The decision out of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ought to be styled History vs. Mob Rule (2016). For once a federal court order may have calmed and clarified a long and rancorous dispute instead of inflaming it. It's issued an injunction against that city's moving its storied old statues from their customary places in Lee Circle, though this is scarcely the end of a struggle that has gone on even longer than The War itself. It's been not just a legal but a social, racial and political conflict with more than its full share of violence and destruction. An irrepressible conflict, to borrow a view of one historian. Which would make it much like Southern history itself, which, lest we forget, also has its close bonds of shared affection among black and white. not to mention Other now.
Now an appellate court has ruled that the statues of these heroes/villains may not be moved--at least until appeals are exhausted--because of the risk of damaging them. Can this mean Lee and his stoic stone-faced lieutenants have been pardoned? Or will they yet meet their Waterloo, or rather Appomattox? Will they survive to fight another day against improbable odds, much as the Army of Northern Virginia did when it was the last remnant of chivalry in a world on the cusp of death-dealing modernity? Let there be no mistaking: The road from Sherman's March to the Sea to Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been twisted and winding, but it was also inevitable. The way one barbaric act leads to another.
This time the threat to the statues' existence is posed by nightriders of a different color and caste, but with the same lawless ways. Complete with death threats, not-so-mysterious fires, and enough trouble in general to make the contractor chosen to move these graven images back out of the whole deal.
What a Trumpian-sized mess, and there's no sign of its ending any time soon, if ever. For in these parts the past is not dead, it isn't even past. Was it Faulkner who said that? He had us pegged--all of us. Black, white and now Other, a wide-ranging category that includes everybody who ever traipsed through these blessed parts, from Lebanese to Chinese.
If the birth of the blues is associated with Mobile, New Orleans was the birthplace not just of jazz but the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that established the doctrine of separate-but-unequal as the law of the land. Now the vicious fight over moving the statues continues. It's another uncivil civil war. Rise again? Only one thing is sure: the South will fall again.
Here in these ever fecund latitudes, life thrives and decays all around us, leaving only history with all its detritus to remind us of where and who we are. Let's hope we've all learned that King Mob is no more gracious a monarch than George III was. And once again anarchy threatens. For where law ends, there tyranny begins. What the people of New Orleans, black and white, may need most just now is a good leaving alone. For there is much to be said for a policy of salutary neglect. That's how these united colonies grew into the United States, and the British acquired an empire almost in an absence of mind. But great empires and little minds go ill together, as Edmund Burke tried to tell his fellow Parliamentarians, only to be ignored.
Abandon the law and only violence remains to rule. Pity the people who forget that. For a taste of what can happen then, see New Orleans, La.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 04/27/2016