The South has risen again, alright.
Only this time it’s after it has fatted itself for a hundred and fifty years on an imperfect but evolving democracy, waiting until it looked like the godly for whom it had claimed so long to represent, waiting to assimilate into a government it secretly loathed, swallowing its disgust in having to share the same culture with the brown and black and yellow-skinned people on whose subjugation its antebellum ideology always depended.
To observe the Republican Party in its current form is to observe it wreaking revenge on a victorious Union and see the incarnation of the beating hearts and blackened souls of their antecedent oppressors; a seditious still-birth of a nation which lost its “right” to divide and enslave whole peoples, which lost the power to treat human beings as property, and which despite the wise stewardship that summoned better angels to beat it back, now walks among us to incite another uncivil war.
And marshaling all but the truth in its efforts, the Republicans are willing to bring the temple of Democracy down on everyone’s heads, having parted ways with even their rebel progenitors in the area of honor and tradition, instead taking sides with their more colorful contemporaries: the jihadists they claim to despise, whose blood fetish and worship of chaos is more a function of ignorance and laziness than of passionate belief. Easy to die, easy to sow confusion, easy to shove a crowbar through the spokes of a spinning wheel.
We’ve endured the run-up to this moment, this salvo at Sumter: the years of disgusting disrespect towards this duly elected president, the disingenuous smirks of the corporate shills posing as journalists, the blatant flouting of the democratic process via gerrymandering and opportunism which overrides humanitarianism when catastrophe strikes.
And the pathetic parlor game which our politics has become to a people who retreat further and further from the town square into the anarchic void of the internet where facts and science mutate into superstition and paranoia.
But thankfully, the majority of Americans still possess a basic decency and instinct for What Is Right and are every bit as determined to face this assault as those who did the same in 1861, as vigilant and passionate about preserving the Union for which its citizens fought so valiantly by merely living in a democracy: by working, by serving, by voting, by simply respecting the process and the people, by embracing change and learning the lessons of history.
And if there’s one thing the current crop of Republicans apparently haven’t learned, it’s this: a house divided against itself cannot stand. But they will. They will.