A WORTHIER BLOGGER WHO I WILL NOT NAME reminds me that I have some unanswered hate mail over me dishonoring Kirk.
. . . Who hath it?
he that died o’ Wednesday.
Doth he feel it? no.
Doth he hear it? no. ‘Tis insensible, then.
Yea, to the dead.
But will it not live with the living?
no.
Why? detraction will not suffer it.
Therefore I’ll none of it.
Honour is a mere scutcheon:
and so ends my catechism.
September 10, 2025 was a Wednesday.
Them selling merch at his memorial infomercial was the official end of any pretense of honoring him, he's a commodity to his company, his fan base, his financial backers and, apparently, even his family now otherwise they wouldn't have let that disgusting thing happen.
We outside of those circles don't have to pretend more, if we ever were saps enough to pretend that and as can be seen, I never have been one. I don't hold with the custom of lying about the dead anymore than I do when they were alive. I had occasion this morning to remember what Walt Whitman said he overheard among two veterans in Specimen Days
95. Calhoun’s Real Monument
IN one of the hospital tents for special cases, as I sat to-day tending a new amputation, I heard a couple of neighboring soldiers talking to each other from their cots. One down with fever, but improving, had come up belated from Charleston not long before. The other was what we now call an “old veteran,” (i. e., he was a Connecticut youth, probably of less than the age of twenty-five years, the four last of which he had spent in active service in the war in all parts of the country.) The two were chatting of one thing and another. The fever soldier spoke of John C. Calhoun’s monument, which he had seen, and was describing it. The veteran said: “I have seen Calhoun’s monument. That you saw is not the real monument. But I have seen it. It is the desolated, ruined south; nearly the whole generation of young men between seventeen and thirty destroyed or maim’d; all the old families used up—the rich impoverish’d, the plantations cover’d with weeds, the slaves unloos’d and become the masters, and the name of southerner blacken’d with every shame—all that is Calhoun’s real monument.”
I'll leave it to you to identify what the real monuments of today's white-supremacist influencers and politicians and "justices" are, what Bush I and II's are, what the Roberts six fascists on the Supreme Court are.
That explains the “Lost Cause” that turned such shame and defeat into perpetuated hagiography and racism, perfectly. Unable to accept it, and the reason for it (the horrific institution of slavery), the children of the soldiers created a mythology they could live with. I grew up in that mythic; it took at least half of my life to see how much of a lie the history I was taught, in school and in culture, it all was.
ReplyDeleteIt has its Northern equivalents, in which some of the worst racists I've encountered grew up. I think every People harbor lies that it believes are its history, one of the biggest of those is that they are a distinct part of humanity with transcendent virtues over those around them. It's one of the things I value about the Hebrew and Christian traditions, the Hebrew in the extensive confession of moral failure that comprises the OT, the NT with its universalist commandment to love everyone including our enemies and the other. I can't claim I've gotten very far with the enemies part though I have made some progress more generally.
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