Wednesday, February 10, 2021

The Civil War Redux: A Film by Ken Burns


Someone like Ken Burns should do a multi-episodic documentary on the current civil war. He, in fact, would be a real candidate since his prior The Civil War (1990) has become such a classic. The collective unconscious of the United States is truly suffering from a split ego. Were the wounds of the first Civil War ever healed? And how did a traumatized society recover? Following Reconstruction, there were uprisings on the part of white segregationists which resulted in a retrenchment from almost all the gains, Lincoln iterated in the Emancipation Proclamation. Today, there's little evidence of détente and the same set of conditions appear to be operant. Yes, the Democrats have won, but a huge swath of the population will not even accede to the fact that the election was fair and not rigged. The Times and other liberal news outlets like CNN and MSNBC are preaching to their respective choirs. Among hardcore Retrumplicans even Fox News is looked at with suspicion since they were the first to call the election for Biden. The same violent language that became the legacy of the Civil War is being repeated by members of the House like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert. Alexander Ocasio Cortiz relates how she hid out during the uprising instead of exiting to a supposed “safe” area with the rest of the house, in fear that some of her colleagues might Tweet the whereabouts of her position. Unless something radical happens in the Biden administration the next four years will simply be the seeming calm before the storm—as the GOP or Patriot Party sets out to finally retake the territory they've lost and win the election in the only way they know how—through force. 

Read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1, Brooklyn


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