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A correction in Time...
The article "Look Away, Dixieland" [Jan. 27] stated that President George W. Bush "quietly reinstated" a tradition of having the White House deliver a floral wreath to the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery â a practice "that his father had halted in 1990." The story is wrong. First, the elder president Bush did not, as TIME reported, end the decades-old practice of the White House delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial; he changed the date on which the wreath is delivered from the day that some southern heritage groups commemorate Jefferson Davis's birthday to the federal Memorial Day holiday. Second, according to documents provided by the White House this week, the practice of delivering a wreath to the Confederate Memorial on Memorial Day continued under Bill Clinton as it does under George W. Bush.I find this type of argument and all the insinuations that go with it to be tedious and stupid and cheap. The first President Johnson â the Republican one â managed to get himself impeached by trying to follow a policy of national reconciliation after the Civil War. (That was a continuation of Lincoln's policy, by the way.) Somehow, in the course of the second half of the 19th century the nation did manage to reconcile itself. As the heroes of the war died off, their former opponents often attended their funerals to bid them farewell. The hatreds engendered by the war were gradually forgotten, to be replaced on both sides by a recognition of the bravery and gallantry of their former adversaries. By the time of the Spanish-American War, southerners were again patriots, and they enlisted in droves, to fight next to the formerly-hated Yankees. In World War I they did the same, and they did it yet again in World War II. The differences of the War Between the States â aka the War of Northern Aggression â had been relegated to the past, and the lingering vestiges were nothing more than an occasional gibe. The men who fought the Civil War are all gone now. The last Civil War veteran â a Confederate â died when I was still a young fellow. Yet the "malice toward none" idea's been demolished by the new pushers of intolerance, demolished in the name of "sensitivity." Waterloo is the site of an English victory and a French defeat, the site where thousands of men died or were maimed. The fight is long since over, and all that remains are the ghosts of the dead. In this single respect, I'll admit that Europeans are more civilized than we are: Visitors to Waterloo today don't pee on one side or the other. The same can't be said for the people who're so much holier than we are in our own country, whose morals are too shoddy to allow the dead to sleep in peace, whose "sensitivity" is too precious to be expended on honoring them for what they were, recognizing that like all of us each person was a combination of both good and bad. Insensitive and loutish as I try to be, I still can't bring myself down to those levels. I especially couldn't do it out of sheer spite. I'm afraid I can't get my heart to be that small. Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-01-24 |
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