The Lost Cause
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
123.59805
Summary
The removal of a Confederate monument in Washington, D.C. from the National Museum of American Civil War and the removal of the Lee statue in Arlington National Cemetary in Arlington, Va. are two of the most controversial events of the past week.
Transcript
00:00:01.820
They have officially melted down the statue of Robert E. Lee.
00:00:13.760
And there's even a burnt offering quality to these things.
00:00:20.100
I mean, the fact that the Washington Post is showing these images,
00:00:26.260
you know, it's almost like we're watching someone being sacrificed
00:00:32.820
I mean, I don't think I've got too much Brahmin on my brain.
00:00:48.700
And it's obviously a kind of ritualistic humiliation, so to speak.
00:00:57.040
And so I definitely understand why a lot of people will be offended by this.
00:01:10.260
Maybe it's my tendency to try to look on the bright side
00:01:14.900
I do feel like this destruction of the monument is kind of liberating.
00:01:28.060
I don't think I would ever again engage in some kind of protest for Southern history.
00:01:40.680
Those guys who want to hold on to the lost cause and et cetera,
00:01:44.080
I think they can kind of defend themselves or not.
00:01:53.380
And I think a lot of things that were said around that time were true.
00:02:08.760
You know, let's not just take away Robert E. Lee.
00:02:18.020
I want to see you have intellectual consistency
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and not pretend that all of these generations of Americans
00:02:44.440
We saw a series of iconoclasm that continued in 2020 with BLM.
00:02:51.040
It was going on in 2016 post-Trump that continued in 2020.
00:02:56.320
You know, paintings of Woodrow Wilson are being taken out of universities.
00:03:02.080
And it's a general trend and it kind of ebbs and flows.
00:03:05.640
I think it will slow down here and there, but it will always come back.
00:03:10.020
And we've even seen it recently where some Palestinian protesters have attacked,
00:03:18.520
Obviously, that doesn't make sense on some level, but it's, you know,
00:03:28.540
But I think it's also important to, you know, critically examine the symbols themselves because
00:03:41.860
And it also was a kind of negotiation, as it were, between Yankees and Southerners, where
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We are ultimately going to be a union in which Washington prevails.
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But we're going to let you have your cake and eat it, so to speak, of we're going to, in fact,
00:04:08.540
quasi deify your generals by naming all these army bases, but also put those army bases in the south.
00:04:15.560
So we'll let you, we'll get all these southern whites to get gung-ho about the military and go fight in wars.
00:04:23.160
And there'll be these army bases with confederate generals, but they'll ultimately, let's be honest,
00:04:28.820
be Yankee bases in the south named, you know, after Jackson or Lee, etc.
00:04:33.940
So I think there was that sort of negotiation going on in the period, the end of Reconstruction and a national reconciliation,
00:04:49.740
But there was also a sort of lost cause, a kind of bad lost cause,
00:04:55.340
where Southerners wanted to pretend that the Civil War wasn't, in fact, about slavery
00:05:02.580
and was some kind of libertarian protest against an encroaching government.
00:05:10.640
And, you know, it's good we, Alex Stevens was a good writer and a very clear writer,
00:05:19.280
and he made it very clear that this was about slavery and it was even ultimately about race on some level.
00:05:26.900
You can read the cornerstone of the Confederacy speech, and it even goes after Jefferson.
00:05:36.140
There's a, this is based on the prospect that Thomas Jefferson might very well have been wrong
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when he wrote those lines about human equality.
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And for Southerners to kind of live in this blindness of,
00:05:56.520
it was about libertarianism or the Constitution,
00:06:01.740
as opposed to being a revolt against the Constitution, which it was,
00:06:05.360
but it was about the Constitution of libertarianism.
00:06:10.020
And they took this to just elaborate ends of, like, talking about black Confederates
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and all of this just increasingly nonsensical propaganda
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to show that they weren't, in fact, racist and that they were the good guys, etc.
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I think in some ways these statues were blinders for Southerners,
00:06:45.540
And they were ultimately, I mean, the fact that these statues were given
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to an African-American institute that just melted them down
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demonstrates who really has the power in this situation.
00:07:03.000
And I'm not implying that blacks have the power.
00:07:05.640
I think there are political football in this as well.
00:07:09.400
But, you know, isn't there something good about just ripping the Band-Aid off
00:07:16.920
and facing reality, as opposed to engaging in this Southern temptation of nostalgia
00:07:26.200
and false nostalgia, kind of imagining something that never really was?
00:07:34.540
And maybe there's something that can be very positive about getting rid of those statues
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that gave Southerners a kind of false sense of security.
00:07:48.140
And maybe all of that stuff was a lie, and it's a lie that the state doesn't find terribly useful anymore,
00:07:59.600
and it's a kind of old lie that's outlived its usefulness.
00:08:05.240
And maybe there's something to be said about this being good.
00:08:11.180
You know, like, let's take down the Confederate flag in South Carolina.
00:08:15.820
Let's not pretend that, first off, there isn't an inherent contradiction of waving a Confederate flag.
00:08:28.580
And to be part of the Union while flying the flag is a bit oxymoronic and ridiculous, even.
00:08:37.960
And let's just kind of get rid of it and face reality and stop living in this dream world of the lost cause myth.