Texas "Secession": The Most Inappropriate Protest in American History?

Secession, eh?

I get it. It is a statement, right? Great. People in Texas don't like President Obama. It will never become reality, for really real. I get it.

No joke.

But, you know, a while ago, I made a joke on someone's Facebook thread about Lincoln's assassination. I thought it was harmless -- a remark about him faring badly on a night at the theater. Well, my friend's friend (someone I did not know) flipped out about my not showing respect for the man who is arguably our greatest-ever president. The thing is, I have always had tremendous respect for Lincoln.

At first, my reaction was: This guy is over the top. He's crazy. How could he flip out like this? Lincoln has been dead for so long... I even "rode" him a little for being ridiculous, for a few lines.

Greek Man Dies for Mythical Money

On Wednesday, I put up a post about my dad saying that if everyone in the world were like him, little children would be safe on the streets. It was little philosophical reductions like this, by my dad, when I was young, that probably set the machine of thought in motion for me.

One of his stories involves a time when he was watching TV with some friends during the Vietnam war. They were taking in a news report about the war, with film from the battlefield. My dad said, out loud: "Look at that."

"What?" a friend replied.

""People are actually shooting guns at each other."

Oblivious to my father's point about the absurdity of the human condition, one of the friends turned to another and said, "What the hell's the matter with this guy?"

I am a fan of reducing things to what, I hope, is their essence, as my dad was trying to do for a hopelessly indoctrinated audience. That's the only way we can get to truth, as far as I'm concerned.

So, how about this one: a man kills himself in Athens, Greece, over his financial woes, claiming, out loud, that he doesn't want to leave his kids in debt.

Over money. Money. There's another soul ground up by the machine's gears. Another result of our brilliant social/financial/political organizations that have developed over the centuries. A man ends his life over shiny metal -- or, worse, the paper that represents it...or the digital code that represents the paper that represents the gold...or, that is, represents the gold that is supposed to be in the coffers -- safe in some vault -- that is represented by the digital codes that represent the paper that should represent that gold, if it were, in fact, plentiful enough to actually support its representation by the paper that is now digital code for money that might or might not actually be there, depending who you talk to...

Be that as it may, a man is dead. Look what we've done. A life ends over bills. The worst thing about that is that, to many, it doesn't even sound absurd; the same way it didn't sound absurd to my father's friends when he stated the obviously horrific, so many years ago.

The Burning of Darien

In the great Civil War movie, Glory, a young, white colonel named Robert Gould Shaw [Matthew Broderick] is given command of an entirely black regiment of soldiers, made up of freemen and runaway slaves. (This movie based on real history, but, please, history buffs: I know there are gaps and suppositions in the film. I'm talking more theme and message, here.)

Shaw

He wins their dedication through his own dedication to them, culminating with his refusal to take pay if the government does not pay the black soldiers the fair rate. They become a formidable regiment: excellent soldiers. Finally, they are given a job to do: foraging for supplies in a town called Darien, in the Union occupied South. They march down with another regiment -- a "contraband" regiment of black soldiers who are not well-trained and who are under command of a mad man, who is Shaw's superior, Col. George Montgomery.

When they reach the town, Montgomery begins, after having shot one of his own men for stealing from a white person's house, to drone about how he needs to wipe the town clean, like the hand of God sweeping through. He commands Shaw to have his men (who are standing neatly at attention, faces open and innocent while the "contraband" soldiers pillage and smash windows) to "fire the town."

Lee's Succinct Truth

Sometimes, I'll write a long post and, the day after, I'll see or hear something that pretty much sums it up in a fraction of the words. I suppose my last post can be found in a quotation from General Robert E. Lee:

"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it."

Indeed. Let's face it: war is cool in a lot of ways. The shame of it is that those ways tend to get negated completely by a photo of the bloated corpse of a dead young man.

(Addendum: The quoting of Lee here is not meant to glorify, in any way, the principles of the slave-owning South -- I was merely interested in Lee's thinking as a brilliant military man, which he was. A friend was offended that I would even quote him, but I would quote anyone with particular credentials, if it made my point. Doing so is not intended as a justification of that person's morals.)