I'm in Tupelo for the next couple of nights.
I come through Okolona, on my way up, like I always do and stopped at the cemetery.
You can see there was the usual arson...though it was explained to me recently by an apologist for the empire that hospitals, evne those abandoned by the military one would have to assume, were legitimate military targets.
Considering the size of it, and that it holds soldiers from all over the South...it's not looked after like it oughta be.
More than likely there are soldiers from my ggGrandaddy Garbett's unit. They ended up in north Mississippi before heading on to the Carolinas. Southroners from Texas to South Carolina have people buried there...many of them unknown.
It's these fellas that got my attention today because for some unfathomable reason...some misguided, or worse, soul has placed U.S. imperial flags on the graves of many of these unknown soldiers.
Unless this was a deliberately malicious act...and who knows...I can't begin to comprehend the thought process. They gave their lives and their identity...leave them their dignity!
I was so beside myself I did something that I still feel gross about...I registered a complaint. I emailed the head of the Mississippi Sons of Confederate Veterans to inquire if they had any idea what the....was going on at the Okolona Cemetery.
Hopefully I'll hear something between now and Thursday because if I don't...them flags wont be there on Friday.
I got lots of things to write about y'all. My Daddy's been up and I been with him. This was not on my agenda.
One of the things that's gone without mention around here that shouldn't have was the passing of Levon Helm...from just over the river in Arkansas. At the risk of appearing overly dramatic...this seems like as good a moment as any to fix that.
*
*Worth noting I think that it was Robbie Robertson,a Canadian...with the help of Levon in getting the story right...that wrote this beautiful and utterly respectful song.
That is rather cheeky.
ReplyDeleteI write that from a country whose highly enshrined national flag features another country's flag on it, and whose national holiday marks not its creation as a country, nor any remarkable achievement of its citizenry, but its invasion by the British and its establishment as a penal colony for their unwanteds and political prisoners.
Its secondary national holiday (which is today), is ANZAC Day, commemorating the "noble sacrifice" of its youth on the other side of the planet in one of the most pointless battles in the damnable series of pointless battles that was World War I, fought in the theoretical interests of the country it supposedly became independent from 15 years before.
This place is an ideological wasteland masquerading as a country.
Sorry, I'll get my own blog.
Its pretty easy to turn a cynical eye to almost any countrys national holidays to be honest, we can't choose our history, it is what it is.
DeleteThis whole things a sticky situation...a tarbaby you might say...though you probably ought not. :)
DeleteI can't think of ANZAC day without hearing the voice of a notoriously Irish* fella who was born in England.
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is not a celebratory song...it's sad...the fall of Richmand...the hunting down of Jeff Davis...the grinding deprevation...the loss but, it gives me goose bumps nearly every time I hear it and makes my heart swell with pride.
It's not the result...it's the stand itself that matters. The way it was carried out. The reminder of a resiliance that persists to this day. It works because, according to Robertson, those are the very things that inspired him to write the song.
*Irish identity in the War Between the States is fun one in its own right.
P.S. Sorry again for calling you at a late hour like that.
DeleteWe can and do choose our histories, every day. The Maralinga tests and the Eureka Stockade happened just as surely as Gallipoli and the First Fleet happened.
DeleteBut some things get more enshrined than others, and reinterpreted in different ways at different times, and there are reasons for that that are worth turning a cynical eye on. (No matter how easy it is, and it's particularly easy here.)
In the case of the US the "just say it's about slavery" interpretation of the Civil War has pushed out any equally true interpretations effectively, and there are reasons to eye that interpretation cynically.
Cynicism is great. Without it we're just a bunch of suckers.
O.K I'll clarify what I meant. We cannot choose what has happened in terms of the historical events, but we can be selective about the history we tend and that we smother.
DeleteMy point being, Australia as it is known today was formed by many of these events, are they worse holidays and points of remembrance than any other? Anzac day is just a memorial day for soldiers who died, and that was the first time independant Australians had. The remembrance days in the USA, UK, Canada, and elsewere are equally ridiculous on one level from that point of view, of course it gets overly nostalgic and sentimental, thats just people.
Most public holidays have lost all semblance of original function anyway, and get enshrouded for the selective purpose of idiotic nationalistic drum banging... boom boom. St Patrick anyone... you know, the romana british fella from cumbria who was enslaved by the irish... wait? I shall of course be taking my queens jubilee free holiday anyways :)
I think you've both brought up excellent but different points.
DeleteYou can't choose those moments that speak to identity...like Gallipoli. Events that somehow demonstrate what a people believe to be their best qualities...their finest moment...even if it's a disaster.
Of course, on the other hand...these moments are by their nature exceptional and can't hide the whole picture.
The complete picture of Flimsy Cups is that we have the smartest readers on the blog...and the best looking author.
I posted this before Adam's post...I haven't read it yet. I stand by my assertion.
DeleteI have faith
I don't really disagree, though when I think of all the national holidays I've known the choice of the First Fleet landing for Australia Day is pretty egregiously reinterpretative.
DeleteA common ridiculousness in the Canadian and Australian (can't speak for the others) war holidays is how, now that all the veterans from WWI are no longer in a position to make speeches about how lousy the whole thing was, WWI can be reinterpreted in a light where the important take-home isn't that a generation of teenagers were killed or damaged for no good reason and that it shouldn't happen again, but that back in those days people were willing to lay their lives down when told to do so and were all really good buddies, and that was terrific.
That choice of history, or memory, is one worth being cynical about.
It's happened in Canada as it has happened here, of course, but it strikes me most in Australia at the moment because I live here now, and because it was ANZAC day Wednesday.
In both countries there is debate over how worthwhile it was for the country's identity to be used as colonial cannon fodder. The fact the debate is less emotional in Canada probably has something to do with much of the Francophone population being able to hold a contrarian opinion without anybody being able to tell them it somehow makes them less who they are.
Here, conversely - when I stop being pregnant and responsible I'm thinking of playing a one-woman drinking game and taking a shot every time I hear the word "Unaustralian."
The First World War* carried with it a lot of tension for the South. Here's a sample of what Donald Davidson experienced during his training for the war....
Delete"One summer evening in 1917 when I was among the trainees at the First Officers Training Camp at Fort Ogelthorpe Georgia, the fifteen training companies were marched into a grove, to hear a guest speaker...Federal General John T. Wilder who had commanded a unit of mounted infantry in Rosecran's army...and had waged deadly war against our Confederate forebears..on the very field of Chickamagua where we were then encamped."
"With great pride the old General told of his part in that other War. He dwelt overlong and, it seemed to me, with vicious exultation upon the fact that his mounted infantry were armed with Sharps repeating rifles...and therefore did bloody execution upon the Johnny Rebs...it did not seem to [him]that the young men before him were descendants of the Confederate soldiers he had so gleefully slaughtered....
"Quite the other way in fact. Raising to a fine...climax he made his patriotic point, which was that even as he...had killed Johnny Rebs in great numbers...so should we proceed to kill Germans in equally great numbers."
***** Astounding! Unless you understand the imperial mind. We're all Amurikns now...aren't you thankful you were saved from the folly of your ancestors. You are one of us now...be grateful. They were no better than the "hun"...or the nazi, etc.
Get****
Donaldson went on...
"Frigid silence prevailed when the general took his seat."
*the Spanish American War was especially touchy.
An "icy silence"? Wow, Southerners are polite. A Canadian would have tsked, at least.
DeleteWe are...but the temperature of our heads demands it.
DeleteDavidson spends the next paragraph explaining, just in case the lines above are too tightly packed, that they under military orders...that the boys from Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama had a rather hard time sitting for the rest.
You should seriously look into that...the animosity and sniping between Commonwealth countries is a fascinating subject that's sorely underrepresented on the bloggers.
ReplyDelete:)
It all sounds very a human to me...and as such probably very frustrating to a ideologue :raspberry:.
Australian identity and its military service for the Empire is a fascinating subject. It was 15 years earlier that Morant was executed and he and fellow defendants were being touted as Scapegoats for the Empire.
Maybe I should just write a letter of complaint about it.
DeleteOuch.
DeleteHa! You let us know how that complaint goes..
ReplyDeleteIt gives me the hives just thinking about it...Martha tried to console me by pointing out it was an extreme circumstance. I feel like a Beatnik.
DeleteIt's graves...just don't feel right about snatchin' 'em up without making some effort to find out what's going on. Well...the effort has been made.
I realise it is far from the point of your post, EF, but what on earth is a hoe-cake?
ReplyDeleteFood is never far from the point...*
ReplyDeleteHoe Cakes are simple bread...calling it bread seems fanciful...flour, cornbread, buttermilk, oil. A poor man's poor man's cornbread.
Cotton hoes were big and flat...a lot of times they were used as frying pans for "hoe" cakes.
My Momma cooked them on a stove top but we had hoe cakes for supper often enough when I was a kid.
I think they're called johnny cakes elsewhere.
*I actually have a question for you about the Ford Motor Company in Britain...I'll get to it. :)
Fire away! My poor father worked there for 25 wretched years, so I have 'knowledge'.
ReplyDeleteHoe cakes sound scrummy. Like a Scotch Pancake kind of thing. Mm.
I am coming to this late - 4 weeks late... but anyways I am glad to have arrived.
ReplyDeleteFascinating stuff.
Surely our national holidays are simply a case of 'winner takes all'?
The dominant philosophies get to impose their interpretation.
So the Christians win and powerfully supplant the pagan festivals with their own. Thus Eostre becomes Easter and etc.
Here, in Scotland, the teaching of our own country's history was not part of the school curriculum - we were taught about the Angles and Saxons; about John of Gaunt and Edward the Confessor; and Elizabeth I... But sweet f.a. about what happened north of Hadrian's Wall.
As for Queen Lizzie (the I of Scotland's) Jubilee holiday? I'll take it. Switch off the telly and the radio. And drink a toast to citizenry. There are no street parties in Scotland. And the union jack bunting is already knocked down to a penny.
I am interested in your southern boy's outrage e.f. - you are helping me see the other side. Because I was fed the winner's ideology. And that entailed 'confederates=bad'...
At least they don't call you English.
DeleteConsidering that they tried to teach us the same thing I can guess what you were taught.
A moral crusade to free the slaves and not the first gulp of a rapacious industrial empire. Just remember these same crusaders...these witch burners...once, they had destroyed The South and occupied it, turned their attention to the Plains and got to work slaughtering Indians. Know that Bismark was extremely afraid that his army would go American (meaning become agents of arson and destruction) once it entered France. He can't be blamed considering Sheridan was there telling himm the only way to win a modern war was "to leave THE PEOPLE with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war."
This instance is a nobrainer these are our dead. They died free of the striped rag and there's no reason to sully their sacrafice and disrespect them in this way. These yankees put their filthy hands on everything else down here...they can leave our dead in peace.
I fixed it...with some Confederate Battle Flags. The one directly inspired by St. Andrew's cross.
Yup. Moral crusade. Confederacy evil. As in Star Wars...
ReplyDeleteWhere does slavery fit in then e.f.?
I need to do some learning of my own on this one.
It fits in as what it was...an economic system that was incompatible with and a hinderance to...industrialism.
Delete(Even though the trade had provided a lot of the capital for said industrialization.)
Rather than be marganilized The South seceeded. They took legal steps to separate from the United States as was their right as soveriegn states.
The South depended on trade with the world and the possibility of opening up its ports duty free was an unacceptable economic threat.
There's also the stategic concerns of an independent South able to make its own alliances and its own expansions into Carribean and South America.
So the united states invaded the South, destroyed and occupied it for a decade.
Mmmmm. So, not as economic system that was morally bankrupt, evil, just plain wrong and needing to be ended then?
DeleteThe economy of the South depended upon enslaved human beings. Enforced labour.
The war was provoked by vested financial interests who could see an end to huge profits or a way of life? Yes? No?
If there had been no war do you think that slavery would have ceased? That the constitution would have been amended?
I'm still reading and learning e.f...
You asked how slavery fit in I explained it and we're back to the moral question...the onus of which is always placed on the South...even though it, as a sovereign state was invaded and burnt to the ground by people who profited immensely from the trade while it suited them.
DeleteOf course we'd still have slaves, despite the outrageous cost in comparison mechanized farming.
I'm learning e.f. - try to go easy?
DeleteJust as I don't blame every German for the Holocaust I don't hold "the South" responsible for slavery. Honest.
The Scots are as steeped in blood as any nation - maybe more so - when it comes to slavery. My ancestors ran plantations in the Indies. Not good.
I'm trying to go easy...I really am. I certainly don't want to be ugly.
DeleteJust a couple of things...one, I am not, in any way, making any apology for my ancestors or The South. As you know, The South did not invent slavery, was not the only region to profit from it and, while slavery was the lightning rod...The South asserted her independence for many important reasons.
I doubt you would find much to admire in the so called "fat cats", "robber barons", and "exploiters" of the Gilded Age...above all this was THEIR war.
"We never treated them like THAT." Scarlet O'Hara...Gone With the Wind.
Obviously she has absolutely no reason to apologize for being invaded, for being brutalized during the war and raped for a decade afterwards.
Go through the blog and find the green plaques for a little taste. I live in Chimneyville...as in there's nothing left but chimenies.
In the conduct of her defense...She has much to be proud of.
Secondly councillor, I must object to even the most casual comparison between the antebellum South and any of these insane murderous ideologies of the 20th century. This is a particularly nasty issue because it is a comparison used by certain groups to scrub all reference to The Confederacy from our public life.
The South was fighting against Nationalism and neo-Statism.
Hope I wasn't too unkind.
Straight from the horses ass...
DeleteI have two great enemies, the southern army in front of me and the financial institutions, in the rear. Of the two, the one in the rear is the greatest enemy. I see in the future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war." -- Abraham Lincoln in a letter to Col. William F. Elkins
Prescient indeed. He wasn't just a pretty face then old Abe...
DeleteI know, I know e.f.
The dialetics of power, eh. And all the shades of grey. Winner takes all and rewrites history - placing the emphasis where he gains most.
I always did love ole Scarlet...even as I felt queasy when I thought of Mammy. The South was dealt with hellish bad. Never had any doubt bout that. I do not condone. And I think it is maybe misguided to ever attempt a "simple" explanation of any military action. It wasn't about slavery - any more than Iraq was about Weapons of Mass Destruction. We learn nothing from history. do we.
His morals were as repugnant as his physical features.
DeleteMaybe we should have a review of some of his General Orders.
A military dictator...if it weren't so unChristian I would gleefully speculate on his current whereabouts.
I think people learn too much from history...I think they learn and think they can do it better. Santayana had it all wrong..:).
Omitted to say - I was taught it was all a bit like the Spanish Civil War (my ancestors were International Brigadists) only, in the US, the better guys won...
ReplyDeleteYeah...that's not quite right.
DeleteOne, we did not have a Civil War...the South was invaded. There was no desire on the part of The Confederacy to run the rest of the continent.