Reimagine & Rewrite

We've been watching the PBS presentation of The Civil War. It's all so familiar that I realized last night that I watched the same presentation 25 years ago. With every battle I still have a strange, futile, politically incorrect and almost treasonous, but lifelong sense of us against them and of relief when we rout the yankees. As the narrator said last night, with every Southern heart I still believe that when George Pickett asks his reluctant superior for the third time, “General, shall I advance? Shall I advance? Is it your desire that I proceed? nod your head,” General Longstreet, who sees full well the slaughter that is about to take place in this worst military move of all time, has talked General Lee out of this incredible blunder and shakes his head, “No.”

In an instant every history book will tell the story as it really happened. It's a strange feeling, like my hope that with this telling, Admiral Kimmel will have ordered the fleet to sea early Saturday, and our battleships will engage the Japanese carriers such that there's nothing afloat for Jap planes to land on when they return from their burnt run over Pearl Harbor. It's my mind meddling with history: Pontius Pilate releases Jesus and sends him home to Galilee. What about the past two thousand years? What about our hymn for next Sunday, "Take up your cross" -- Cross??

Long years ago in Look magazine, or was it The Saturday Evening Post – I read a story about time travel into the past. People could travel back and see the dinosaurs. But you could only look. Your visit was carefully orchestrated by the sponsoring company, with paths laid out for paying travellers to walk on, and you pledged and were cautioned not to step off the path. In the story, which may have been a serial over several weeks, it was national election time, and a good, wise and gentle president had just been elected to everyone's relief, over the other candidate, a brutal despotic monster who would have forced a fascist dictatorship on the nation. In the story, a traveller accidently trips off the path, stepping on a bug and crushing it. Well, he thinks, it was only a bug. But he returns to modern day to hear the travel agent exclaim, “Damn you,” and on the counter sees a newspaper headline proclaiming the victorious election of the fascist strongman.

The Civil War ended in 1865. When I was born in 1935, it had been over the same 70 years as from now back to the 1945 end of World War 2. Seventy years is a short time both in history and in human memory. Shared by my parents and passed on to me, my grandparents' memories and stories of Reconstruction, and their hatred of yankees and “The North” was part of me, of my growing up, of my being. I remember. It's still there: their feelings can still be stirred. It helps to know myself, and to realize that my life would not have been, when I hope and believe that when the story is told this time, our beloved General Lee will see his folly and attack another way, even another day.