Guest post: Growing up in a culture that embraced the mythology
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on As white Americans embraced the moonlight and magnolias.
I had known my (now) ex-wife for a year before we got married, and I knew she liked the movie. She was born in Louisiana, and would sometimes say things that made no sense to me as her personal point of pride at being from one of the 4 states that are the “real South.” The Mason-Dixon line was BS, she said. Only Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana were the Real South. So, you can imagine what it felt like as we were driving through Mississippi on our way back from a honeymoon in New Orleans for her to say “Slavery wasn’t so bad. Some of them were even treated like members of the family.” It was one of the most sinking feelings I had ever had (and I’m a Minnesota Vikings fan, so you can imagine the depths.)
She didn’t get what is so wrong about people owning other people, let alone the subjection to whippings, rape, family separation, torture, and murder that the slaves were subject to. Imagine even living your whole life without the hope of every being free from the yoke of another. I think that’s the worst torture.
Do these people who romanticize the Old South and tour the Plantation homes in awe of their splendor have an ounce of human empathy? She didn’t get that someone who was a ‘house nigger” faced being sent out to the fields on a moment’s notice if they were imagined to be looking the wrong way at the daughter of a plantation owner, or for trying to learn to read. I tried to reason with the woman I had just married, but it was so ingrained in her by growing up in a culture that embraced such romanticism as depicted in this story. “Gone with the Wind” isn’t the only movie to depict the Reconstruction this way, either. “The Outlaw Josey Wales” is the story of a former Confederate driven from his land and his family murdered by the Union. And he was depicted as a hero, while the Union soldiers were depicted as bloodthirsty avengers.
It’s not virtue signaling to be disgusted by the influence that “Gone with the Wind,” movie and novel, have had on our society. It excuses the worst excesses of our history. And the attitude enables idiots to fly both the US Flag and the Stars and Bars on their trucks as patriots.
GWTW was not the reason we got divorced, but it was a sickening foreshadow of some of the conflicts to come.
(I never understood why Joan Baez covered “The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down.” There must be some hidden meaning that I miss. Robbie Robertson said he got the idea from listening to family of Levon Helm talk about Reconstruction, and one could perhaps think of Virgil Caine, who was not a slaveholder, as an innocent victim in an existential power struggle in a country at war with itself.)
This post may be virtue signalling, but do we need to drop n-bombs, even in quotation marks?
This is a direct quote of what she said. It offended me, coming from someone with whom I had just traded vows. If I had used asterisks or a euphemism would you have felt the impact that i did?
And how do you mean that it is “virtue signaling?” Or was your reply here meant as irony?
The Youtuber Atun-Shei Productions has a video (series?) on how Gods and Generals is basically just Confederate propaganda, but he actually has some very nice things to say about The Outlaw Josie Wales by contrast. Never having seen a second of the film outside of that brief analysis, I can’t really commit to a full-throated defence of it, but I will say that a story with an honourable Confederate protagonist and dishonourable Union antagonists (especially when depicting the Union troops as pirates in the Midwest, which not a few basically were) isn’t necessarily a bastardisation of history. Lumping it in the same bin as Gone With the Wind because of some superficial similarities isn’t really fair.
And Colin, I would say we do. Euphemising doesn’t change the words quoted.
Seems like a crystal clear example of mentioning as opposed to using the word to me.
Re The Night…, perhaps I’m seeing things through a Band fan’s glasses, but I never took it as defending slavery or even the Confederacy. I always interpreted it as more about how the war affected the poorer (yes, white) people of the south. Robbie Robertson certainly wasn’t racist, and I don’t think Levon Helm was either.
As for using n-, personally I don’t like to do that even if it’s mentioning rather than using, but our host here has no compunction about citing such words.
Yeah I’m a real Karen that way.
Ophelia,
It wasn’t a criticism, just an observation. I don’t like uttering or writing out slurs even when mentioning them because it makes me feel icky, but that’s a personal feeling, not a judgment.
I agree WAM, it makes me feel icky, but as I replied to Colin, conveying the impact in this case is important.
And as for “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” and “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down,” those stories made me think, and I agree that they may not necessarily reflect heroism of the southern cause. Virgil Caine may have a compatriot in Inman, the character in “Cold Mountain.” He just wanted to survive. I think I also have a tendency to romanticize the Northern cause, being from Minnesota and home of the first volunteer regiment to join the fight. There were megalomaniac assholes in blue.
It makes me feel icky too. It’s a little weird, the power it has that way, even in attribution as opposed to use.
That’s the thing though, maybe it’s too subtle a distinction but the ACW wasn’t a war fought to end slavery, but it was a war fought to keep it. Sooner or later a Fort Sumter was bound to happen, but if it hadn’t, what then?
@ Mike Haubrich, #2
I meant that my own comment might have been virtue signalling, so it may have been ironic.
Also, were you quoting your wife?
Yes, I was quoting her directly. Now I understand about your comment, thanks for clarifying!