Tag: Washington DC

I laughed out loud. As we watch some states sending National Guard troops into Washington DC bowing subserviently to the convicted felon’s desire to stop everyone but him and his followers from committing crime, a friend in frustration said “the South is sending all of these troops.” Well, not exactly.

But then again, maybe so.

Yes, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana and Mississippi are sending troops and they are indeed Southern States geographically, socially, and historically in the context of the American Civil War. South Carolina makes perfect sense as it was the first state to secede from the Union. Some of the others with their secessionist histories do as well. But at first glance, Ohio certainly doesn’t, nor does West Virginia.

The American Civil War has been studied and written about so much, it’s amazing how much so many just don’t know. It’s actually a bit stupefying how many accept the mythologies about the sentiments and ideologies that underpinned that conflict. The maps in the history books make it easy with their North/South divide. But it was never easy. In an ironic twist in this latest reactionary resurgence of racist rewriting history, West Virginia actually split off from Virginia to join the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union.

Like I said, it’s enough to make me laugh at the ignorance of it all.

But then I remember a line from Lanford Wilson’s play Talley’s Folly. A lovely two-hander that features Jewish New Yorker Matt Friedman wooing Sally Talley in Missouri.  As she demurs with objections about their different backgrounds and ways of life, in frustration he tells her:

…there is New York City, isolated neighborhoods in Boston, and believe me, the rest is all the South.

I’ve found Wilson and Matt’s observation to be extremely accurate in my travels through life, and certainly it resonates the same in today’s insanity as well.

Put it this way, in this Civil War we’re inching into there won’t be anything like a Mason and Dixon Line dividing the opposing sides. Actually there never was.

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