Who is My Neighbor? The Good Samritan and Joel Osteen

For four years on my left shoulder, whether it was a tunic or a white coat, I wore  a patch of the New York Hospital which showed The Good Samaritan ministering to a man with the words "Go and Do Thou Likewise."

Never during that time did I look up the reference, but there was no Google then. I simply had no idea this phrase was lifted from the Gospels.

Hearing about Joel Osteen's response to the Biblical flood in Houston, I was prompted to read the story.


A man asked Jesus how he could get into Heaven and Jesus asked him what he knew of the commandment to help his neighbor and the man asked, "But who is my neighbor?" A savvy question.
Jesus replied with a parable about a man who had been beaten and robbed and lay in the road and various people  walked past him until one man, the Good Samaritan, stopped and helped him. The Good Samaritan had assured his own place in Heaven by his generosity to his less fortunate fellow man.


So the question arose out of self interest:  the man asking it wanted to know how he could get the ultimate prize for himself, entry into Heaven, a good seat at the best restaurant.  The Good Samaritan did not ask anything for himself. His motivations are never elucidated. He simply acted generously.  Jesus's interlocutor in the story is a man who is interested in what he needs to do to get a prize.
But he is told to love his neighbor as he loves himself.  That's a problem for the interlocutor as he realizes "neighbor" could bankrupt him, or at least cost him.


This problem arises daily on the streets of nearly every city in America--there are men and women, vagrants we call them, holding up their hands crying out for a dollar.
Our response to them can be: Oh, well, they do not deserve my help because they are not trying hard enough to help themselves.

The parable from Jesus slid neatly by this problem of being an enabler, of "tough love"  to the man who clearly did nothing to bring misfortune and poverty upon himself but had the bad luck to be robbed.


Now consider Joel Osteen, a "prosperity church" preacher, a very slick operator, who like members of this guild is very rich and claims God bestowed riches on him for being a good man. And what is a good man? Not one who helps others, but one who helps himself, according to this brand of evangelism. This emphasis on helping yourself and not asking anything from others is a core value of Republicans and Free State Project people and prosperity church people.


This is the Freedom Caucus, Republican Party brand of religion. God helps those who help themselves so don't ask us for help.


For the less slick practitioners of prosperity church TV evangelism, they pitch very openly: Send me money and God will smile on you and make you rich, too.


Osteen is smart enough to avoid such crass appeals.
But when his "church" which was formerly a basketball arena and holds 16,000 worshippers every Sunday, was faced with the prospect of sodden, muddy and poor people flocking inside to seek refuge from Hurricane Harvey, Osteen was not willing to open his doors to his "neighbors."   He had his, they could go find theirs.


This idea of generosity is in tension with the idea of  taking care of your self but not others.  It is, in some way, the core conflict between Republicans and Democrats. It animates discussion of the welfare queen, of the "don't feed a stray dog or he'll follow you home." It's basic.


Ultimately, the social media storm was enough to make Osteen change his mind. He is nothing if not tuned into public relations and mass communications.


So now he is all about helping his neighbors.


The most amazing part of this story is not Osteen's reluctance to help--no, the most amazing thing is the fact reported that every Sunday Osteen fills 16,000 seats and his preaching is broadcast to a hundred countries world wide.


Who are all these people who are his fans?
Apparently, the creed of self interest has deep and broad appeal.
This is Texas, after all and it is America, well that Red State version of America.
Heaven Help Us.

The Granfallon of White Supremacy

Kurt Vonnegut had a word for people who sought out a phony basis for association and affinity with people who they deemed some relationship, some club membership which was essentially phony: Granfaloon.

So, there were people who met at some bar in Philadelphia or New York who discovered an Indiana connection--maybe they were born there or had lived there and thus you are my good buddy, my new best friend because you are a Hoosier!


Oh, plueeeze. 


This shared connection was not based on any substantial shared values or genes or anything other than this fake connection.


I would argue that, for the most part, state identification in the United States fits this description now. A Texan from Austin is likely more like a New Yorker or a person from San Francisco than he is like someone from Lubbock. The Virginian from Fairfax County is likely more like the lady from Westchester, New York than she is like the woman from Richmond.  The man from Chapel Hill or Durham, North Carolina shares more politically, socially, even physically with the man from Durham, New Hampshire than he shares with the man from Greenville, North Carolina.

In fact state borders are now anachronisms, and group unlike people, who have no substantial connection of interest, economy, values, education. 


If we were really ready to come into the twenty first century, we'd abandon the idea of states altogether.


But most especially, this idea of "White" put forward by the granfaloons of the Charlottesville white supremacists. 


There was an old joke in the Third Reich about the tall, blonde, blue eyed, fair skinned German Aryan, that he was as blond as Hitler, as tall as Goebbels, as lean and hard as Goering.

Hitler and his cronies had to invest considerable time and attention to define who was really White and Aryan in Germany. It was difficult because they were trying to define a group characterized by a distinction without a difference.


The Charlottesville Nazis had the same problem. They were trying to find unity and coherence among people who shared only superficial traits--apart from the hate.

When is a Homonym Not a Gorilla?

My mother loved to play a word game with me when I was about six.  First she would ask me the meaning of the word, "synonym." Once we had established I knew two words with the same meaning, she would ask, "And what is a homonym?" 

"Sounds the same, different meaning."
"Right. But is it spelled the same?"

Now, at age 6, and actually at age 60, my spelling is problematic, but I would say, as part of the ritual:  "It may be spelled the same or differently, the important thing is they have different meanings. A homophone sounds the same but is spelled differently and so is a special type of homonym."

Magnificent gorilla 

That would begin the game, which consisted of my coming up with examples of words which sounded the same but have different meanings.

I don't know that we ever did "guerilla" vs "gorilla."

Guerilla was a word I can only remember hearing in the 1960's and this game was before that time. 

Real Guerilla 

Perhaps the executives at ESPN would have benefited from that game had their mother's played that with them.

Apparently they fired a sportscaster named Doug Adler for uttering the following sentence, while calling a tennis match in Australia:

“You see Venus move in and put the guerilla effect on. Charging.”

That was taken, in some quarters, by some people, as a racial slur. The man just called Venus Williams a gorilla.

And in Australia!  Australia, where never a racist word has been uttered, where brown skinned refugees are turned away to alternative islands. 

Gorilla not

Personally, I found it deeply offensive and amusing to hear white men refer to Michelle Obama as a gorilla.  She is an athletic, tall and muscular Black woman, who beyond her physical attributes, could probably demolish the pot bellied, pencil legged men who called her that--demolish them on a basketball court, baseball diamond or even on a wrestling mat.

Eat Your Heart Out

The guys who described her that way were invariably wimpy White men whose idea of exercise was getting up and walking across the room for their cigarettes. 

Guerilla maybe, not Gorilla

Beyond that use of gorilla, I'm not sure why that is such an insult.  To my mind gorillas are gorgeous, magnificent beasts.

The do beat their chests, but usually to avoid conflict not begin it.

Flip Wilson

My favorite depiction of a gorilla is Flip Wilson's great riff on the near sighted Reverand Leroy, the pastor of the Church of What's Happening Now, who mistakes a caged gorilla in a zoo for a man who is having his civil rights violated.

"Why look how low they've brought you, now," says the appalled Reverand Leroy. "They've got you eating out of a trough!"

And the Reverand promises the gorilla he will go right back to the congregation and mobilize a protest.

Of course, the Reverand gets too close and the gorilla snatches the Reverand through the bars of his cage (broke both shoulder blades getting him in) and proceeds to reign blows upon the Reverand's head with a seventy pound fist of hair covered knuckle before throwing the Reverand back out of the cage. 

The Reverand pulls himself together and says, "You don't act like an upstanding man. You act more like a gorilla!" and promises to go back to the congregation to see if they can't get the gorilla the electric chair.

Of course, this record came out in the midst of the civil rights movement in 1970, and it was a lovely expression of the ying and yang of violations of civil rights. If the guy in jail has actually harmed you, you don't see his civil rights as having been violated.

Well, so much for gorillas and guerillas. 

The fact is, political correctness can be stupid. 
The facts in this case are a little more murky because the comment was made on air and nobody could see the spelling.
My mother would have had words for ESPN.

Is Socialism Good for Women?

My upcoming trip to Iceland is one of the few in my life I actually want to do.
If Anne Tyler had met me she could have taken notes for "The Accidental Tourist."
I do not like travel. I hate waiting on lines. I hate airports--although the Iceland airport is actually gorgeous. I am acutely uncomfortable among people who do not speak English. I usually just want to go home.


Now, I'm going to Iceland, by choice.

Photo by Annie Ling

The Icelanders are very cagey.  If you fly Iceland Air, chances are you'll be stuck in Iceland over night because of "weather conditions."  It happens with such regularity that Iceland Air has a shuttle bus which shuttles you to their corporate headquarters near Reykjavik which just happens to have a hotel with a restaurant, where they put you up overnight, at their own expense.
Then, the next morning you wake up and you see Reykjavik out your window and you wander over there, because your flight doesn't take off until later that day, and as soon as you wander through Reykjavik's streets and talk to the people--most of whom speak English at least a little--and see the women in the coffee shops chatting amiably, and wander through the sweater knitting shops and the wonderful, minimalistic church, you are completely hooked.

Photo by Annie Ling

Ninety-nine out of 100 Americans waylaid in Rekjavik say, "I gotta come back here." It's like welcome to Shangri-La. Iceland is so cool.


Apparently, it's been discovered. It's only 4 1/2 hours from Boston. People go there for weekend debauchery, I'm told. Sex is a big thing in Iceland, which at my age is less of a draw, but for the thirty something crowd, it's a big draw.

Photo by Annie Ling

In preparation I watched the TV series "Trapped," which is how, as I said, most people discover Iceland.


Apparently, women in this country which provides health care and child care,  are free to live their lives without worrying about financial support from men. So they have their kids, 67% of the time without being married, and they don't need men to help raise them, because they have the village for that.


Women are living the feminist dream in Iceland, according to the New Yorker and the Atlantic.


These articles do note that women living as single mothers in Iceland are not living in the same material abundance and luxury as women in America. The message here may be: You can go it alone, but you will live richer if you have another income supporting you and your kids, which figures.
American women already know this. This is a choice, I presume, a lot of American women make daily: Do I stay with this bozo and drive a better car, live in a better house, have an undisrupted family with dinners at home, or do I live less comfortably, but free?

I'm eager to hear from actual Icelanders what they think about the lives of women in this island society.


From what I read, this place is about as far away from Jane Austen's world as one can get--women are not just hovering around the dance floor hoping to be chosen; they are living their lives, having their kids and if men want a part in that, and if they want men to be present, so be it.


Recent articles about women in the former Soviet Union have said much the same: freed from dependency on men, women are happier. One sixty something woman, who had grown up in Soviet East Germany, said she looks at her daughter and her daughter's husband and they are working long hours in the new capitalist Germany; they come home "like zombies" and just collapse in front of the TV.  When she was that age, she says, she had one job, got off at five o'clock and went out with her friends. "Life was a lot more fun for me than for my daughter. We didn't work as hard or worry about money."

Why did Gloria Steinem spend so much time in India, rather than in Iceland?
Well, India needed the work, I understand, but I tried to Google this but all I got was Gloria Steinem in Viceland. Not exactly the same thing.


Stay tuned, the Phantom will keep you posted.
When I'm there I will likely have no access to the internet--they use different electric current over there. It is called the world wide web, however, so I may be able to post from this feminist eutopia.

The Trouble with Twitter

Just opened my Twitter account. 
I don't get it.
The 140 character forces a discipline. That I get.
But it also enforces superficiality and determined ignorance.
One of the necessary but not sufficient conditions for intelligence of the analytical variety is the willingness to explore, to say, yes, but. 
Twitter shuts down just that impulse.
It's a summary sort of thing.
None of the building of case, marshaling evidence, acknowledging the argument of the other side, simply the bottom line.
The media is so corrupt.
Lock her up.
Little Marco.
Corrupt Hillary.

It's ideal for the declarative sentence without supporting detail.

All you have to do is say it's so and it is so.
When you wish upon a star.

Is this what America has become?

Think of a single great American paragraph:
"One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew this interest was somehow the cause of the war...Neither party expected for the war the magnitude and duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other."

Now, here you have, with great economy a summary of the greatest, costliest conflict in our nation's history, told by a man who not only lived it, but was at the center of it. With all the woof and pull of events around him, he cut through it all to state why it happened and addresses some of the fundamental psychology and irony which propelled it.  He does all this in 108 words by my count. Pretty amazing writing. Pretty amazing thinking.

How would our 45th President present the same ideas so eloquently and memorably expressed by our 16th, in 144 characters?

"Very big war caused by southern slaves. Nobody expected such carnage. All media's fault."

How far we have fallen.

Sloths Find Their Groove at the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal and Fox News are often difficult to take, but I've been trying to Aude Alterum Partum, to hear the other side. Often, there is not much worth hearing, but every once in a while, the folks at one of these places reveal they do have a glimmer of humanity lurking in there somewhere.


This weekend, the WSJ ran an article about the phenomenon of sloth frenzy. Apparently, zoos around the country have been having trouble dealing with the swarms of people at the sloth houses, who have overwhelmed the sloth capacities at these places.

A star is born

There was the usual journalistic stuff, inquiring with experts to explain what sloths appeal to in the human psyche, but above it all floated the clear bewilderment of the WSJ editors as to what on earth this all could mean. In the frenetic, push, push world of Wall Street, it seems inconceivable to these New Yorkers that people are drawn to animals who can take ten minutes to eat a grape.


They did recognize the role played by "Zootopia's" scene at the Department of Motor Vehicles, where all the employees were sloths, which has to rival even Roger Rabbit in the pantheon of movie greatness.


Some love coyotes, some red tail hawks; some love whales, and otters have their fans.  The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration even has a division called "Charismatic Mammals"--I kid you not. You cannot make this stuff up.

I have charisma

But sloths have now come into the spotlight.


What did it for me was learning that they come down from their tree perches every three days to poop on the ground, which of course takes a while. Then they re-ascend. They could poop from the branches above your head, but they are considerate. They poop on the ground. Only if they scooped up their poop in little plastic bags could they be any more considerate, but then they would not be fertilizing the trees in which they hang out.

I'm a fan. Some of my best friends are sloths.

Sloths rock.
Of course, these are not the only animals we watch, which enrich our lives.
My neighbor described the wild turkeys who took off from her neighbor's yard, trying to reach the trees behind her house.  "I've seen them take off from the yard across the street and really expected some of them to be splattered against my house---they just didn't seem capable of clearing it--although they did and they were incredibly loud and awkward.  They hit the branches like flying pigs. Certainly not the most dignified of birds, not like the red tails, masters at soaring majestically."


For the lucky few who live in New Hampshire, just sitting on our back porches is a front row seat at the nature show.  Flying pigs and soaring red tails: what more can you ask?

Learning to Love the French

Winston Churchill remarked he had prepaid all his subsequent sins in life during his early childhood at English schools, where he was made to memorize Greek and  Latin, and he was told he was stupid and otherwise terrorized. 

I felt the same way about the French. 
I had four different French teachers during my school years, none of whom was actually French French. Only one was any good--an Algerian, Monsieur Hassan, who looked delighted whenever we learned anything at all and for whom we all tried hard to learn French. 
But then there was a woman from Texas who thought memorizing "dialogues" oral and written every accent and precise spelling was learning French, and ultimately there was a true nightmare from Luxembourg who was over six feet tall and spent most of her time flirting in the back of the classroom with the basketball players, and disparaging the shorter males as not true men, and rhapsodizing about "Le Petite Prince," which she insisted we all memorize. 

As many people do, I extrapolated all this to the entirety of French culture, even though I knew this was ridiculous. It was irrational but embedded. 
In college, however, they had us read Camus, which I read first in English, then went back through the French and fell in love with my first French crush: L'Etranger, the Stranger. 

Finally, late in life, I got to Paris, where, contrary to all rumor, I found French people who were funny, kind, pleasant, sophisticated and generally very cool.

The final stone in the castle of my new found admiration for things French is Bernadette, who walks her dog around 6 AM on Plaice Cove beach. Bernadette is probably 60, and she speaks English with just a trace of accent, is married to an American naval officer (retired) and she always has a treat for my dog, who nearly knocks her over trying to chomp it out of her hand, but she never seems to mind. 

Her own dog weighs about 10 pounds but she is un-intimidated by my 65 pound Lab who would bite her hand off to get that treat.

She has been educating me about the French. 
For one thing, President Macron. 
It turns out it can be a crime in France for a forty something mother of four to have sex with her high school student, but since the parents of that student did not press charges and simply moved the student to a different school, the "offense" was shrugged off. When the student later married the teacher and wound up as President of France, all was forgiven. Thus can Americans be instructed about the value of judging not when we do not know all the facts.

I, for one, am not scandalized by the idea of a 17 year old boy and a 41 year old woman having an affair, ipso facto.  I understand the objections, but it strikes me as something Americans could learn from the French, about opening one's mind to the possibility of individual variation. Bernadette  informs me when President Mitterrand died and both his wife and his mistress showed up at the state funeral some were scandalized, but again, many were sophisticated enough to shrug it off. Men are not angels and love governs by its own rules and it was not even clear which part of that story was love or what love really means in the individual case.

Bernadette wears a necklace with her name in Arabic.
"Oh," I said, thinking back to L'Etranger, "The French and Arabs."
"Yes," she laughed. "We do have a history."
I told her about how delightful it was watching parents walk their children to school in Paris, where I saw a man with his daughter on the back of his bicycle drop her off with a baguette for lunch. 
"This is true. We don't have school buses. But we do have excellent health care and when a woman has a baby, she gets 6 months maternity leave and if she wants to keep her job, she gets another 6 months at half pay. We believe that first year is important for mother and child. Day care is free. Of course, we pay 55% in taxes."
"We paid that much at the higher brackets once, right here in the USA. But then Reagan told us government was the problem not the solution."
"And Americans bought that," she said. "So all the possibilities of what the community could do for the individual went right out the window. I don't think many French would trade what they've got for what you've got. You've got the rugged individual, living alone on the frontier, dying of polluted water from the run off of the factory five miles away, calling that freedom."

"We all have problems," I rejoined, weakly.
"We pick our poisons," she said. 

The Jerome Almon Mode of Thought

Whoever this guy Jerome Almon is, Snowflake's personal lawyer seems to like his emails.
So the email which made the New York Times does that old grade school thing: "Compare and Contrast."  Well, actually, he did the compare part, but never got around to the contrast thing. Maybe he didn't make it that far in grade school.

Patriot

So George Washington and Robert E. Lee compare:
1. Both owned slaves.
2. Both rebelled against a ruling government.
3. Battle tactics of both are still taught today at West Point--although in Lee's case, one might wonder if they are taught as a what-not-to-do and Washington basically retreated a lot and developed the hide and seek technique.
4. Both saved America.  Well, that really is news, especially to U.S. Grant. Lee, as I recall, tried to destroy America, although perhaps I quibble.
5. Both were
        a/ Great Men
        b/ Great Americans
        c/ Great Commanders
a&b above are unprovable and undeniable since they are simply statements of emotional expression. "C" is debatable, since Lee lost. There was Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, which Lee insisted upon. Lee was relentlessly aggressive, which worked well for a few years, but eventually, it ground his army down. Bold is not always the best generalship--just ask the Wehrmacht after Hitler kept pushing them to attack and attack right into the Russian winter. Aggressive makes you look good until the enemy adapts.


6. You cannot be for Washington and against Lee because there is little or no difference between them.


Setting aside the question of how you can be "for" a person or "against" a person, we can now look to the similarities Mr. Almon did not note:
1. Both were Virginians.
2. Both were white.
3. Both were in the upper 1%, economically speaking, at some times in their lives.
4. Both rode horses.
5. Both breathed air.
6. Both pooped in the woods.

Buried with his horse

Now for some differences:
1. General Washington was not buried with his horse.  Lee was, and underground, the two of them, on campus at Washington & Lee University. Washington was afraid of being buried alive, so he was put in an above ground sarcophagus.
Both men do lie in repose next to their wives, which might be added to the "compare" list above, but it is not nearly as much fun as talking about being buried with your horse.
2. General Washington had wooden teeth. Far as I know, Lee had his originals.
3. Washington may well have been a eunuch, judging by his eunechoid habitus and failure to impregnate Martha. Lee was a flirt.
4. Washington did in fact, save the nation we now call the United States of America. Lee fought hard to destroy that nation.
5. If a patriot is someone who is on your own side and who fights so your side wins, then Washington is a patriot; that would make General Lee, for all his white hair, well groomed beard and nifty gray uniform with the gold buttons, a traitor.


This listing of similarities is Rush Limbaugh think, this sort of phony marshaling of details  which make you sound like you've done some thinking and research, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.
Sort of Shakespearean really. Got to admire it.

Trump and the Call of the Y Chromosome

There is a wonderful scene in "The Godfather" where Clemenza teaches Michael to cook Sunday shaghetti in the kitchen, as the Corleone clan gears up to "go to the mattresses" i.e., hunker down for the onrushing war.  
Michael will trigger the war by assassinating the police captain and the captain's gangster patron, and Michael, who has never experienced gangster war, asks Clemenza how bad it will be. 
Clemenza, ever unflappable, shrugs and says, "Pretty bad," and continues slicing tomatoes, then adds, philosophically, "This has to happen every five, ten years. Lets out the bad blood."

Sunday dinner

There is a lot going on in that scene, as Michael girds himself to flee into exile, to leave his home, his girlfriend, his immediate family, as the Corleone soldiers answer the call to arms, as the world is about to change, but Clemenza is saying, this is not really a change, just part of the cycle. 

This is what men do. They have to fight every now and then. It kills off the wildest among them, and it sates the appetite for violence baked into the DNA of male homo sapiens, although Clemenza would never put it that way.

The same theme animates "The Fight Club." Men are not snowflakes, well not real men. Phony men, like Donnie Snowflake, but real men need to bloody themselves.

Wannabe Tough Guys

David Brooks, in a very interesting column yesterday, suggests the answer to the gorilla beating his chest should be "modesty."  You simply do not pound your chest back, because you cannot win that pissing contest. You shrug and say, that's all phony posing.

For Real Tough Guys

Reading about the Amercian Civil War, as I have for years, it strikes me that war served the purpose Clemenza was talking about. About one quarter of the male population who fought in that war died in that war, or came out of it half gone, without a leg or an arm. I can only imagine enough men were heartily sick of fighting after that, and enough men decided to study war no more, it set up the progress which followed. Of course, there are many aspects to the story.  Some Southern men took to the hills, even after Lee's surrender, continued to maraud and murder to rob banks and they clearly had not tired of violence. The South has always been a violent place, rivaled only by the West. 

Tough guy Whites exercising their First and Second Amendment Rights

But, over the grand scheme, I do suspect the nation had punched itself out, was arm weary, weary of the punishment and turned its attention to building rather than destroying.

Tough guy cops, as long as they have their dogs and guns

Vast over simplification, I know, but maybe this is what is going on now, among that core Alabama of the mindless, out there, who ardently support President Snowflake.
They are simply spoiling for a fight and he promises to allow them to find it.

The Civil War Becomes Current

Ever since I could read, I've been reading about the Civil War. Bruce Catton (my favorite), Shelby Foote, James MacPherson--there are more books written about Lincoln than any other subject, and I think the Civil War is a close second.

I have no illusion I really know what those times were like, although I have imagined them.  I was alive when men who had fought in that war were still alive, old codgers, but alive.  A mere 80 years after the Civil War began, the sons of men who were born during  it were shipping out to fight in World War Two.

But still, it is an act of imagination, not memory to resurrect the Civil War.
I still learn new stuff with every new book. "The Destructive War," is one of the most recent and it simply details the depths of hatred which that war fed and  from which it drew.


I can guarantee you one thing: Those gun toting White Supremicists who were marching in Charlottesville have not a clue what the Civil War really was about, nor about Robert E. Lee--it's all a Disney movie inside their heads. They cherry picked the meaning for their own purposes.

I do not think for a moment, the events in Charlottesville or even Durham, North Carolina have much to do with the Civil War. They have to do with today.  In so far as today's attitudes were shaped by attitudes passed down through generations, there is a relationship, but unless racism served a purpose, it would simply be discarded.


Speaking with some Free State Project ultimate libertarians, the line from them is the Civil War was not about slavery, but about being free from a distant central government imposing their values on you in your local shire. The fact is, every soldier probably has his own reason for joining up--as Boris Pasternak observed in "Dr. Zhivago" happy men do not leave home to go fight.

But once they got there, whatever they believed in the beginning, as Lincoln so astutely observed, as the war ground on, and as the freed slaves began to follow the union army as it slashed and burned its way across the South, there was no question the ultimate reason was somehow that "peculiar interest" which was slavery.


History, of course, is one long argument, but there is little doubt, the Civil War, ultimately was fought to end slavery, which in turn reshaped the economy of the South, as a by product, not as a war aim.


It is also inarguable that Robert E. Lee, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, and all those other gallant gentlemen who were the superb generals of the Confederate armies were traitors, committed treason by anyone's definition, as did Washington and Jefferson before them.

We do not allow the defeated soldiers of the Third Reich to erect statues to Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and Himmler. They are part of history, undeniably, but we do not celebrate them and we do no allow the Germans to do that.

"The victors write the history"  some Nazi huffed at his trial at Nuremberg. And surely if Hitler had been victorious, Churchill, Roosevelt and the American army would have been vilified and statues to Rommel and the glorious Luftwaffe would have gone up from Berlin to Paris.

But Hitler lost, and so did Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy. 
I for one, am grateful for that.