We came up differently than our parents' generation; we didn't think anything about some of the things that bother them. We played ball together, we showered together, we teased each other in ways that would have sounded rough and inappropriate to outsiders. We imagined that we were friends.
That said, some of us knew it was different in the other's neighborhood, where we didn't stay past dark. I drove Leon to his house a few times after practice when his car was in the shop. That was the only time I ever drove those streets, the only time I had reason to go there amid the weedy lots and shanties.
There were only a handful of black kids in my high school; I think I knew them all. At least I knew all of them in my class. Our school was integrated, but not all that integrated; it was the newest high school and probably the district's richest. We took our new textbooks and our chemistry labs for granted. Our parking lot was filled with new Firebirds and Camaros--the two-year-old Mustang II I drove was respectable, but didn't qualify as cool.
We didn't think about our privilege because that's what privilege is, something taken for granted. We didn't think of ourselves as particularly well off, though some were. Most of us didn't go to college, and a lot of those who did didn't really understand what it meant to go to college, and how the next few years could be determinant of the rest of our lives. Or at least I didn't understand that.
I don't think much about monuments. Old battlefields sometimes stir me, the Holocaust Museum in Washington completely hollowed me out, but statues in parks present as bronze and stone, markers of hubris--another way men shout their names into an unloving vacuum of time and space. We crave and bestow such honor because we despise the idea of the world moving on, of plowing under our great works and our follies. We are desperate for a foothold in the imaginations of future generations. "Forget, hell" is as much prayer of hopefulness as obstinate declaration.
I have no truck with the cult of the Lost Cause; my Southernness is not the Southernness that insists Lincoln was a syphilitic war criminal and that the War of Northern Aggression had nothing to do with the servitude of dark-skinned people. You can make up what you want, cherry-pick the Bible for your comfort, but while there are many Lincolns and some of them are not exemplary, his heroism is not at question in my heart.
He was no abolitionist, and though he privately abhorred slavery it might be more to the point to say he recognized that the world was changing and the practice would soon become untenable. Lincoln was right to seek to hold the secessionist states to the Union by force--but the right by which he enforced his will was not contained in the Constitution. His actions were extra-constitutional. He fathered a new America, he saved us--an "almost chosen people"--and positioned us as the world's last best hope.
This is a Lincoln I admire, though it is also a Dictator Lincoln. It is difficult to reconcile one's faith in the rule of law, in strict attention to principle, with the ruthless pragmatism of Honest Abe. Lincoln made a principle of pragmatism; he developed it into a strain of Americanism.
And the heroes of the Confederacy were as mortal as Lincoln, as flawed and complicated as any rebels. But they were losers, and their cause was wrong, for no matter how you look to excuse it we have known since before Horace that human beings should not be treated as chattel. Jefferson and Washington and Jackson knew that. Robert E. Lee knew that. Whatever their motivations, they were on the wrong side of history. And while we ought to remember them and study them for virtue, we should also keep in mind the great evil they served.
We have to remember that things are never simple; there is the world of theory and the world of practice, and we do what we have to do. Sometimes hard choices are necessary. Sometimes wars are necessary. Sometimes the losers are noble and right.
But we should never start believing in the silent blandishments to glory that marble and granite monuments offer; on a personal level there is nothing redemptive in dying in the mud for a cause. One of the uses of these monuments is as a call to some latent martial instinct, a will to fight for the high-flown words of rich men in suits in far-off capitals. Then their propaganda has done its work. Slaves still exist, though no one insults their dignity with actual chains.
America is a lucky land--you could call it blessed. We are powerful and, relative to the world's history, we have mostly exercised our tremendous power judiciously. But that doesn't mean we are infallible or especially favored by God; governments function in the world of practice. People who believe God whispers instructions to them are crazy and dangerous; politicians who encourage the belief that God whispers instructions to them are treacherous and wicked.
One of the reasons I identify as a Southerner is because being Southern implies a facing up to the sins of our fathers. The Southerner is acquainted with what is tragic and what is true; the Southern character has borne up and persisted despite all attempts to rehabilitate it. Part of what makes the South the South is its inability to forget and its acquaintance with guilt.
Maybe I wouldn't pull down a monument or rename a street, but I understand why people who came up differently from me might want to, and why generations might have felt their dignity assaulted by Americans who feel those statues should come down. They'll all come down eventually anyway. Why not now?
------------v------------
Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 05/30/2017