Wonkette - It’s Appomattox Day. The South Lost. Deal With It.
Sorry I didn’t get around to posting this earlier. I meant to, but I forgot. Doktor Zoom has an important message for Neo Confederates throughout the union,
One hundred fifty years ago today, the American Civil War ended with Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, which wasn’t a courthouse but a town named after a court house, and the actual house belonged to Wilmer McLean. This is generally considered a fortunate thing, since “The Surrender At Wilmer’s Place” would not look nearly as good on a commemorative print. The relentless romanticizing of the Southern cause — state’s rights, the Old Noble Ways, the Southern Aristocracy, and the Fight for Freedom for people of a certain pale hue — started well before the war, and the mere fact of Southern defeat did little to slow it. After all, what’s more romantic than a Lost Cause? It was a good enough reason for a delusional actor to shoot Abraham Lincoln just a week later, and it was a good enough pile of romantic mush to keep the Lost Cause ideology alive long after the Confederacy and all its leaders and followers were dead and in the ground.
If you’re in the mood for an awfully good thinky piece about the survival of Confederate ideology into a century when no one mourns other briefly existing nations of the 19th century — we’ll bet nobody has the flag of the Confederation of the Rhine (1806-1813) on a bumper sticker — check out this terrific essay in Politico Magazine by Euan Hague. Hague notes that it’s not just a benign interest in Southern genealogy that draws modern Confederate sympathizers to get passionate about putting the Confederate battle flag on state license plates, and also cautions that it shouldn’t be “simplistically understood solely as an exhibition of racism, although the power of the Confederate flag to convey white supremacist beliefs cannot be discounted.”
*Warning there’s a bit of immature mature language at the end.