And I’ve never said that he should be a hero, only that the issue was nebulous and complex and not the least bit simplistic and that the fact he was once revered enough to name schools for him doesn’t mean that people who went to those schools are hatemongers any more than people who went to schools named for Sherman really want to tear up the Atlanta train stations and encourage their homies to steal everything that’s not nailed down along I-95. Names reflect the heritage of an era- good, bad, and indifferent, and in a land where most students would be doing good to place the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War and the Civil War in chronological order it’s disingenous to think that by not daily denouncing the long dead they’re honoring them.
Then will you [del]se[/del]concede the point that the fact Davis could have walked out of the court room a free man and in so doing, rightly or wrongly, to some extent his acquittal would have validated secession and the Confederacy in the eyes of many on the national and world stage was possibly if not probably also a very major and real fear and possibly if not probably also an incentive for dropping the charges?
But the naming of things after Jefferson Davis does nothing to help students get their history straight. To the contrary, it’s part of a process that leads to widespread muddle-headedness:
“Well, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee fought for the noble cause of States’ Rights, and we’d be better off if they’d won, although of course I’m proud to be an American, and Abraham Lincoln was one of our country’s greatest Presidents, and we should be proud of our Southern heritage of secession from the United States, which is one nation, under God, indivisible.”
You can be damned sure that very few of the people driving around with Confederate battle flags on their cars or trucks think, sure, the Confederacy seceded because they felt slavery was threatened by the election of Lincoln, and Jefferson Davis was guilty of treason, but it’s just that the guy in the truck over there is personally in favor of slavery and treason. He doesn’t believe in slavery, and he despises “traitors”; but he’s been lied to about the Lost Cause all his life. Renaming Jefferson Davis High School is far from the most urgent priority facing the nation; but the general program of dismantling the official cult of the Confederacy–Confederate flags flying over state capitols and all the rest–is a necessary part of dispelling the nonsense that has been promoted in the South for too long about the nobility of the “Lost Cause”.
Which is also something of a political consideration, yes. If Moe beats the rap on robbing a liquor store this doesn’t lead to hundreds of thousands of people concluding that robbing liquor stores must actually be legal.
Basically, if Jeff Davis is convicted and hangs, this runs the risk of embittering ex-Confederates, possibly frightening them about their own personal safety, and risking the whole policy of national reconciliation.
If Jeff Davis walks, then this is a huge victory for un-Reconstructed ex-Confederates who still maintain they did nothing wrong.
Either way, a trial is a huge political liability; and frankly, from the P.O.V. of national governance, it’s hard to see any particularly good outcome.
I don’t think people are hatemongers simply because their schools and holidays are named after Confederate “heroes”.
But I will say this: anyone who thinks this practice is a tribute to their proud past, and anyone who compares changing the names of buildings to reflect more modern values to a Taliban raid, and anyone who sees nothing “off” about equating Jefferson Davis to MLK should really not be surprised when mainstream society views them with contempt. Because all three of these ideas are wrong. They based on misplaced sentimentalism, not stuff grounded in reality.
If you think this mode of thought only applies to a small segment of the population, then that’s a good thing.
Even if this is what you meant by “character flaws”, you are, in your own elegant words, humping strawmen here. You need to acknowledge some uncomfortable facts:
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historical figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who you keep denouncing, have a record of positive achievements which Confederate leaders do not, much as you keep reminding us of their language skills and modeling of guayabera shirts, and
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there is no dogged movement to gloss over the less admirable sides of Roosevelt, Franklin et al, comparable to the self-delusional spoutings of the Lost Cause advocates.
We should be able, on an individual and thoughtful basis, to take public works that have been named for various figures in history (whatever their region of origin) and rename them for individuals now considered more deserving, even if that includes Giants of the Southern Realm like Jefferson Davis, without Professional Southerners going into paroxysms over insults to their pride.
Be a Dixie pixie, eat cornpone till it’s coming out of your ears, but enough with the Confederate denialism.
Well my conclusion from that point was the opposite, that we should remember evil monsters as evil monsters, even (especially) our own, but I guess yours is a fair interpretation too, and more practical given cultural inertia. I base my opinion on the humanizing effect it would have on our culture when dealing with other cultures and groups, as well as the various subcultures, ethnicities, and racial groups at home. Especially war, but foreign policy in general.
I also base my opinion on blind outrage at what whitewashing the past says about those who were steam rolled under it. That the crimes against them aren’t even worth mentioning.
I know I only think of only one heritage when I walk down Monument Avenue here in Richmond. It’s a heritage that doesn’t really include me or my ancestors in any positive way. I imagine almost forty percent of this city’s residents feel the same way. Tough titty for us, I guess.
I would shed nary a tear if someone decided to pluck up those monuments and replace them with live oaks. Live oaks are just as Southern as the Confederacy, without all the treasonous bloodshed and embodiment of white supremacy. Live oaks don’t carry baggage. They live for ages and everyone can gaze upon them with their own innocent nostalgia. I’m sure even Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis could agree with that.
I feel a sting when I see laughing and smiling tourists snapping pictures of Robert E. Lee mounted on his horse. Are they captivated by the artistry of the statue, or are they honoring the legend of the man and the cause he fought for? See, I don’t know and that’s why it hurts. People laughing and smiling at a one-hundred year old tree would make for a less ambiguous scene.
I hear all the arguments about how I’m so wrong to feel irked by Monument Ave, but I choose not to listen to them. Slavery and bloodshed aside, there’s something creepy and cognitive-dissonancy about a boulevard where glorious homes have the American flag waving in their front yards and right across the street are statues honoring people who fought against the very ideals represented by that flag. It’s just like when Lee and Jackson were celebrated on the same day as King. Why is it that some people can see the ridiculousness of it all, and others can’t?
People can do whatever they want, believe whatever they want, and I’m free to do likewise. That this kind of freedom isn’t a part of the Confederate heritage is something I don’t take for granted. That’s why you’ll never see this southerner wave a Confederate flag or be particularly compassionate towards those who choose to do that. There’s a difference between acknowledging heritage and honoring it with symbols, monuments, and yes, names.
I know my post expresses an opinion that’s been stated numerous times already, but I always seem to kill threads anyway so it doesn’t matter. 
Any evidence that there’s a causative link between the renaming or non renaming of things and this mindset? I’d bet my 401K there’d be more of this thinking if they were ordered to change the names. The whole point of the SCV (now anyway- it wasn’t always, it used to be more like the DAR) wasn’t until the last few years in fact) is to seize hold of such opportunities for proselytizing on the eradication of southern nationalist and revisionist pride.
Probably not. Personally I don’t speak for them; I think the ignorance of history in this nation is a crime on all sides and I think most of the world’s problems now and always and probably ‘in states unborn and accents yet unknown’ lie in the quest for easy answers where there are none.
And right to believe in it or not is his right as an American. I abhor, loathe, despise, insert-strong-verbs-connotative-of-disapproval-and-negativity-here the teachings of most churches, but making them change their doctrine (even if it’s something as loopy as Scientology or as easily disproven as The Book of Mormon) is something I’d dust off my Enfield (actually it doesn’t have any dust on it, I keep it blued and clean) and fight against strenuously. Lost Causery stimulates the same neurons as dumbass religious beliefs, Glenn Beck, Louis Farrakhan, healing crystals, Miracle Manna infomercials, Get-Rid-of-all-Carbs!/Carbs are the Answer fad diets, Sai Baba, Islamic Fundamentalism, rabid anarchism, NORML or PETA stimulate. “You are special! You are meant to be the masters of the Universe! But know what your problem is? You’ve been lied to and discriminated against and held down and the easy answers are all right here- I have them- put a dollah in the box and ignore the man behind the green curtain.” It made Susan Powter a millionaire and it sells rebel flags. As Mr. Russell once observed “Most people would rather die than think and in fact they do”, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Nada. Rename the school Martin Luther King or Andy Kauffmann Junior High, you’re still going to have misinformed mean spirited idiots of all complexions and gender orientations emerging from it and I seriously doubt the name of the school has jack to do with how they got to that point.
An anecdote about your home city (where Stone Mountain on the outskirts is about the only thing to let you know there was ever a major battle there [and as mentioned earlier in this thread if not here I’ve always loved the fact it had two generals who had nothing to do with that battle]): I went to see Cyclorama there a couple of years ago because I was going to the zoo anyway and it’s at the entrance. A Billy Bob coming out remarks to his Sheila Bob the Cable Guy that “You know if they built that today the NAACP and MSNBC and them others would shit bricks! Cain’t honor our heritage today.”
All over the visitor center at Cyclorama, ON THE BROCHURE FOR CYCLORAMA, on everything about the history of Cyclorama, it’s history is given. It was commissioned by John Logan, former General of the Army of the Tennessee, a Yankee general who briefly commanded the Union forces at the Battle of Atlanta and who painted it specifically and for the sole purpose of reveling in the defeat of the rebels. It was basically a prop for his political campaigns- he wanted to be president one day and this was to accompany him on campaign tours or else go where he couldn’t to as we would say today “put his name on the floor”.
That said it’s mostly objective- it’s a huge round painting of (incidents from a 48 hour period in) The Battle of Atlanta. It came to Atlanta when nobody else knew what the hell to do with it after Logan died before being able to use it; there’s not a big market for enormous cylyndrical paintings of battles so Atlanta said “sure, we’ll take it” and there it is now. Well worth seeing if you’re in Atlanta with time to kill and have an interest, not worth going to Atlanta to see.
To Billy Bob, however, it’s about his discriminated against heritage. He didn’t read one damned thing about the fact it was painted by the Union general and only came. The little wage slave giving the spiel about it during the lecture before the merry go round starts mentioning what it was- didn’t register in the slightest. It is what he wants it to be. I could have corrected him that day but… why? He’d have a story to tell about how some Yankee fag tried to shit on the south and he gave 'em what for.
So once you get rid of the Lost Causers, who are you going to go after next? Forget the poor, the idiots you will have with you always. Neither the south nor any other region of the world has a monopoly on them, and if you blasted the face off Stone Mountain and replaced it with the world’s largest statue of Concordia and brainswept every Billy Bob and repeopled Altanta with emigrants from the subcontinent and claims accountants from Montana and tour guides from Greece and not a single one of them has ever even heard of Jeff Davis, then I guarantee you that you’ll still have morons subscribing to simplified, wrong, hopelessly stupid ideologies that like or not have villains and scapegoats like Lost Cause has the Yankees & the Librul Media, NoI has white devils, Aryans have blacks and Jews and whoever they’re pissed at this week, Baptists and other religions have queers and abortionists, and the gnomes have grasshoppers.
Why single out one group out when it’s neither the most powerful, the richest, the largest, or the most correct or the most incorrect? What is it about those who subscribe to what some would define the southern variety of EZ-Answer Idiocy that makes them so doggone more dangerous than all the other groups that subscribe to EZ Answer Idiocy?
You’re only going to set a bad precedent that solves no problems and plays into their martyrdom while putting the most temporary and placebic of salves on the real or imagined wounds of people from the opposite side of the spectrum whose views on history and truth, while better meaning perhaps, frankly aren’t any more complex or detailed or informed, just different. You can perhaps use these things as discussion starters or teaching moments and if you do then I wish you the best of luck; this hasn’t exactly been a love fest and I guarantee you the rhetoric is kinder far and more informed (in some cases) than you’d find in the public at large.
Or you can look for more important things to concern yourself with: implementation of better information and more critical thinking in education (it’ll never ever ever ever ever happen, but you’re welcome to try). Or you can look for things that actually might happen to do, or for that matter you can just look to make yourself and those around you have lives a bit happier and easier because that you can do, and accept the fact that there will always be stupid people because rest assured there will, and repeatedly say a secular form of the Serenity Prayer:
[Your Higher Power here] grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know what is and what isn’t worth the fucking trouble.
On a sidenote, those who know me only from this thread may think I’m just absolutely obsessed with Jefferson Davis. I’m not at all; I think he’s a fascinating character, but he’s not my favorite person to research even in the Civil War or even on the side of the south in the Civil War (Judah Benjamin, Nathan Forrest, and even Davis’s wife Varina are far more interesting biographically from the southern side, Lincoln blows them all out of the water in complex personalities and in terms of unadulterated genius, I’ve read more books about Libby and George Custer than any other Civil War era couple, and all of them pale when stood beside Brigham Young, Sarah Bernhardt and Cornelius Vanderbilt [all of whom I’ve been researching for 30 years or more and still read any new bio of- wanna read some great stories? Check out Vanderbilt’s fin… or don’t, this is trivia of course). I’ve done a one man show of Joel Chandler Harris and the military person who most fascinates me is Hermann Göring. It’s not because I admire these people but because I find the notions of why humans do certain things and how individuals shape and are shaped by their times the most interesting of subjects. (That said I am currently researching a play on Davis, but it’s more about his wife and Wilde; I’m going to Beauvoir this week in fact to get some pics and see the interior decorations for three unrelated writing projects.)
I’d go into a long dissection of Brigham Young and why I find him both admirable and fascinating as well as contemptible which I would find relevant to the thread (definitely to the secession parts and some of his comments on Davis and other southern elite were insightful) but this is too long by far. So, I’ll take my own advice: opinions have been formed already, I am already pigeonholed, nobody but villa has conceded a single point, and I am a twisted ideologue Confederate apologist (who happens to think that they were wrong about every ideological point and has spent god knows how many hours and a small fortune fighting some of the weirder aspects of southern culture) and while it’s an erroneous and simplified assessment of me, nobody here knows me in the waking and whatever your opinions are I can live with quite happily.
Though I will mention that Johnson specifically excluded Davis from his amnesties strictly so he could be tried, though in interest of bipartisanship I’ll clue you in on something: research the pardoning of John Surratt and the Johnson Impeachment and you’ll find ways to jiggle the weakest stones in my reasoning.
I should mention if I haven’t already I have a decidedly misanthropic view of human intelligence and of history. YMMV.
If it kills this one I’ll buy you dinner at any Richmond establishment of your choosing. (Is O’Briensteins still there I wonder? Good place, or was back when I lived up there.)
You seem to be under the impression that I’m advocating violently repressing opposing views. I’m not. I don’t think there should be any laws against personal displays of Confederate regalia (including displays “in public”, not just hidden shrines to Robert E. Lee in a closet or something). The answer to these things is not force but education. As to collectively-sanctioned displays of such–like the names of public schools or public roads–if you ask me I will vote to change them. That’s all I’m saying, is that I think they ought to be changed. Coming together to change things like that is part of the educational process.
Yes, the ignorant we will have with us always, but I am quite not as cynical as you are. Progress is possible; progress has been made. A few generations ago and the Lost Cause would have been nigh-unassailable in polite Southern white company. Now, most of the Confederate battle flags have come down from the capitol domes and been taken off (most of) the state flags, and many of the schools and bridges have been renamed. (And many schools and bridges have been renamed for Martin Luther King, Jr., or other civil rights figures.) This is not because the Taliban swept over Dixie with fire and sword, it’s because things have gotten better.
Actually, if you look very carefully, lost in all the clutter of suburban sprawl, there are tons of those little roadside historical markers. These are pretty much all just documenting the course of events, not glorifying anything per se–“So-and-so’s Corps marched along this road (or the cowpath this road replaced) on such-and-such date”.
You’re still young so don’t worry, you’ll get there.
True, but… why? I would argue that it’s because of three things:
1- The passage of time removing former gods from the memory of the living
2- Better information technologies
3- Trickle down from the Civil Rights movement which was fought over major human rights issues and not pissant nuisances like high school names or who rednecks have on their trucks
You can’t any more educate people who don’t wish to be educated than you can legislate morality or order them to like baked fish.
Maybe the cure for the Billy Bobs and their “The South is gonna do it agin!” is to spread the word that Confederate leaders were educated genl’men who spoke Latin and Greek, wore the height of fashion and drank out of teacups with their little fingers extended. That should kill off any remaining nostalgia among the pickup-and-beer crowd.
That’s the great thing about battling ignorance, there are always other, if not necessarily fresh targets.
You make what difference you can, while passing up disingenuous invitations to reorder priorities and go after more important injustices.
It is actually possible to work to right multiple wrongs simultaneously, particularly if the arena is a message board. 
To give this the response a Jackmanni post deserves let me start by attacking something you never said:
Oh, so people who drive pickup trucks- i.e. manual laborers- are a bunch of bigots who hate Italians and Greeks? What about Greeks who drive pickups? How dare you say Greek truckdrivers should “kill off” Greek truckdrivers as “fresh targets” - these are your words man! (And quit with the genl’men nonsense- it’s offensive and not unlike quoting a black Doper who said something about calling the police to her house as having said ‘called the po-po to your crib, yo’; point of fact I am usually thought to be English or Midwestern rather than southern in accent.)
Oh, and for wit we cut and past Lehrer because we’re encapable of making our own don’t we? Here you go:
But comparing people who are in favor of renaming a high school to the Taliban is just “hyperbole”.
If killing this thread means we don’t have to put up with Sampiro patting himself on the back over his debating “skills”, you’ve done us all a favor.
That’s alright, you did that earlier (and half-assed apologized for it) by putting words in my mouth about your position re slavery.
And since you bring it up, it’s bizarre of you to be singling out “Billy Bob” as the problem in perpetuating Confederate apologism and twisting of history - when in this thread, it’s supposedly educated people spinning fables.
Sorry the Lehrer has gotten under your skin, but you handled it reasonably well, being kind to people who are
Inferior to you. 
Actually I don’t think I’m a good debater, it’s never been one of my strengths- except by comparisons to some (not all) others in this thread who confuse typing “sOUtH Was BAD” with making a substantive statement (your “Civil War had higher profile than Mexican and therefore was worse” argument for instance).
It’s not Lehrer so much as the utter lack of originality,
Well I’ve had a lot of practice.
I guess this thread continues to live. Oh well.
Even when it dies, it will rise again.
Maybe in a few hundred years the last apologists will have faded away and only their ghostly emanations will remain to haunt the remnants of once proud plantations.
“Taaaaalibaaan got meeeeeeee…Roooosevelt was as baaaad as Jefferson Daaaaavis…”