I haven’t seen ‘Lincoln’ (I love Daniel Day Lewis but don’t like Spielberg), so I won’t make a comment on it. But I do read Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Atlantic page. And he’s in the midst of conversation about the movie and, more broadly, how the country looks at the Civil War.
Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I have long held that the South won, even though it lost the Civil War. And with the petitions from the old Confederacy getting 10s-of-thousands of signatures (I think the Texas ones have somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000—one has almost 120,000 alone); the continuing meme that Obama won re-election by giving “gifts” to minorities; and Ross Douthat’s most recent article about the “decline” in the U.S. birthrate (anybody else hearing echoes of the eugenics movement?), I think it’s time to go even farther.
Not only did the South win my friends, we’re still fighting the Civil War.
So what does that mean when we look at a movie like ‘Lincoln’? Is compromise always the thing to strive for? Are there things that we should remember, but don’t? What happens when no outcome is good? And what does liberal religion have to say in that situation?
