Back from the Dead

Well, a recent plug about me from my friend Meghan Daum over at The Elegant Variation has encouraged me to write a few words. I do this despite the fact that my sister Molly over at aptly named Molly.com has been urging me to write forever. But little brothers have an age-old right to ignore big sisters. And why should I write? The dissertation-writing process leaves me dried-up and blocked and I come to doubt that anything I write has any real meaning. Perhaps this is all part of the way graduate school builds character and my feeling is universal in the academic world.

So, since guilt prevents me from enjoying anything that doesn't have to do with history, the only movie I could justify seeing this weekend was CSA, a pseudo-documentary about the Southern victory in the Civil War. Or "The War of Northern Aggression," as some like to say. Since I'm now working on a Civil War chapter that deals with Henry Adams trying to convince the New York Times-reading public of 1861 that the war is, or should be, very much about slavery, the movie resonated on a few themes not much in the public consciousness these days. Like the fact that Lincoln's first goal was preservation of the Union and his theory of the war was that the South had no constitutional right to secede. Adams kept pounding home the concept that the war was about slavery and not only that, without the moral authority of that issue, Europe would follow her economic interests and interfere on behalf of the South. He had a good point: If the war was about the very localized idea that states had no constitutional right to secede, why would Europe care? In fact, hadn't the colonies separated from England under a very similar theory? But if the abstract and universal principle of "freedom" were at stake, then Britain, with her anti-slave and Dissenter heritage, and France with her supposed commitment to the principles of the Revolution, could hardly weigh in to preserve a nation built on bondage.

CSA does a creditable job of depicting an alternative America. Most disturbing perhaps are the ostensible commercial breaks which give a window into a country where slavery has become mainstream. The plug for a tv-show called "Runaway" has footage so close in appearance to the reality of "Cops" -- white officers pursuing blacks -- that one wonders if this is irony or reflection.

As for me, the most pertinent question is not how finding the moral imperative for a war defines its place in history (a question much on my mind since I can find no real moral imperative behind certain nameless wars) but, "how much of my dissertation do I write today?"