Paul Gottfried, How the Left Conquered the Right

Jacobin Responds To Kentucky Division Tag

Mr. Ramsdell,

Again I will respond [Interlinearly]

On 5/16/2011 12:45 AM, The Loose Cannon wrote:

Dear Mr. Childress,

I tried to read through all of your response, please know I honestly did.  There certainly were parts I enjoyed – like the story about your brothers funeral, and the story at the end about the old boss and the 1^st cavalry sticker. These stories were eloquent and personal and they spoke from the heart and I honestly appreciate your sharing them. 

I really don’t think I am a Puritan/Yankee/Hegelian/Marxist/Fascist just because I disagree with the need for a Confederate Flag vanity plate; and you lose me in this line of reasoning.  I will concede you have taken my comments in a direction I did not intend, but I will suggest to you that I understand from your e-mail how personal your desire to honor the fallen confederate solders are.  [I'ts hard to know where to begin a response, but I am curious why you are so concerned that I know you tried.  It really doesn't matter what you think (you mean to say believe rather than think-- I can believe I'm the emperor of the world all day long...but if no one recognizes my authority in such regard...my belief counts for nothing.  We are all given a "filter" through which we see the world.  It is taught to us by the stories we are told about what came before us and what those events mean in the way of a moral/ethical point.  It shapes how we believe the world works and what we should be doing in it.  Because of this that filter mysteriously then shapes reality and the particular human cultures sharing a particular view of reality and is why memory and the telling of stories growing out of memory are so important for the continuance and existance of human communities.  There is hardly anything more difficult, dangerous and threatening than looking critically  at the filter a person has been given by which one makes sense of the world (reality).  Even more dangerous is what we believe we know but don't  It is for this reason that the first critics of the societies in which they found themselves were philosophers (philosophy being the first science) and why political philosophy was one of its first great aspects.  The modern world is dominated by political postulates that grew out of enlightenement philosophy and burst upon the world through the English/French and American Revolutions....the French being the most important or at least the most influential.  It was dominated by folks called Naturalist Romantics...who emphasized human feeling and sentiment..your latest response reflects that in your praise of my heart felt stories.  It does not therefore surprise me at all that you can't see how you reflect the ocean in which you swim.  It's quite natural and because "feeling" won out over reason ( or what passes for it today) Quite simply we live here in the modern era dominated as it is by the postulates of the French Revolution.  If you desire to begin to wrap your head around some of this stuff apart from what I"ve already provided or cited I would refer you to a book by MIchael Schama called Citizen, a chronical of the French Revolution.  Pay particular attention to the epilogue.

The above comments are why I included the PS to to which you reacted with appreciation that included those stories.  But did you really digest the import?  It is beyond my power to make you understand (and wouldn't if it were....the pursuit of power is part of the problem).  I have already included more material than you can wade through as it is, just on a practical level.. I can speed read, most folks can't.. but even if you shared that ability with me...these are matters that require deep reflection.  So I appreciate your trying to read through it all while saying at the same time that simply trying is not going to "get the job done".  We are out of time.  I don't think you or the vast majority understand fully what's happening the roots of same and what it means for where we are headed. Having said that I'm attaching an exchange I had some years ago very relevant to this discussion I had back when NASCAR was trying to get rid of the Redneck racist element from that sport, spurred by Jesse Jackson and the NAACP's most recent atttempt at blackmail inspired by Dale Earnhart Jr's joining that program some years back with comments he made springing from some of the same motivations you seem to share.  Of course today, with attendance and TV viewership having fallen off tremendously, in no small measure due to the backlash it inspired,  NASCAR has quietly largely abandoned that effort.

Even after reading your reply, I still don’t see the need and still do not agree.  [Not surprised and not trying to get you to agree.  It is irrelevant whether you do or don't.  What's about to unfold is going to unfold whether you understand it or agree with it or not.  As Richard Weaver wrote a half century ago in a work called Ideas Have Consequences.  It's simple. we refuse to be forgotten by being barred from the public space via that set of Jacobin ideals whose purpose is political dominance and control by banning any speech that doesn't conform with their assumptions

First, I would suspect there are better ways to honor them, to honor both sides, and fallen veterans of all the wars than simple license plate.  Personally, I also believe there are better ways than just stone monuments too.  This can be done ways like educating future generations about more than how and where the battles were fought but also the reasons behind them, both rights and wrongs on each side.  Teaching about the lessons of history in the stories of honor and bravery and committing one’s self to a larger noble cause. [Anything I suspect that wouldn't involve display in the Confederate battle flag...but eventually it all goes down the memory hole, because that's the object for political purposes...I am copying this response to a couple in the leadership of the SCV so they can ponder that we've been doing it wrong all these years and that one distressed by the public display of one of our symbols has our better interests at heart]

Second, I fear you either missed or totally dismiss why I object to the plates.  Perhaps this is my fault – I was not as eloquent as you were in my e-mail.  The confederate flag stirs emotions on several levels with people; this is evidenced by the email response from you.  Right or wrong, it represents different things to different people. [Symbols do that..it's unavoidable and the argument is always about meaning as you go on to remark next]  For some it is a symbol of freedom and independence, while for others it is a symbol of slavery and oppression.  (Understand my only point on the swastika was --the symbolism-- not to compare you, your group or the even confederacy to the Nazis. I regret you did not take it that way) [perhaps you didn't intend it, but the inference was there and is quite prevalent today]

You will probably tell me why it doesn’t stand for any of that, but you cannot truthfully deny it evokes those passions in other people who are also citizens of the state. [well obviously it stirs passions.. disagreements as to meaning always do I don't recall making any assertion that would deny such evocation.. just like nothing you've received from me has denied that the issue of slavery wasn't a crucial component of the matters in contention.  And it stirs those passions because it all has been distorted for the political benefit of those whose power is protected by such distortions]

What I will suggest to you, is that for me personally, it represents a symbol of a time where we lost track of the true ideal’s and true purpose of our country’s destiny. [I actually agree..but it wasn't the South that lost track, it was the revolutionary north..and we're still suffering from the loss see below].   (It is not the only time this has happened in our history and as you seem to suggest, there is some of this going on today as well too perhaps.)  This is true for states on both sides, but Kentucky especially, because of its unique relevance in the Civil War, both Presidents of that time came from here and Kentucky was pretty much in the middle of it all.  Symbolically, both confederate and union flags had a star for Kentucky, this state truly represented neighbor vs. neighbor and brother vs. brother.  [So what is your standard?  That nothing that generates contention should be allowed in the public space....ok well then let's get rid of government and politics altogether.. of course that would require getting rid of people or at least their living in close proximity to one another... it is the disagreements people have with one another regarding the proper ends and means (those true ideals and purposes as you put it) for the "human project" that generate divisions.  The other alternative is that suggested by the French Revolution... accept our political program and analysis or be exteminated.  Of course that involves extinguishing any memory of any other possible view and for those who refuse to quit remembering, their murder, hence the slaughters that have occurred in those societies who have fully adopted Hegelian/Jacobin logic and it is that idea that stands behind the objection to an SCV car tag - a Jacobin stance growing right out of what I just identified - so whether you believe you are one or not, you are expressing not an American view, but a French Revolutionary one.  And is this an admission that your comments that Kentucky wasn't a confederate state were in error?]

See, I believe (and please feel free to disagree) regardless of the Puritan/Yankee/Hegelian/Marxist/Fascist concerns you may have, that this country “The United States” has done more to lift up individual freedoms, liberty and justice than any other country on earth, and can and will continue to do so.  I feel we are at our best when we find ways to unite and achieve the higher causes and achieve greater things.  Not when we are divided and killing each other. This is just how I see it. [Again you may believe what you like, but if you're right continuing the lifting up of individual freedoms, liberty and justice cannot continue if we continue to pursue Jacobin ideals.  All the isms fighting with one another in the modern era are offshoots of or reactions to the French Revolution.  Allow me to cite a quote - had you actually digested all that I sent you rather simply trying to do so you would have encountered this in the links I provided earlier, specifically this one in the reference material at the end> http://www.fireeater.org/Pages/Vol_II_2010/912speechRichmond_09Sep2010_bazz.pdf.

Benjamin Rush confided to Timothy Pickering, who served as Secretary of State under
Presidents Washington and Adams: “But Alas ! my friend, I fear all our attempts to produce
political happiness by the solitary influence of human reason, will be as fruitless as the search for
the philosopher’s stone. It seems to be reserved to Christianity alone to produce universal, moral,
political and physical happiness…. I anticipate nothing but suffering to the human race while the
present systems of paganism, deism and atheism prevail in the world.”[ix] As no less than John
Adams admitted to Rush: “Have I not been employed in mischief all my days? Did not the
American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce
all the calamities and desolation to the human race and the whole globe ever since? I meant well,
however…” 

Indeed, when Nixon went to China lo these many years ago now.  Chinese premier Chou En Lai was asked by a reporter what he thought about the French Revolution.  He responded - "It's too soon to tell"

As an aside I had an opportunity a few years ago to meet and speak at some length with a man named Yuri Maltsev, who was an economic advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev during the period when the Soviet Union was falling apart. Maltsev was enamored with the confederate flag tie I was wearing.  He is an example of Europeans who have lived under one of the political systems that are offshoots of the Jacobinism you don't see or understand.  They are astonished at how America is headed down a road that has already proved itself to be an enemy to liberty and are quite aware the South is the real source of those political ideals that oppose the modern penchant for political murder in the name of revolutionary fervor.  I am inserting a picture from the Berlin Wall as the communist east Germany was collapsing  note the flag flying toward the middle of the picture.

 

 

Today the confederate battle flag still remains a symbol of these divisions; this is even evidenced by our email exchange.[The CBF is a symbol - you say simply of division.  But what is the division over?  That's the critical question.  I have given you enough to begin trying to sort it out...but no one can do that for you.  You are going to have to chew on it all however discomfiting that my be and it is discomfiting, because it requires you question everything the existing political environment wants you to believe and that you uncritically have bought into is quite wrong.  I am going to provide some more material available in the links I"ve already sent you to close in a PS underneath you closing.  Thanks for the well wishes...we are going to need all the help we can get...because we (the United States) are doomed unless we manage to escape the nonsense that now dominates modern political discourse.

Thank you for your reply Mr. Childress, I truly wish you well.

M. Ramsdell

PS-  And to push Penn’s comments a bit more it could be said that the ”American Civil War”, was in fact the pivotal event in world history as it has developed since what is known as the Enlightenment.”

Here is what Os Guiness, philosopher and religionist, says about that era and what produced the current ongoing ferment that began around 1500 AD,
“The Enlightenment has its own unmistakable identity, but both it and the Renaissance opposed Christianity and consequently accelerated the forces of modernity. …. If the legacy of the Renaissance is humanism, then the contribution of the Enlightenment is paganism.
The eighteenth century came in on a wave of irony and satire, exalting the trivial, ridiculing the noble and attacking anything which previous centuries had been taught to believe, revere or love. …...
As time went on the questions became more far-reaching and the criticisms more uncompromising…until the break between reason and revelation was finalized……[Little wonder then]…The eighteenth century went out amid wars of revolution and the nineteenth century was ushered in by the campaigns of Napoleon. ….Man was not only the measure of the world he knew but the measure of the world of which he dreamed. ….”

 Those campaigns of Napoleon moved to North America and were carried on the bayonets of Lincoln's boys in blue.

It might be helpful to hear an excerpt from scholar Eugene D. Genovese (a lifelong communist), in his
book, The Southern Tradition-The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism.
“…[Today] We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity.....Southerners are being taught to forget
their forbears or to remember them with shame …. The northern victory in 1865 silenced a discretely
southern [viewpoint]....[and] sanctified northern institutions and intentions......in consequence, from
that day to this, the southern-conservative critique of modern Gnosticism[s] has been wrongly equated
with racism and white Supremacy.........To speak positively about any part of this southern tradition is
to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. ….. From the
beginning of my academic career in the 1950s, I have argued that the Left would have to learn some
hard lessons from southern conservatives if it were ever to rescue itself from the overt totalitarianism
of Stalinism and the disguised totalitarian tendencies that infect left-liberalism and social democracy.
The hard lessons I have had in mind, which especially concern the Left's rosy view of human nature
and the irrationalities of its radical egalitarianism [which is the philosophy that won in the American
Civil War], …… For "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" requires that those of us who spent
our lives in a political movement that piled up tens of millions of corpses to sustain a futile cause and
hideous political regimes have a few questions to answer….[The "modernization" of the South] has a
price that northerners, southerners and blacks will rue having to pay. That price includes a neglect of,
or contempt for, the history of southern whites, without which some of the more distinct and noble
features of American national life must remain incomprehensible…….”

---

From: Bazz Childress
Sent: Sunday, May 15, 2011 12:24 PM
To:
Subject: Re: Group Pushing Kentucky Confederate License plates.

From: The Loose Cannon
Sent: Friday, May 13, 2011 7:04 PM
To:
Cc:
Subject: Group Pushing Kentucky Confederate License plates.

Mr. Loose Cannon,

I am in receipt of your comments below (sent as above)....My response to your comments will be interlinear and [bolded in brackets]

Gentleman,

Group pushing Confederate heritage license plate in Kentucky 

Saw the above story on the news…[well I suppose there are those who make news and those who watch it]

Forgive me if I am not speaking to the right people, but I find the push for a confederate license plate in the state of Kentucky extremely distressing.  [seriously?  Why on earth our desire to have such a car tag would distress you is mystifying.  That mystification is increased by its stated extremity.  Such a statement though is made more understandable by considering that you may be (in that you write and argue like one) of the very many individuals who these days seem to have been infected with the Hegelian/Marxist elan that has come to dominant today's education establishment.  I know because I have corresponded with many of them over the years.  They all exhibit loose thinking (hence the appropriateness of your email address) poor logic  and if I may mix a metaphor, muddy thinking exhibited by those who have adopted such an ideological viewpoint.  As professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina named Clyde Wilson has put it (underling for emphasis mine).

I am reminded of this words I included in a Kentucky Confederate Memorial day speech almost 3 years ago.. written to a young Texas college student

the narcissism, [the self-centeredness] to which you’ve already admitted, which is the natural and inevitable by-product of the new dogma. The source of that dogma – [is] the philosophizing that grew out of the Enlightenment – particularly the Naturalist Romantics, who encouraged the idea that Tradition and the governments that had come from long human experience had imprisoned humanity. The solution was to toss it all and begin to look inward – to what the human soul could create “on its own”.

http://camp100.blogspot.com/2008/11/confederate-memorial-day-speech-1-june.html

And this quote from another speech regarding that Hegelian/Marxist elan I just mentioned from Clyde Wilson professor emeritus of history at the University of South Carolina

"A true history is interested in making something of the past as a whole that will be both true and useful…..Perhaps we now face the inevitable distortions of our Civil War “re-founding”, which prevents us from seeing the truth. That re-founding necessarily involved a shift from tradition to ideology, and from history as a search for antecedents to history to history as an unfinished agenda: i.e., from things as they were to things as one might have wished them to be, from the living community and its real experiences to a hypothetical community and its fictitious past.,,,,,

…There is a vast difference between the writing of an American history that is a synthesis [and the modern distortions]….

The second re-founding is inextricably bound up with the Marxist élan which has pervaded a good part of the professional historical community….this is the critical problem in the survival of history [memory] as discipline….[and without memory there can be no human society. (I will pick this last point up later in  a PS at the end of my reply)].

but for now more from professor Wilson on the foundation in this country of the origins of that turn to revolutionary ideology

The Yankee Problemhttp://www.lewrockwell.com/wilson/wilson12.html
I am using the term [Yankee] historically to designate that peculiar ethnic group descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant for ordering other people around. Puritans long ago abandoned anything that might be good in their religion but have never given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their own image.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, raised a Northern Methodist in Chicago, is a museum-quality specimen of the Yankee — self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing. Northern Methodism and Chicago were both, in their formative periods, hotbeds of abolitionist, high tariff Black Republicanism. The Yankee temperament, it should be noted, makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought into the Deep North by later immigrants.
The ethnic division between Yankees and other Americans goes back to earliest colonial times. Up until the War for Southern Independence, Southerners were considered to be the American mainstream and Yankees were considered to be the "peculiar" people. Because of a long campaign of cultural imperialism and the successful military imperialism engineered by the Yankees, the South, since the war, has been considered the problem, the deviation from the true American norm. Historians have made an industry of explaining why the South is different (and evil, for that which defies the "American" as now established, is by definition evil). Is the South different because of slavery? white supremacy? the climate? pellagra? illiteracy? poverty? guilt? defeat? Celtic wildness rather than Anglo-Saxon sobriety?
Unnoticed in all this literature was a hidden assumption: the North is normal, the standard of all things American and good. Anything that does not conform is a problem to be explained and a condition to be annihilated. What about that hidden assumption? Should not historians be interested in understanding how the North got to be the way it is? Indeed, is there any question in American history more important?

for an answer I would recommend the book review  linked in the below
http://www.fireeater.org/Pages/LT_Content/Yankee%20Babylon/YB_2.html

and this speech given last month in honor of Confederate Memorial month (April across the deep South) sponsored by the Bell County Kentucky Historical Society http://www.fireeater.org/Pages/Vol_1_2011/PDF/Bell%20County%2028%20April%202011.pdf

after 1865 the French natural romantics and the German romantics in reaction to the French conjoined- in the afermath of the northern victory, France's class politics conflating with German racial politics. ...both of which tried to explain the South's fight in the terms of their perverse understandings.  It is past time to cast them off. To the degree that the New South has essentially adopted the Yankee narrative is the measure of the degree of our current troubles and is why we so desperately need to recover ourselves and cease trying to out Yankee the Yankees.  America's naturalist romantics were centered in New England and were a large part of how the Puritans [those folks whose rebellious nature lopped off the head of English King Charles I not unlike the French murdered Louis the 16th during the Terror of the French Revolution a century or so later, because they shared so much affinity in believing revolutionary violence was a positive good which is still with us today and in fact shapes our world

to continue though with your comments

First, I doubt any of you are actually sons of the veterans that served, as we are several generations removed from the war. [This is meant of course to be a disparagement, but instead it just reveals how silly and shallow your thinking is, more on this below regarding your swastika comments)  Second, while there were soldiers in Kentucky who fought on both sides, Kentucky was in fact - not a confederate state. [Again a comment that examples ideologic rather than historical thinking.  You don't want Kentucky to have been a Confederate State therefore it cannot have been....Of course it was....the Confederate Congress admitted Kentucky as such on 10 December 1862, after Kentucky Secession convention in the prior month...which represented the vast majority of the existing Kentucky counties at the time in Russellville, Kentucky in the face of occupation by federal armies.  However much it may distress you that is an historical fact..whether Kentucky would be a member of the CSA or USA depended on who won the war] It is very sad to me to see a celebration of our country’s divisions, [perhaps, but those divisions were present from the beginning, resulted in a war and have not and will not disappear whatever your desires or emotion about them may be] rather than a one that focuses on the principles that unite us. [precisely, such unity requires a shared metaphysical dream as Richard Weaver put it.... the sharing of which we have not had for a long time  hence this exchange between us]] I realize you may long for the old days of the antebellum south and perhaps you wish that the south would have triumphed at Gettysburg, but it is really time to move on - it’s the 21^st century nowadays..[no I/we don't long for a return to the past, but instead wish for a present not dominated by intellecutally dishonest ideology devoted to revolutionary fervor and violence.   The whole world would be better off had the South won its independence...and the 21st century looks as if it is going to be dominated by the self same issues fought over so long ago now, unless you are not paying attention to today's politics]

I actually have no argument with you preserving the history as we need to learn from it, but your argument that somehow the confederate cross has nothing to do with slavery is at best disingenuous.[... but of course you do have a problem....in that you are arguing to keep from view one of those historical symbols]

I hope you can understand, while you may not see the connection with the symbolism of the Southern Cross, many others do. [The issue of course is what does the symbol mean-- from the Bell County speech see below

Seeing through lies..to see that the philosophical foundation of today's politics is one massive deception .. that has put the human soul into the service of evil.... involves replacing one mythology which is to say one way to tell a story, a narrative that tells us what the events of the past mean - for quite a different one -- such is religious in its depth and is why we are sitting on a powder keg if the truth ever becomes fully understood. That understanding can only come from some brutal honesty.  The core contention at the heart of American politics is this question; What is the nature of the US Constitution? - a strictly constructed and interpreted document or the fluid one that allows the federal
government to be as Woodrow Wilson said, "the arbiter of its own powers", won on the battlefields of the 1860s, that allows the Corporate/Government partnership to work. For we are truly owned by corporate interests backed up by the political power of the state.  Alexander Hamilton (north) wanted that arrangement and Thomas Jefferson (South) warned constantly against it. That Hamiltonian arrangement's operation has always depended on slavery/race politics (the poles of which are occupied by White Supremacists and the Multi-Culturalists who are each trapped in a worldview that is not Southern); that is the red herring behind which Hamilton won and Jefferson lost. Such race politics must be transcended if we are to see the real and continuing contentions. (Which are over that question of the powers of the federal government; their nature, their extent, their source and to what purpose exercised). The issues have inevitably resurfaced, as Jefferson Davis predicted....along with all the deceptive distractions that have
always been used to hide the real divide.  Preventing such different understanding is precisely why such efforts are made to brand Jeffersonian politics as Nazi….that and the old “race” subterfuge comprising the type of misdirection that has worked for so long. Indeed, the extent of the attempt to keep that branding active is the thermometer
of American politics….the more The People oppose their New England inspired masters…the more one will hear screaming about racists and traitors.

By the way - NAZI (na - tsi) are the first two syllables from how the German word national is pronounced from the name of Hitler's party, the NSAP. National (Na Zi onal) sozialistische Arbeiter Partei --- National Socialist Workers' Party.. we've come to call movements of that sort fascist, but fascism is really an old old ancient stance toward the world and the humans in it.  But today from an economic standpoint Fascism is triumphant in that the Nazi's economic program is in fact that Hamiltonian Mercantilist system Thomas Jefferson and the South opposed so long - put in place finally in this country by the original (real) Republican Party (the one that can't stand the Jeffersonian Tea Party bunch in its midst today) and neither have the Marxists who fought over Germany in the 1920s and 1930s…But almost all are Marxists or Fascists now - since their template for viewing the world is the one that regrettably now provides the filter through which we fashion what we believe to be reality.  We simply must get rid of that filter's influence --- and move toward understanding that the cause of the South truly was the cause of us all….that last cause for human liberty in opposition to a coercive controlling attempt to steal easily and make everyone live a lie.

It is like saying the swastika has nothing to do with concentration camps. [This of course reveals that you have no understanding of political theory and history....Hitler detested the cause of the South  and argued against it strenuously, taking the side of Lincoln and the consolidationists in Mein Kampf]

Perhaps Kentucky should issue swastika plates too?  I would hope you are not in favor of this too. [ This is a gratuitous ignorant insult see above .....which you may see if you actually take the time to read what I"ve included, which you won't...see below]

While I suspect you disagree with me, I prey you can at least begin to consider and understand the other side. [this comment is so typical of what I have said up to this point about the Puritan/Yankee/Hegelian/Marxist/Fascist and prior correspondences I have had with those holding the world view you exhibit and the illogic and hypocrisies involved in that they refuse to consider they are the pot calling the kettle black -- the problem is we do understand the other side and consider it to be quite in error]

http://www.fireeater.org/Pages/Vol_II_2010/912speechRichmond_09Sep2010_bazz.pdf

With all the ills is the world – is this the really best battle you can fight in your life?  [there is no important service to render than combatting the worldview, which is the perspective from which you write......]

Kentucky has several real issues like, [you of course of the arbiter of the real] educating its children it could use a hand with. [We might be better off if Kentucky rather than the US dept of Education was educating its children.  In any event that poor education system produced Robert Penn Warren who once remarked thus in a famous book called The Legacy of the Civil War a portion excerpted below]

"If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history, automatically redeemed. He has in his pocket…a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history…[an absolution that produced]………Moral narcissism -- a peculiarly unlovely and unloveable trait ..Historians, and readers of history too, should look twice at themselves when the Civil War is mentioned.

[That War] means that we should seek to … try to learn what the contemplation of the past, conducted with psychological depth and humane breadth, can do for us….[such is] …a discipline, both humbling and enlarging, [which]….cannot give us a program for the future, but can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future."

It consistently scores in the bottom ten states.

Areas of the south have been hammered by tornados and areas of your own state are flooded. [Yes I"ve already contributed through our Southern organizations relief monies..indeed there was a recent salon piece about how the private response by Southernors to the event could be an example about how church based culturallly strong, societies deal with the tragic..comparing Alabama to Japan's dealing with its earthquake with quiet stoic determination]

God gives us only so much time on the planet – it is sad if this is the really best you can do with your time.

Fight the battles that help people – on this is we are ultimately judged. [Judging and recommending to another how they should live their life is of course is that enterprise Yankees undertake in God's stead... judge yourself....We are doing what we think important......I guess you'll have to accomodate somehow the distress that creates] cuz we ain't goin' anywhere

M. Ramsdell

Kentucky Resident

PS ---  the issue memory.. portions of an email from someone asking why we remember veterans.. all not just Confederate

Memory (specifically what is remembered and how the stories in which that memory is passed on) makes human communities, human cultures. 

And what is there to remember about the human story?  That whether looked at from Hegel's claimed height, or down close to the earth, where one has to bury kin in that cold, hard ground - that story is a tragedy.  Whether a tragedy devoid of any hope, or one with a redemptive capacity depends on how the story gets told - and how the story gets told become the myths (myth is the Greek word for story) on which we stake our "way of living".

Each generation, whether  ably  or  incompetently or in some mixture of the two,  sacrifices itself  (whether we want to  see that  in quite that way or not),  on behalf the  generation to follow.   This is the grand mystical  cycle - the snake swallowing its tail, [see> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros]

Back on 4 Oct 2009 I sent out an email to the list that included this:
 
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=5917  Excerpt:  "...What I am proposing is a complete revaluation of political theory: a return to an extra-political, even metaphysical, foundation for thought about politics. Death—the death not of ourselves but of others—becomes the key for understanding human association when we grasp three propositions about death and politics: (1) The losses human beings suffer are the deepest reason for culture, (2) The fundamental pattern for any community is a congregation at a funeral, (3) A healthy society requires a lively sense of the reality and continuing presence of the dead......"

Of course, soldiers' graves become the markers of humanity's capacity to do evil to one another - but also and at the same time markers of the capacity of some to "stand in the gap" to try and oppose and prevent  the doing of such evil.

That's what makes remembering so difficult.  It all is wrapped up together, the suffering, the hurt, the wrongs - but at the same time the tragically noble willingness to be a redemptive sacrifice... 

That's why I think this story is so telling:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+8&version=NIV

The Faith of the Centurion   

 ⁵When Jesus had entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, asking for help. ⁶"Lord," he said, "my servant lies at home paralyzed and in terrible suffering."

 ⁷Jesus said to him, "I will go and heal him."

 ⁸The centurion replied, "Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. ⁹For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, 'Go,' and he goes; and that one, 'Come,' and he comes. I say to my servant, 'Do this,' and he does it."

 ¹⁰When Jesus heard this, he was astonished and said to those following him, "I tell you the truth, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. ¹¹I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. ¹²But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

 ¹³Then Jesus said to the centurion, "Go! It will be done just as you believed it would." And his servant was healed at that very hour.

And remember, Jesus was the one who said, "greater love has no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends".  I think Christ and the Centurion understood one another.

Let me tell you a story that may help wrap it all up.  When I was not yet 13 years old (August of 1969), my dad's youngest brother, Dean was killed in action serving with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam.  Our family has never gotten over that loss.

That event, for good or ill, has helped shape who I am.  From that moment, I began preparing myself for a career in the military - I began living vicariously on battlefields through reading every war memoir, every military theorist's book(s) on strategy and everything else on which I could avail myself.  At the end, it nearly killed me.

I wanted nothing more than to get to Vietnam and kill the bastards that had killed my uncle.  Stupid, yes quite - but I was a teenager who loved my uncle and wanted the honor that accrues to the hero  --- it takes many years to find out the suffering required for the "heroic act".

Fast forward>>   my dad died in 1991.  His next oldest brother died two years later.  My mother on a visit, brought me some items the family thought Uncle Joe  would  want left with me.   When my mother gave them  to me,  I was sitting in  our family room  with my then  6 year old oldest daughter and my wife.   My mother  put a  hankie in my hand, untied it so it could fall open to reveal the empty brass from the rifles that fired the 21 "gun" salute at Dean's military funeral.   In that moment,  I  was 12 years old again and  weeping instantly uncontrollably - scaring my little girl to death.  She had never seen her dad cry.

Move forward more --- now to 1998.   I am working for a company who has sent its new COO to Lexington.  I am to meet with him and our CFO for supper at Marikka's on Southland Dr. before his first full day on scene at the office the next day.   The  CFO had served in the Air Force at a missile base -- responsible for putting one of the keys in the system to unleash a nuclear attack, had the order come.

The COO as it turned out had been a sniper on a special forces team operating in places they should not have in Southeast Asia (I won't say more than that in a public email) -- and our talk turned to war stories.  During the course of the conversation I told the story which I shared above.   The old sniper, when I was finished looked at me and said, "I understand that perfectly"  and reached into his pocket to retrieve an empty 7.62mm casing -- which he said was off the rifle of his best friend just before that friend's brains were blown out.

There are after all, some things that should not be forgotten - one of which is that as John Wesley said, war is the greatest of human evils  --- and that is true because it puts love for your people in the service of evil.  The nightmare is  - there is no way out of that nightmare. 

And we are left to honor what can be honored, mourn what should be mourned and somehow live through the misery in between.

BDC

PS  --  Ironically I had just shared this story (in a different context) with another of my correspondence last night:

For some reason this reminded me of something that happened a few years ago down in Georgia.

I was invited by my old boss, president of a bank up in Scott County, who is a big horse riding guy to accompany his circle of horse folk to the Chickamauga battlefield to ride as their guide (in my Confederate uniform) on a horse they provided for me.

>From there we traveled to a trailer park where we stabled the horses and cleaned up for the night.  As I got back to my truck from getting my horse in its stall and giving it some carrots and feed, as well as grabbing a shower for myself, a guy who had just arrived, family in tow, pulling a big trailer full of horses behind an Ohio tagged truck, parked across the road from my truck. 

He noticed my 1st Cav sticker on the back of my truck and walked up to ask if I was ex military.  I explained, no that patch was on my truck in honor of my uncle who was killed in action in Vietnam in August of 1969.  This guy immediately started crying - grabbed my hand  and  with tears pouring down his face said,  "that's when I was there with the Cav -- your uncle may have died for me.  Thank you brother."

That's all of which was capable.  He turned and walked away, shoulders heaving.

Basil D. (Bazz) Childress
Kentucky resident and
Cmdr Kentucky Division Sons of Confederate Veterans