My Brain is Hanging Upside Down

Ronald Reagan received well-deserved scorn in 1985 for visiting Kolmeshöhe Cemetery, where several dozens of SS members were buried; even so, the circumstances of that visit could at least be rendered moderately sensible, given the incompetence that preceded the trip in the first place (e.g., Michael Deaver’s inability to realize who were buried there) and the political conditions that Reagan claimed had boxed him in (e.g., Kohl’s earlier support for missile deployment). The fact remains, though, that Reagan’s gesture of “reconciliation” was a disaster that subsequent presidents have wisely elected not to repeat.

By way of comparison, I have no idea why US presidents continue to honor the memory of soldiers who died fighting for the rights of white people to own black people.

A little over 140 years ago the residents of the American south rose up and began brutally slaughtering thousands of their fellow citizens to defend a despicable system of slavery. They chose to kill and destroy instead of recognizing that the tide of history had finally turned against them. Yet the memory of these traitors and murderers is honored, the reasons for their crimes santized. Deserters from the US military – men who took and then broke an oath of service to the Constitution of the United State – are given memorials and characterized as men of honor.

No shit. What respectable constituency is served by this annual rite of national humiliation? That anyone would mourn the confederate dead is beyond my range of comprehension; it’s unfortunate enough that William McKinley ever set in motion the process that eventually brought tens of thousands of Southern corpses under the care of the US government, when the nation would have been more properly served by stacking them on barges and launching them onto the North Atlantic current. But I’m kind of an asshole that way. The scandal here, however, is that Obama and his predecessors have specifically granted legitimacy to a memorial that — as a heap of scholars properly note — is nothing more than an ode to white supremacy and Lost Cause mythology. It continues to serve as a beacon to neo-Confederates who believe the South was engaged in a divine struggle against evil and that its founding principles have been vindicated over the past century and a half. Unless the wreath Obama sent to the memorial happened to be attached to a jackhammer, the effort was surely wasted.