[Vision2020] The red herrings are beginning to smell

[Joan Opyr]

Ted of Tacoma writes:

>Um, please explain.  I really don't follow here.  The South lost, OK, yes.
>Lee surrendered, OK, yes.  I don't know about you, but I didn't learn
>anything new today.

>I guess this means that losers and those who surrender have nothing to teach
>us?  Correct me if I am wrong, but you didn't expound much on your lengthy
>thesis.  I think that we would be foolish if we only used what is said by the victors
>in war.  While I am not a historian (but I pretend to be one in this forum)
>I do believe this would be a lousy way to study history.  In fact, there are
>some that say there is often more to be learned in the studying of those
>defeated then those victorious.


If those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, what can/should we learn from Robert E. Lee?  How to fight for a lost cause, surrender nobly to the victors, and then sit back and watch as your reputation is systematically rehabilitated by a defeated people desperate for a restoration of pride and some kind of redemption?  The cult of Robert E. Lee grew after the Civil War.  During the conflict, his reputation was more mixed.  Some Confederate soldiers called him Runaway Lee.  Some criticized his decision to fight the war largely on his own home turf, rather than take the battle to the enemy.  His troops were undersupplied and outgunned.  Their destruction was inevitable.  The Civil War left 640,000 dead and ten million sick or wounded.  At one point, the state of Mississippi spent a quarter of its total annual budget on artificial limbs.  To look at Lee in the years after the war, when poverty was rampant and all was changed, changed utterly, and to say, "He was a noble man.  He was a gentleman.  He represented the best of us and the hope of our cause" was to cling to some shred of pride and dignity that might just make a Confederate soldier's lost legs and lost brothers somehow seem more bearable.

But what does that have to do with us?  Let's put Robert E. Lee back in his tomb.  Moscow, Idaho is not a war torn remnant of Sherman's March.  We're not obliged to gather the tattered remnants of our civic pride and come up with some myth and some mythological figure to whom we can cling while we put all the broken pieces of our lives back together again.  We're a small, progressive, Western town.  The Civil War never laid a finger on us.  If we want to access our mythic past, then all we need to do is pop down to Good Samaritan's Nursing Home and have a long talk with great-grandma.  Our history is accessible because huge chunks of it are still in living memory.  Lucky us.

Paul Kimmell did not choose Robert E. Lee because Lee's leadership offered lessons applicable to businesspeople on the Palouse; he picked him because Lee is a hero of Doug Wilson's.  He picked him because the veneration of Lee is integral to the Christ Church political vision.  Once upon a time, when Doug Wilson said, "Jump," Paul Kimmell asked, "How high?"  Now, sadly, he asks, "Where's the cliff?"

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment   Get more from the Web.  FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
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