A friend was sitting on his porch in Charlottesville this morning and got to witness one final retreat pic.twitter.com/0y6HlaB8Oa
— Clyde McGrady (@CAMcGrady) July 10, 2021
July 10, 2021
There goes Robert E. Lee...
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6 comments:
Narr writes:
"A friend of mine got his JD degree from W & L about 20 years ago; he
recently mocked-up a W & L hat that reads "Woke & Leftie." Caused
some controversy among the alums, apparently."
"You can’t undo the past, no matter how many statues you get rid of."
The decision to make a statue out of someone and place it prominently is in the past, but it's an ongoing choice, and you absolutely can make a different choice about keeping the statue in the location and you can act upon that decision in the present.
As for what happened in the historical events that led to making a statue of this one human being, that can never be completely known, and to attempt to tell the story is to select from the available evidence and to interpret it. That's an ongoing process that continues in the present and while the history told in the past remains in whatever books have been published and those books can't be undone (though they can be lost), there will always be new books, and these are doings, not undoings.
Wayne writes:
"Ironic the song, ‘The Night They Drove Ole Dixie Down’ was written by a Canadian and performed by a (mostly) Canadian band. It couldn’t be performed today and will likely be canceled soon."
I'll say:
I've heard it on the satellite radio recently. I don't think it should be cancelled because it's about the subjective experience of poor people, not any romanticization of plantations.
From Wikipedia:
"Robertson said he had the music to the song in his head and would play the chords over and over on the piano but had no idea what the song was to be about. Then the concept came to him and he researched the subject with help from the Band's drummer Levon Helm, a native of Arkansas. In his 1993 autobiography, This Wheel's on Fire, Helm wrote, 'Robbie and I worked on 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' up in Woodstock. I remember taking him to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.' The lyrics tell of the last days of the American Civil War, portraying the suffering of the protagonist, Virgil Caine, a poor white Southerner.... The song's opening stanza refers to one of George Stoneman's raids behind Confederate lines attacking the railroads of Danville, Virginia, at the end of the Civil War in 1865."
The Band stopped playing the song, but not for any racially correct reason:
"The last time the song was performed by Helm was in The Last Waltz. Helm refused to play the song afterwards. Although it has long been believed that the reason for Helm's refusal to play the song was a dispute with Robertson over songwriting credits, according to Garth Hudson the refusal was due to Helm's dislike for Joan Baez's version."
Ha ha. I can't stand Joan Baez's version. But you know she wouldn't have sung it if it was racially bad.
Ed writes:
"Certainly the present has no choice but to accept the uncertainties of history. But does not that recommend charity rather than intolerance?
"When a good many of the statues went up, more or less the whole of the American people understood that (were it today's population) 6 million young men had lost their lives in settling a terrible and important question. The victors had the sense to recognize some of the finer qualities of the defeated; the defeated had the sense to mourn a cause without pursuing it in guerrilla warfare. We put up statues rather gulags.
"Now we seem to be reaching different conclusions about charity and tolerance, and statues and gulags."
Lars Porsena writes:
"The irony is that Lee's contemporaries in the Union Army held him in high respect if not awe.
"Read Chernow's biography of Grant. Grant was constantly irritated by the Army of the Potomac's soldiers admiration of Lee. After the war, Grant continued to be baffled by historians who ranked Lee higher than himself as a general, even though he had bested Lee. To men on both sides Lee was the apotheosis of a soldier, a military saint.
"Those that risked death fighting him held him in the highest regard. It's only those 150 years safe from from his threat that rage."
Hunter writes:
""The decision to make a statue out of someone and place it prominently is in the past, but it's an ongoing choice, and you absolutely can make a different choice about keeping the statue in the location and you can act upon that decision in the present.”
"In principle, I agree. The problem is that these “different choices” are being made by mobs or by those who are complicit with the mobs. I personally feel totally dis-enfranchised in the process by which these decisions are being made."
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