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1/A quick thread about the Confederacy, and John Kelly's remarks... nytimes.com/2017/10/31/us/…
2/I grew up in Texas. I had (and have) Texas pride. It always bothered me that Texas had fought on the side of slavery.
3/I asked my dad why we fought on the wrong side. He answered, "we" didn't - I was a citizen of the United States, which was the right side.
4/Furthermore, he said, had our ancestors lived in America rather than Lithuania in 1860, they would have fought for the *right* side.
5/In the late 1800s and early 1900s, America experienced a wave of nationalism that transformed it into a nation in the 20th century sense.
6/That nationalism involved forgiving the South for the Civil War. Rewriting history to make the South's defense of slavery about honor.
7/The Lost Cause became the accepted narrative. Black people were thrown under the bus of revisionist history.
8/In a way, this was a direct result of the desire not to let the South secede. To reabsorb it into America.
You are what you eat...
You are what you eat...
9/It was also a result of the decision to let the South keep its Confederate, pro-slavery culture and institutions in Reconstruction.
10/John Kelly's narrative of history basically just reiterates the bargain America made with the South in the early 20th century.
11/The John Kelly bargain says that the South - the cultural Confederacy, not the physical region - gets to keep its honor and pride.
12/But the popular resistance to Kelly's narrative shows that people no longer want or need this bargain.
13/It took a very long time, but I think most of the country is now willing to accept that the Confederacy were the villains of the story.
14/I predict young Southerners will come to see their heritage not as the Confederacy, but as the United States that defeated it.
I did.
I did.
15/When all the monuments come down, and all the textbooks agree that slavery was what the Confederacy fought for...
16/And when the bullshit lip service to Confederate honor and nobility is met with universal laughs of derision...
17/Then, the United States will truly have digested the conjoined twin that it devoured a century and a half ago.
18/You are what you eat...but not forever.
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