addendum.)

Dear Madam,

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle.

I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,
A. Lincoln.

~The Bixby Letter, as quoted in the film "Saving Private Ryan."

Maine, of all the fucking places.

On July 3rd, 1863, the 20th Maine Infantry Regiment held the high ground at Little Round Top, on the far-left of the Union line at Gettysburg. They had repulsed repeated attacks by two Alabama regiments of the Confederate Army, they were exhausted, overwhelmed, and out of ammunition, with their only support being a company of sharpshooters on an adjacent hill. And the enemy was coming back with blood in their eyes to finish the job. The regimental commander, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, knew this. He knew his men could not withstand another assault, so he executed some skillful maneuvering to get his regiment back in formation, and ordered them to fix bayonets and charge right into the face of the oncoming enemy. This they did, with enough courage and skill to rip apart one regiment, and force another to surrender, snatching victory from the jaws of certain defeat. Many historians credit Chamberlain and the 20th Maine with preventing a flanking maneuver by Confederate forces and in so doing, saving the Union.

Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain would go on to become Governor of Maine...as a Republican, back when that meant you could be something other than a bigot...and president of Bowdoin College, and be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions at Little Round Top thirty years later. He would ultimately die of wounds he sustained during the battle of Petersburg, nearly fifty years after he was wounded. There are statues of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain aplenty in Maine, and deservedly so. He measurably made the world a better place.

Who will build statues of Donald Trump, and what has he done?

The United States of America, when it first declared its Independence from Britain, was a living experiment in democracy and innovation. Many technologies the world takes for granted today were pioneered by Americans. From the deepest depths of the sea to the edges of the Solar System to digital frontiers undreamed-of by the ancient mathematicians who ultimately made them possible, the United States of America has led the world far more often than it hasn't.

What was the Confederate States of America, except an attempt to defend capitalism based on human bondage from the forces of common decency, freedom, social change, and the industrial revolution? The North was an industrial powerhouse with a burgeoning and diverse population, the South was an agrarian backwater that held half its population in chains, and whose agriculture was mostly tied up in commodities like cotton and tobacco.

It doesn't take a degree from the US Army War College to see how that was going to go, and generations of "Lost Cause" bullshit will never change how it ended. Shelby Foote can kiss my fucking ass.

As far as I'm concerned, flying the Confederate flag in a place like Maine ought to get you beat up. There is, simply put, no good goddamned reason to even fly the fucking thing, especially in a state that famously shed a lot of blood to tear it down.

In point of fact, the South's cotton monoculture was so widespread that it damaged the region's soil, something that was ultimately undone by the efforts and research of George Washington Carver, an African American scientist and inventor who introduced techniques of crop rotation and alternative crops such as peanuts that helped rejuvenate the South's soil.

But yeah, Fox News, go ahead and equate increases in the stock market with the deaths of Black men. My God, what the fuck is wrong with y'all?


We live in a world where the Confederate statues are coming down, even as the info-graphics equating Black death with financial prosperity apparently are going up.

Does anybody else see how fucked up that is?

If even the United States Marine Corps, hardly a bastion of liberal values, can understand the need to stop memorializing the fucking Confederacy and thus enabling racism, what in the fuck kind of excuse does Fox News have?

Just a little context here, but nearly every Marine I have ever met is at least a little bit of a history buff, and many of them have in fact been or at least started out as Southerners and had more than a passing familiarity with Confederate statues and the Lost Cause narrative. If these people fucking get it, that promoting this stuff does not benefit anybody, what in the hell is your excuse?

There is no excuse for this bullshit anymore.

As we have witnessed in recent weeks, our society is still abusing Black people, and in fact if the cops had their way, it'd abuse anybody that crossed its path whether they be an old man protesting, or simply a little girl carrying her groceries and minding her own fucking business.

And if we, as a people, do not get the cops back on the leash, held accountable by and responsible to the people they're supposedly protecting, it's going to rip our country and our society apart. The Republican Party, far from the party of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, might as well re-cast itself as the party of Robert E. Lee...or perhaps Josef Stalin. It's nothing more, at this point, than a rogue bad actor given power and determined to use it to either enslave all the rest of us, if they can, or profit from the downfall of the United States of America if they cannot.

And for the life of me, I don't know how in the hell anybody thinks that is either conservative, or Christian, except of course that Fascists and racists always claim to revere Christianity until the moment they're actually asked to practice it themselves, or recognize the Christianity or humanity of other human beings.

The fate of the clergy and protesters at that Episcopal church Trump wanted to use for a photo op should disabuse anybody with ears to hear and eyes to see of the idea that Trumpism is Christian.

But of course, we've beaten this shit before, whether at Gettysburg or Omaha Beach....or in the 2018 election for that matter.

And if the continuing pressure of the protests and air of panic from the President and the White House is any indication, we will again, but we have to keep on these fucking people and we cannot afford to be complacent even for one second.

Yesterday, the President said some dumb shit at a press conference and released job statistics that said damned near right on the front of them that they were bullshit and the press spent much of yesterday afternoon talking about the dumb shit and touting a 3% decline in Unemployment that didn't even exist in real terms. Thankfully, a hell of a lot of people kept their nose to the grindstone and didn't notice the play, much less care.

We are up against people who want you...even, maybe especially if you're white...to trade your freedom for some chump change, jingoistic slogans and racism and who have no problems with pushing conspiracy theories, false religions and outright lies if it'll get the job done. These fucking people, up to and including Donald Trump, are not your friends and would gladly let you die if it saved them a dime.

Today is the 76th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.

Do yourself and everybody else a favor and just keep fighting the fucking fascists. We can't take a break, we'll sleep when we're dead.

Part Four.
Part Six.

Addendum: Jeff Sessions shot off his mouth today, talking about Doug Jones voting to remove the names of Confederates from United States Armed Forces installations, as if such were a bad thing.
It's the middle of my work week and I haven't felt much like writing the last couple days, but I couldn't let that pass. I was going to write something new, but then I thought about it, and I thought this held up pretty fucking well.

Fuck the Confederacy, and in case you didn't hear me the first time, FUCK THE CONFEDERACY.

Jeff Sessions is speaking up in defense of a nation that lasted for less than a third of the time that I've held my current job, or for about half the length of time that Barack Obama was President.

The Confederate States of America had as its entire stated purpose the defense of the institution of Slavery. That was the basis of their entire society, and if you don't believe me that's Okay, you don't have to. Simply go and look at what the Confederates themselves fucking said.

What other nation that only existed for a few years is this celebrated?

No one except a few people of certain ethnic groups in Nigeria mourns Biafra, no one in the Democratic Republic of the Congo mourns for Katanga, and nobody but Vietnamese Americans particularly cares about the Republic of Vietnam. Why is the Confederate States of America so special?

Let me ask you a question; Does anybody outside of the United States honor the Confederacy, and if so, who?

....

Apartheid-era South Africans...as well as their racist Boer ancestors did, that's who.

The British-built Confederate commerce-raider CSS Alabama, captained by Raphael Semmes, used Cape Town, Simon's Town, and Saldanha Bay in South Africa as bases on their South Atlantic and Indian Ocean raiding cruises. Southerners and Afrikaners got along famously, enough so that there are memorials to the Alabama and its crew throughout the Western Cape...though fewer now than there once were. Just as the Confederates themselves composed the sea chantey "Roll, Alabama, Roll!" the Afrikaners composed a song called "Daar Kom Die Alabama" (Here Comes The Alabama) after they heard that the ship had been sunk at Cherbourg by the USS Kearsarge.

Think about that for a second. Just think about it.

I've been reading about and studying the American Civil War since I started to learn to fucking read. I've been a student of this history almost since before I was a student of anything else. There was no nobility in the Southern cause, which was entirely the "right" to own other human beings and profit from their unpaid labor.

Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and many of the Confederate generals for which ten United States Army bases have been named should have been hanged for treason, and under the aegis of Reconstruction every aspect of Southern society that was based on racism should have been forcibly dismantled under the muzzle of the musket. Abraham Lincoln was far too merciful, and none of these fucking people ever accepted his offer of "With malice toward none, and charity for all" except in the most bitterest possible terms.

And the American response should have been to smack these fucking people right in the mouth and tell them "You want to be mad? I'm a give you a reason to be mad" just like my Grandma told me when I was a kid, if I copped a bad attitude when I got in trouble for something I did.

If these fucking people won't let that shit go 155 years later, maybe it's time the rest of us revisit the issue as well, but not on their fucking terms.

Make them face what the fuck they are, and what their ancestors really did.

If they want to commemorate the Civil War and the courage and honor of the soldiers, we should offer to replace every statue of a Confederate, free of charge, with a statue of a Black person that was a decorated United States Armed Forces member, from the 54th Massachusetts regiment of volunteer infantry all the way up to the present.

Faced with that offer and a choice of "take it or leave it, but no more traitor statues" I bet you money they will rip down their own statues with their own hands and demand that none be put up to replace them, because as with everything else they'd rather have nothing than share their illustrious "history" with Black people.

Because it was never about courage or history or honor, it was about racism.

And anybody who tells you otherwise is either a fool or a liar.