Dispatches from the Culture War
In the book of love’s own dreams
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old
— Attics of My Life, by Robert Hunter
THIS POST IS FULL OF SPOILERS:
If you hate spoilers and plan to read Go Set a Watchman, skip this post for now.
But please, come back when you’re done.
Count me among the gaggle that is looking forward to the new Harper Lee like a 5-year old anticipating Christmas morning. Release date is this coming Tuesday. I will be at the nearest bookstore at opening time to grab my copy.
PBS recently broadcast a new American Masters episode about Harper Lee as part of the run-up to the new book. It’s well worth the time, especially the interviews with the adult Mary Badham (Scout in the movie) and with Lee’s elder sister, Alice, an embodiment of what Southerners call a real character. But the best to me was the interweaving of guests reading favorite passages that faded across to the movie where the dialogue was straight from the page.
That’s Lt. Derrick Gamble of the South Carolina Highway Patrol Honor Guard carrying the Confederate Battle Flag that, as of Friday morning, no longer flies above the SC statehouse. There’s something pretty damned delicious in seeing a black man carry that rag away once and for all.
The crowd chants of “USA! USA!” as the flag was coming down struck me as just right. The United States won that damned war, and if it took yet another Confederacy surrender to drive that point home, so be it. 1That it happened in what Pierce calls the “the home office of American sedition” just adds to its sweet piquancy. A pal suggested that an artillery bombardment from Fort Sumter would have made for a fitting coda, but I imagine the liability insurance would have been too dear. And apparently my idea of just taking a chainsaw to the pole with the flag still aloft lacked the dignity that the organizers were looking for.
References
It’s been a good week to be a liberal in America. The affirmation by the Supreme Court that the Affordable Care Act will be allowed to remain the law of the land, along with their upholding of Obama-era policies regarding housing discrimination, are big victories.
Even bigger: today the Supremes affirmed the right for everyone to get married. This is a huge stride forward. Obama is correct in saying that “We have made our union a little more perfect” with this decision. The Obergefell decision is one of the key social justice decisions SCOTUS has delivered, and today we saw momentous history in the making, as surely as Brown v Board of Education was sixty years ago.
