False political narratives must be exposed

Stefanik is a leader of Trump's new "lost cause"

I used to have books mailed to me by random publishers when I was the features editor of the Post-Star, including some from Pelican Publishing, a small outfit in Louisiana. 

Some of the books in Pelican’s catalogue portrayed life in the antebellum South in ways that were jarring but tolerable, if you believed that enslaved people lived happy lives, working outdoors alongside their spouses while their children played in the fields nearby.

I called an older lady who worked there and questioned her about the distortions of history in their books. She was polite but stubborn, insisting that black people and white people got along well on southern plantations and that abuse of enslaved men, women and children was reprehensible but rare.

These conversations took place not in the 1890s but the late 1990s, and, although the storybooks were clumsy and inaccurate, they weren’t far outside the mainstream. From “Gone With the Wind” to Faulkner’s novels to “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” minimizing the evils of slavery and promoting the romance and righteousness of the Confederacy has been a popular theme in American culture.

That contemporary country music fans could embrace a band of southern white musicians named Lady Antebellum shows how deeply we have internalized the lie that the South didn’t fight the Civil War to preserve slavery but to defend an honorable and admirable “way of life.”

In 2020, when the band changed its name to Lady A, its members explained “… we named our band after the southern ‘antebellum’ style home where we took our first photos …”

Who lived in those grand antebellum homes? 

How did they make their money?

Embracing the “lost cause” of the Confederacy demands a deliberate turning-away from the truth — a refusal to see it or hear it — and a similar turning-away can be seen in the defense of Donald Trump. With her facility for buzzwords, Rep. Elise Stefanik is a leader of this new “lost cause.”

“The radical far left will stop at nothing to interfere with the 2024 election,” she said, in a statement that followed Trump’s indictment for removing state secrets from the White House and storing them at his Florida residence and showing them to random people and lying about them.

I’ve read some speeches by southern congressmen made in the lead-up to the Civil War, as they defended the South’s right to preserve and expand slavery, and you can hear an echo of them from the defenders of Trump, when they claim the fault lies with those who condemn illegal and immoral behavior, not those who perform it.

John Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, said in an 1837 speech:

“However sound the great body of the non-slaveholding states are at present, in the course of a few years they will be succeeded by those who will have been taught to hate the people and institutions of nearly one-half of this Union, with a hatred deadlier than one hostile nation ever entertained towards another.”

By “sound,” Calhoun meant supportive of slavery.

Trump’s clown show doesn’t approach the scope and gravity of the Civil War, but his behavior is dividing this country, and those who abet it must be called out. Our congresswomen is one of them.

Around downtown

It was nice to see recognition of Pride Weekend (or is it Week?) in downtown Glens Falls:

Celebrating Pride in the window of Crandall Public Library

Celebrating in the display window of the LARAC gallery

And here’s a video of Deja Vu Jazz, which performs in a lovely, mellow fashion Saturday afternoons in Spot Coffee:

And here’s a video of a couple who were enjoying the music: