Benjamin Wallace-Wells, writing in the New Yorker, ponders politics and culture after the lost cause in. a review article about Client Smith’s “How the Word Is Passed,” began just a few months after the white-nationalist uprising at Charlottesville.
I think the following passage illustrates a lot of the recalcitrance we’ve observed in the more non-confrontational supporters of the status quo.
Ever empathetic, [Smith] concludes, “For many of the people I met at Blandford, the story of the Confederacy is the story of their home, of their family—and the story of their family is the story of them.” No wonder they have been so resistant to “confront the flaws of their ancestors,” he writes. At Blandford, Smith watches a Confederate honor guard solemnly present, and listens to the crowd singing a “spirited rendition” of “Dixie.” That is still a sound you can hear, if you want to seek it out.
From the article
I also found his closing very persuasive as a tactic we maybe able to use in some way moving forward.
But the removals, and the erosion of a Southern exceptionalism they make evident, also make way for something complicated and contested—a slightly different country, one with more blame to go around.
From the article
Image © 2021 Condé Nast in The New Yorker.