This is the third time in seven years I've pulled this Shelby Foote interview out
of my holster. I used to think there was a chance to talk reason,
as did Foote evidently. The political climate today is ripe for
these whiny Liberal MFCS to find their Jiang Qing [Michelle Obama?], and then we'll witness some real cultural reeducation.
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excerpt
The Civil War, there's a great compromise, as it's called. It consists
of Southerners admitting freely that it's probably best that the Union
wasn't divided, and the North admits rather freely that the South
fought bravely for a cause in which it believed. That is a great
compromise and we live with that and that works for us. We are now able
to look at the war with some coolness, which we couldn't do before now,
and, incidentally, I very much doubt whether a history such as mine
could have been written much before 100 years had elapsed. It took all
that time for things to cool down.
When I was a grade school boy in Mississippi, I knew obscene
doggerel about Abraham Lincoln, left over from my parents and
grandparents. Yankees were despised. When one of them was so
unfortunate as to move to Greenville, Mississippi, he was despised. All
that stopped. All that's over now, and the great compromise obtains. I
wish my black friends could do the same thing. The Illinois senator
[Carol Moseley-Braun] who didn't want the Daughters of the Confederacy
at Richmond to have a Confederate symbol -- not the battle flag; just a
Confederate symbol -- on their stationery, got her fellow senators to
disallow it. I do not understand that. That's a violation of the
compromise, for example, and it's an arousal of bitterness. But she,
along with a great many others, do not want to be reminded. She has
every right to want to hide from history if she wants to, but it seems
to me she's trying to hide history from us, and that's a mistake. -
Shelby Foote - CSPAN Booknotes interview, September 11, 1994
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