In the Eye of the Beholder

Once upon a time in America, in a far different and far more gentle age, it was possible for four young men from Memphis, Tennessee, to appear at a performance in a Northern city dressed as Confederate officers and sing a song entitled “Save Your Confederate Money Boys, the South Shall Rise Again” without being booed off the stage. Not only that, rather than their performance at the 1956 International Quartet Singing Contest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, being met by a mob of screaming, placard-carrying protesters, the quartet, the Confederates, became that year’s gold medal winners. In that bygone era of our nation’s kinder past, such things were entirely acceptable, but in today’s politically correct and racially charged society anything that relates to the Confederacy, from songs, memorial statues and flags to place names, t-shirts and bumper stickers, have become anathema to a large section of the population in the North and, sadly enough, to many in the South as well. Even in the Confederate’s home state of Tennessee, there is now a theater in Nashville that has felt it politically expedient to cause their annual showing of a highly-acclaimed, Academy Award-winning film to be, like the movie’s title, Gone with the Wind.

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