Tonight is the Collinsville Chorale's Patriotic Concert - held at First Baptist Church on St. Louis Road in Collinsville. Starts at 7 and lasts about an hour. Free will offering received. Yes, Cindi has a solo. Yes, she and Lauren are both singing. Join us if you'd like an evening of good music. The only ICKY part is that they're also singing that nasty Battle Hymn of the Republic... They seem to think they can counter-balance that travesty with a line from Dixie. If they really wanted to hear the other side, there's always
Maryland's State Song: The despot's heel is on thy shore.... Virginia shall not cry in vain, Maryland, my Maryland!
Sir, I am impressed.
ReplyDeleteDeo vindice
And when the audience rose during the singing of the Battle Hymn, I adamantly remained seated. I would not and could not rise at the singing of the hymn that accompanied the rape and pillage of the south.
ReplyDeleteLincoln was no saint; and the folks of beautiful, peninsular Maryland came to understand, soon enough, that their "inalienable" rights were, in fact, subject to travesty and an Abe's lien.
ReplyDeleteBut while the north won a brutal war, the south ultimately won a barbaric and terror-filled peace, while wrapping that "peace" in a guilt-assuaging "Lost Cause" romanticism ... the thesis of that absorbing (and disturbing) book The Bloody Shirt. It's a good read from start to finish, if you don't first drown your eyes in tears, or end up plucking them out in grief.
Human beings were being sold and bartered like cattle and inert commodities. The traffic was principally, but not exclusively, limited to certain geographic locales of the United States. Slavery may (or may not) have died out "naturally," without resort to the hellishness of war; but the post-war atrocities only establish that a certain handicapped people would have been evaluated as less equals than problems, whatever the outcome. Accordingly, Mr. Jefferson rightly trembled for his nation's future. Apparently he didn't see reason to excise from his Scriptures, a God given to visiting the sins of the fathers, unto the third or fourth generation of those yet hating the neighbor.
That seemed all too likely, and it was, too.
The Battle Hymn of the Republic
ReplyDeleteis now part of the UNITED States
Of America. We must admit the civil
war is over, and there is no longer
North or South, but only A UNITED
States of America. There are a few
pickup trucks with the rebel flag
with red neck hillbillies who don't
know the civil war is over.
@anonymous: What "The Battle Hymn of the Republic is now part of the UNITED States Of America" means is unclear to me. Probably to you, too.
ReplyDeleteAs far as "pickup trucks with the rebel flag with red neck hillbillies," well, let me suggest that ad hominem arguments are not really useful. There are serious historical disagreements about the 1861 war, and calling people "hillbillies" doesn't contribute to the discussion.