Hallowed Ground...
The benefit of age is recognising that history doesn't repeat itself so much as themes do.
Republicans like to think the 1950s were the Golden Age, and certainly most of their "traditional values" appear to have roots in that sorry decade, even if they have none in earlier times. The Fifties were golden, if you happened to be white, male, Protestant, and even more golden if you were above the 50th percentile in income.
In 1956 a middle-aged white Protestant historian named Bruce Catton published a one-volume survey of the Union's Civil War, This Hallowed Ground. Catton -- and a growing number of others -- seemed aware that something was rotten in paradise. All of Catton's histories were illuminated by the understanding that while the fighting had ended in 1865, the war still went on.
One of his more memorable passages concerns the first conflicts between the Western Federal armies and slave owners. Fifty years later, it is just as telling, though the stage is different:
...There was no patience. The slaveholder was driven on by a perverse and malignant fate; he could not be patient, because time was not on his side. Protesting bitterly against change, he was forever being led to do the very things that would bring change the most speedily.
Tom Reilly, Mittsy, and Ah-nold should be reading their Catton. So of course should the leaders of that "base" they are so wary of. What sort of victory is a 2008 ballot initiative, if it holds? Every week, a few more of the most adamant voices and votes against change (the real enemy) pass from the scene. (The outcome of a combination of a cold winter, high heating costs, and a worse-than-average flu season probably keeps people up late at the American Family Association.) Every week, a few more people who have grown up with little or no fear of sexual difference mature, and more and more take the trouble to vote.
Time is not on their side: opponents of change understand that. Their chief hope is that the proponents of change don't.
Republicans like to think the 1950s were the Golden Age, and certainly most of their "traditional values" appear to have roots in that sorry decade, even if they have none in earlier times. The Fifties were golden, if you happened to be white, male, Protestant, and even more golden if you were above the 50th percentile in income.
In 1956 a middle-aged white Protestant historian named Bruce Catton published a one-volume survey of the Union's Civil War, This Hallowed Ground. Catton -- and a growing number of others -- seemed aware that something was rotten in paradise. All of Catton's histories were illuminated by the understanding that while the fighting had ended in 1865, the war still went on.
One of his more memorable passages concerns the first conflicts between the Western Federal armies and slave owners. Fifty years later, it is just as telling, though the stage is different:
...There was no patience. The slaveholder was driven on by a perverse and malignant fate; he could not be patient, because time was not on his side. Protesting bitterly against change, he was forever being led to do the very things that would bring change the most speedily.
Tom Reilly, Mittsy, and Ah-nold should be reading their Catton. So of course should the leaders of that "base" they are so wary of. What sort of victory is a 2008 ballot initiative, if it holds? Every week, a few more of the most adamant voices and votes against change (the real enemy) pass from the scene. (The outcome of a combination of a cold winter, high heating costs, and a worse-than-average flu season probably keeps people up late at the American Family Association.) Every week, a few more people who have grown up with little or no fear of sexual difference mature, and more and more take the trouble to vote.
Time is not on their side: opponents of change understand that. Their chief hope is that the proponents of change don't.
posted by Uncle | 02:01
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