I'm developing Stockholm's Syndrome. For all that the Civil War was 140 years ago, people can still tell you whether they were the Union or the Confederacy. I'm Union, cousin of Abraham Lincoln, current Democrat (the reversal of the party stances stands next to the role of the Ottoman Empire in Gaps in My Formal Education).
However, I've been reading Gone With the Wind, and well, for all that I hate Scarlett, I'm seeing slavery in a different light. The negroes (I'm using this phrase because that's what the book uses, and because I don't know what the appropriate term is.) are not treated like human beings, more like dumb children, but the Uncle Tom's Cabin situations aren't there. Makes that "liberating, accepting" work look downright racist, actually. Granted, most of the slave points of view are taken from the field hands rather than the house slaves, but I am always dubious of a history that claims things were "always" one way or another.
This sort of thing happens all the time about women in history. It's always oppression and no rights and beatings and the powerlessness of the females. Well, this is not a universally true statement. In the hundreds of years of the Greeks and the Romans, it wasn't the case. In two hundred years, they're going to look back on the 1800's to the 1900's and say women were not allowed to vote, never mind that whole Amendment.
With this in mind, I wonder about the exceptions to the norms, especially in places like Nazi Germany and the Civil War- what was the norm, because Auschwitz is not the norm (for proof, go to Dauchau- I have).
Gone With the Wind was written before the Civil Rights movement and Mitchell lived in a segregated world (she was born in Atlanta). Remembering that, I don't know what to think about much of the book, how much of it is post WWI thinking and how much of it are the stories her Confederate army soldier relatives told her? If this same book had been written by a woman of Scarlett's era, how it would have been different?
I worry a little bit about the way everyone is being programmed to remember the World Trade Centre. In November, a group of students at my high school wrote down all their initial reactions, 90 precent of us thought the whole thing was hilarious. Now, we're being taught to speak of it in hushed tones, in reverance to those who died. Those who laugh and point out the inevitable nature of the event are horrible people.
At the time, songs, poems, and merchandise came out about getting the foreign devils who "did this" to us (Toby Keith, anyone?). None of that, my friends, has come to pass. Instead, we have created a war on terror and draped ourselves in the flag. We have stopped fighting for The Cause, and have begun fighting for... well, do you know why? I don't. I see half a nation of ignorance and fear intent upon keeping things the way they are, and the other half furious and trying to rally to do something about it.
Maybe I'm making some scary comparisons with what I'm steeping myself in at the moment, but there's a lot this country, with it's ready knowledge of red states and blue states, has in common with 140 years ago. Do we want to do this to ourselves again?