Through a Lens Darkly

 

There is an old saying in the theater that when one is acting the part of a butler in a play, the actor tends to regard it as a play about butlers.  This manner of observing personages and events, both past and present is, of course, a sad fact of life within many levels of modern society.  All too often, people today are inclined to view such things through a lens which shows them not as they actually are or were, but rather as the observer might wish them to be or have been.  A prime example of this revisionist view is the current controversy over what the South actually represents today and what part it played in the shaping of America’s past.

A case in point for this distorted view of America’s past and present would be on the part of those who now choose to play the role of slavery’s victim.  This can be clearly observed in an article which appeared recently in the Los Angeles Times by Jamil Smith, a black freelance journalist who had once served as an editor for the liberal New Republic.  In his piece, “Doomed to Fight the Civil War Again,” Smith contends that people who defend any vestige the Confederacy today are guilty of upholding traitors.  His argument is based on a White House press conference at which Press Secretary Sarah Sanders defended some remarks made by White House Chief of Staff General John Kelly about honoring the memory of Robert E. Lee and the events that actually brought about the War Between the States.  However, in Smith’s opinion, all Kelly was doing was merely defending a slaveholder, as well as displaying his total ignorance of what should be properly deemed as the only true cause of the War . . . slavery.

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