A Summer Sunday's Thoughts Drift South

I'm cutting and pasting passages from the Guttenberg Project site's Personal Memoirs, Vol. 1, by Ulysses S. Grant, to avoid the vision-bustiong drudgery of re-typing all of this text into my own document. It still needs a lot of format editing though, to conform to manuscript submission standards. It's work, particularly for somebody as visually-impaired as I am.

I switch off from Grant to a lighter interest, vampires. Meyer's 4thTwilight book published on the stroke of midnight Friday night, has been big weekend entertainment news. The forthcoming HBO series, True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris's series, also has been big news this weekend. Meyer's books are set in the Pacific Northwest, while Harris's are set in small town northern Louisiana. An interesting cultural contrast there, kind of like Dark Shadows vs. Buffy The Vampire Slayer, in terms of economic class, social acceptance and the place of violence in a society.

The radio's playing the "Tennessee Border" show. This Sunday's program is all songs about cheating on your partner or being cheated on by your partner, or your partner cheating on his / her partner, and how you feel about that. This is the South too. Do the writers of this music live in a milieu where infidelity was more common than in others? But the fans who make this music so popular are religious and concerned with doing right and care about what people think about them. Grant is easier to understand because he knew what he thought about everything and why he thought it.

I have another hero to stand with George Washington now. Grant too was a general, who became POTUS. Unlike Washington, Grant's press has been bad -- part of the historical propaganda strategy by the former Confederacy and sympathizers to discredit the Union and Reconstruction.

This article in Newsweek,"The Mind of the South," says that studying Grant this summer is about the most contemporary thing I could be working on:

[ For many of the hobbyists the delight is in the details, right down to the paper cartridges in their muzzle-loading rifles and handmade buttons on their hot woolen uniforms. "We all know slavery was wrong," says Donald Davidson, whose day job is with the water department in Nashville. "War is not a nice thing. Hopefully we can show we can live together by reliving history like this."

But the subtext of old prejudices keeps creeping in even among the very young. Walking down to The Point one morning, a 12-year-old "private" in this particular Confederate unit told me what he'd heard tell in school about the elections. Next to nothing about McCain. But Obama? "There are too many chances we would take if he became president, you know what I mean?" I said I wasn't sure I did. "I don't know if it's a myth or it's true," said the boy, "but they say that they caught him trying to sneak Iraqi soldiers into the United States."

I remember all the things I heard tell in elementary school in Atlanta during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, when the schoolyard talk was about a Roman Catholic running for president, and the threat that he'd be putting nigras (which is what you said if you were halfway polite) in Atlanta schools. Certainly much of the similar talk you hear now comes from the obvious suspects, people like Dent Myers, a relic collector and self-caricaturing bigot in Kennesaw, Ga., north of Atlanta. (His shop, Wildman's, is full of the crazy literature of the unreconstructed South, as well as guns, swords, Ku Klux Klan hoods and scurrilous bumper stickers.) Dent argues that when Southerners criticize Obama, "They say, 'He's a Muslim, he's a mulatto Muslim, or quadroon Muslim … [only because] they don't want to use the old N word." ]

The conditions of the 19th century, from the Mexican American War and the Second Great Awakening, the Southern slave-owning determination to go to war to expand slavery, through Reconstruction, in comparison and contrast with what this nation's been experiencing since Reagan, throws a light that illuminates better both the past and the present.

I take consolation from history.