ght for the Day // About Confederate Monuments // (Steven Hayward).

As background for an composition I’ m currently authoring southern politics, I had purpose to dip into Bill Alexander Percy’ s (Walker Percy’ s uncle) typical 1941 memoir, Lanterns on the Levee . It is one of the great textbooks about the post Civil Conflict South, and it confounds pretty much every dominant narrative about the To the south then and now. This passageway reads with special poignancy and irony today:

You will find in different Southern town a figurine in memory of the Confederate dead, erected by the Little ones of something or additional, and made, the townsfolk may respectfully tell you, in Malta. It is always the same: a sort of the whole length or truncated obelisk, following your manner of the Washington Batiment, on top of which stands a tiny man with a big loath holding a gun. If you are a Southerner you will not feel inclined to be able to laugh at these initiatives, so lacking in either attractiveness or character, to preserve typically the memory of their gallant in addition to ill-advised forebears. I think typically the dash, endurance, and loyalty of the Confederate soldier have never been greatly exaggerated inside song and story: they don’t deserve these chromos inside stone. Sentiment driveling directly into sentimentality, poverty, and, I actually fear, lack of taste is the cause of them, but they are the only typical monuments which are dreadful from the point of view regarding aesthetics, craftsmanship, and getting pregnant that escape being preposterous. They are too sad for the Perhaps a thousand years coming from now the spade regarding some archeologist will find simply these as relic regarding and clues to the faded civilization we call mine. How absurdly and hilariously erroneous are his deductions of is going

But it didn’ t take a thousands of years for our cultural ” archeologists” to light after these statues and be unfortunately and comically wrong concerning everything.