Jack Burns Lives!

I’ll Make My Stand

Last week was the 144th anniversary of the battle of Shiloh, a beautiful place that was once the scene of one of our ugliest conflicts.

As a young boy growing up in the south, I loved to visit Shiloh and would often fantasize I was Albert Sidney Johnston, P.G.T. Beauregard or Nathan Bedford Forrest dressed in a magnificent grey wool uniform trimmed in gold with a sabre on my hip. It all seemed so romantic, exciting and honorable, and like most good southern boys, I grew to dislike Yankees. Just hearing the word conjured up images of ruthless, untrustworthy savages still in our midst, despoilers of our land, our way of life and worst of all, people disrespectful to our fine southern women.

I remember the dogwood blooms of April along the Sunken Road and around Bloody Pond. Rows and rows of white headstones mostly inscribed “Unknown,” and Confederate burial trenches where thousands of my rebel ancestors were dumped in mass graves without dignity by a drunken, cigar smoking former clerk named Ulysses S. Grant. Little Shiloh Church. The Hornets Nest, the scene of supposedly the (but falsely credited) most brutal and significant fighting of the entire battle. Glancing across the Tennessee River where Buell’s reinforcements arrived and climbing on the cold, quiet canon that still overlook the mighty river.

I wanted to be a rebel. A Rebel soldier.

Of course to a young boy, all this is over romanticized and glorious, but in reality, there’s no glory in war. War is horror. Multilated bodies, children without fathers, the killing of innocents and often brutal occupations. No one mentioned those things when I was twelve, and although I saw the Brady photos of bloated dead at Antietam, it never seemed to register just how gruesome a spectacle it really was.

And no one mentioned the ugly specter of racism, either. Folks conveniently left all of that out of story.
It’s simply part of being an American boy. You’re raised to believe there’s glory in war, it’s honorable to be in the military and U.S. wars are always just. Just part of the indoctrination into the official but unspoken American religion, war to support profits, and don’t ask no questions! It’s unpatriotic and aids the enemy. Or so I’ve heard.

I later went on to study history at the University of Mississippi and The University of Memphis, and during those years, many of my boyhood images, fantasies and unfounded prejudices were shattered by the brutal reality of Southern history. The burden of Southern history, as some call it. Plantations like Oak Alley were not the norm, and while most Southerners didn’t own slaves, blacks universally endured a torturous existence that persisted in the South until the 1960′s. Whites were cruel and inhumane. Period and the end.

Southern armies were ragtag units of half starved boys, bare footed and stricken with disease, and the South and the North had war time prisons that made Abu Ghraib look like Disneyland.

It was basically an extremely ugly, grosteque affair fought by the lower classes to support the corrupt causes of the wealthy: profit, power and control. Today’s wars aren’t much different. There’s just less valor thanks to push button, high tech weaponry.There was little glory but enough pain and despair to last nearly 100 years. Mississippi didn’t even recognize or celebrate the 4th of July until the advent of the Second World War.

Much has been written about the causes of the The War Between The States, and close examination reveals that the dynamic leading up to the conflict was highly complex. Cultural and certainly economic issues were part of that dynamic; however, slavery, and more precisely, race and the domination of one race over another, was the core issue.

“I saw cotton and I saw black. Tall white mansions and little shacks. Southern man when will you pay them back? I heard screamin’ and bullwhips cracking.”- Neil Young

Despite all this ugliness I remain a proud Southerner. Why? Why do I cling to this place and defend its honor? How do I possibly defend a region that fought for slavery, enacted and enforced Jim Crow laws and murdered Martin Luther King? How do I defend a society that is still segregated, by choice and by both blacks and whites?

Southerners are raised on an unwritten code of honor that you defend your people right or wrong. It doesn’t matter that we were wrong about slavery or that we were stupid to vote for Bush or that the south is the key contributor to our nation becoming a theocratic oligarchy. We tend to stand with our own and as Shelby Foote once said, “Southerners are funny about that war.” But I’m not sure that’s it. A lot of southerners drive me absolutely nuts. I don’t defend our messianic zealots any more than I the defend bigots. In fact, I try to avoid them and simply pretend they aren’t there. Trouble is they are there and there’s too damn many of ‘em. The south is still has plenty of bigotry, and it’s nearly completely dominated by fundamentalist Christians that see some strange connection between Jesus and militarism.

I suppose it’s because those are not aspects of our culture that I cling to, admire and defend. To me, the south is thick forests and magnolias, gumbo, sparkling white beaches, countless rivers and streams, the majesty of the Smokies, “down home” cookin’, the Blues and Robert Johnson, Johnny Cash, Cajun Mardi Gras, alligator snappin’ turtles, our unique dialect and mannerisms. It’s the moist, seductive heat of the Lower Delta in July, cicadas singing at dusk, Faulkner, Welty, seersucker trousers and our rich soil. Things worth defending and being proud of.

“Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”-last words of Stonewall Jackson

And I’ll tell you something else about the South that’s important. It’s the right to stand up and demand sovereignty from unwanted government. Something more Americans ought to be thinking about right now, especially if that band of baneful idiots in Washington decides it wants to bomb Iran. The South had some damn good reasons to secede and one damn poor one, but at least Southerners (some of ‘em anyway) had the guts to stand up and say “enough is enough.”

We lost in 1865, and we’re now losing a different type of war. After Appomattox, our largely agrarian society was quickly transformed into a Yankee industrial shit hole that eventually metastasized into a completely over-developed, non-sustainable, “grow at all costs” society with bad air, bad traffic and even worse schools. We had pockets of industrialization before the war, and the North had agrarianism, but things changed dramatically after the war for the South. Had Lincoln lived, things may have turned out differently, but he was of course murdered by a man from a state that wasn’t even part of the Confederacy.

Today, the Causes of sufficiency in living, environmental responsibility and conservation (SEC, but not to be confused with the Southeastern Conference) seem as hopeless as Pickett’s Charge in 1863. Not enough people care about this land, and our values have changed. It’s not about the land anymore; it’s about money and profits and nothing seems sacred.

The dreams and fantasies of youth have now passed into the dark reality of the present. A world where there is no honor except in the rebel tactic of intentional simplicity. Small daily decisions that you hope will have some impact and help save the land from a invasive, plague species. To stand bravely and like a stone wall against the swelling tide of indifference and ignorance and in dignity with the voiceless. To speak up and speak out, to challenge, to question and to probe. To, as Edward Abbey once said, “Follow the truth no matter where it leads you.”

Forget you lust for the rich man’s gold
All that you need is in your soul,
And you can do this if you try.
All that I want for you my son,
Is to be satisfied.