Country Music
directed by Ken Burns.
In October 2017, two months after white supremacists had held a ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s comments echoed the president’s remarks in the rally’s immediate aftermath. (‘Some very fine people on both sides,’ Trump said, comparing the marchers – who carried torches and chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ – with those who had come out to protest against their presence.) In many quarters Kelly was taken to task. But when Trump’s (then) press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was asked about it, she concurred. ‘I don’t know that I’m going to get into debating the Civil War,’ she said. ‘But I do know that many historians, including Shelby Foote, in Ken Burns’s famous Civil War documentary, agree that a failure to compromise was a cause of the Civil War.’
Sanders was right: Kelly’s comments could have come straight out of Burns’s documentary, which gave a sympathetic hearing to the notion of the ‘Lost Cause’. ‘Basically,’ Foote said at the start, ‘it was a failure on our part to find a way not to fight that war. It was because we failed to do the thing we really have a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising. Our true genius is for compromising. Our whole government’s founded on it. And it failed.’
No comments:
Post a Comment