The South Done Rose Again!

 

Mad Dog was born in Washington, D.C., but he was brought home, swaddled, transported across the Potomac River to his first home, where he spent his first nine formative years, in Virginia. Arlington, Virginia, within bicycle distance of the former home of Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Anna Custis, which was used for the military cemetery after the Civil War.

So, he is steeped in memories of the Civil War, and he grew up running through the woods in Arlington, where he could dig the occasional musket ball or bullet out of a tree, or find some relic of one of the armies which trudged through that cursed land ninety years earlier.

He handled the old pink Confederate dollars, relics treasured by the families of friends who would, with a quiet wink, say, "The South shall rise again, don't you know? And these will be worth something again." There were people still living who had been young during the Civil War. That war was within living memory. It was almost as close to them as World War II is to us now.

Lee Crosses the Potomac: Invasion

And, in a very real sense, they were correct about the South rising again, the Lost Cause being redeemed. 

Through Reconstruction, then Jim Crow, and now unto Donald Trump, the undying resistance, the White nationalist spirit remained unbowed, embers burning, waiting to be fanned into a conflagration.  

Read "Gone With The Wind." Really read it,  and you will find passage after passage where Margaret Mitchell inveighs about the disaster of the Confederate defeat the way Vladimir Putin rues the collapse of the Soviet Empire:  Starving darkies on the street, unable to take care of themselves or their children now that their masters were gone; rapacious freed slaves raping White women and then drinking themselves to death; Corrupt Negroes taking over legislatures and enriching themselves; Negro women given plots of lands from former plantations, unable to manage, and starving alongside their children. That is the real "Gone With The Wind," not the Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable version with swelling musical chords and huge vistas of dark clouds scudding across a windswept sky, spread out over a huge silver screen. No, the actual novel is a  mean, hate filled ode to a Lost Cause, a hymnal to a slave state, of lost aristocracy and plantation life.

Confederate Diaspora

During that war, Lee cross the Potomac to invade the North, first at Antietam and then later on his way to Gettysburg. Neither of those two incursions was particularly successful from the Southern point of view, but now we have a third invasion from the South and maybe the third time's the charm.

Even after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the war was not over until successive Confederate armies capitulated further south, and the White population, particularly the aristocracy, never conceded defeat mentally. They made heroes of the murderous Bedford Forest, who carried on a guerilla campaign, culminating in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan, which Grant had to finally address with federal army forces, but the Southern gentry and the Southern hoi polloi never accepted the fact that White folks should give up their place of privilege in the South.

Tony Horwitz wrote about this in "Confederates in the Attic" and Heather Cox Richardson covered it in two books, "West from Appomattox," and "How the South Won the Civil War."

There have always been signs: Monuments from Richmond to New Orleans with Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis staring out imperiously, forts named after Confederate generals, A.P. Hill, Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood.  Now the War Department, under Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, have renamed those forts with the same names but putatively named after some other soldier with the name Hill, Bragg or Hood, wink wink. 

This was all part of the "Lost Cause," campaign, which taught that the Civil War was not about slavery at all--even in the South, folks knew slavery would be a hard sell to the rest of the country, but no, the Civil War was about a war of Northern aggression, and it was about economics--the South, you see, wanted low tariffs so it could sell its Cotton on a world market, particularly to England, but the North wanted higher tariffs to protect its budding industrialization and factories.  So slaves had nothing to do with it. And racism in the South was not really a thing.  That all reached a peak in the 1950's, the sanitizing of the war. 

Of course, nobody today was alive in the 1850's and 1860's, so we cannot get new testimony, but Lincoln was alive then, and he gave compelling testimony about the cause of the war--it was called his Second Inaugural address:

"And the war came.

One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves not distributed generally over the union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. 

All knew this interest was somehow the cause of the war."

And now, we all know what the cause of MAGA is. 

You can say it's chaos in the cities, the inner cities, which is a dog whistle for those colored folks in the cities are running  wild and we have to seen in the troops to put them down. 

You can say it's that invasion over the Southern border, not by white, blonde South Africans or Norwegians, but by those folks--we don't even have to say it--who are dark skinned--rapists, seeking out white women and selling drugs. 

The odd thing, of course, is MAGA has many Hispanic and Black adherents who do not seem to understand that the MAGA base is White nationalists, or maybe they do but the Hispanic males love machismo and the Black MAGAt's may be suffering from the Stockholm syndrome, figuring if they join Trump, they will be safe.

What's Wrong with This Picture? 

The reveal has been more dramatic recently, with Trump sending troops from Texas to invade Illinois, and from Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama to invade the capital of the Union, where Abraham Lincoln resided, Washington, D.C.

It's no more horses fording the Potomac; they've got big airplanes to transport them and their armored vehicles. 

National Guard from Rebel States and Diaspora 

There must be much smug satisfaction in the Confederacy now: Finally, we have won!