A Memoir of the Occupation, Part 2

​I was born on the fifth anniversary – or was it the third? Or second? It doesn't matter – of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law. You and Freedom are twins! My parents used to say that. They were in Washington for the signing. Both were born in the Deep South but met at Yale, that finishing-school for the missionaries of Americanism. When better to launch a new one than after the great triumph of World War II, with FDR scamming Churchill out of the British Empire? We must continue the great work of Father Abraham! So my parents returned to the South, on fire to lift the South from its Stygian darkness of racist oppression.


I am not old (or that's what I am told). But I have always felt out of place, out of time, and even more so now. I am ancient, lost, alien. I do not like the "American Century." Kennedy's assassination and the elevation of LBJ broke something, I am convinced, or rendered the U.S. unfixable; it is as though governance of the nation passed to those who hate it. Vietnam; stagflation; the "false dawn" of Reagan, whose great "achievement" was the unleashing of Milton Friedmanism, aka the neoliberal economic order. Capital must be free to cross borders – provided it is denominated in U.S. dollars -- freedom of cross-border dollar-denominated capital flows; it is the duty of the corporation to prioritize shareholder returns; if margins must be bolstered by wholesale layoffs, so be it. Reagan's "revolution" also unleashed the private equity/private credit industry to practice some of that neoliberal-approved "creative destruction." Buy a company with junk bonds; load it with debt; pay oneself a dividend and fire workers to support cash flow; strip and sell the assets; and shift any remaining operations to a low-wage domicile. Citizens are no more than units of economic consumption – "consumers," they are called, like cattle. The business of America is business, and business requires "growth," and if mass layoffs are needed to show "growth," then that's what the C-suite shall do. If your job got sent to China or Vietnam – well, numb your pain with Oxycontin, approved by the FDA.


Sorry to be a downer, Uncle Sam, but I don't think you've deployed your "talents" wisely.

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Grandma once told me a story that she had from her mother. It was the summer of 1864. A Confederate officer galloped up the plantation drive. Sherman and the Americans were coming, he said. And indeed, they could see, just on the horizon, the flags fluttering in the breeze. They – all of them, the women that would be my great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother and the twenty-nine slaves – fled to the forest to hide.


They heard shouting, gunfire, the screams of horses. Soon smoke and the reek of the burning drifted through the trees drifted through the trees and the reek of the burning. When they returned two days later, it was all gone but for charred timber and blackened bricks.


The Americans, Grandma said, killed the livestock. All of them, or such as remained: a milk cow, two hogs, the team of mules, the horses, the pony my great-grandmother rode. They just shot them, Grandma said. Shot them and left them to die. Mama said her pony was wheezing, she held the poor thing's head. Why? I asked Grandma. I was ten or thereabouts. We were on the porch looking toward the pond. Early evening in August, when the setting sun seemed to gild the air itself. They were just mean people, she said. Maybe the war made them mean. Something sour in them. Well, Grandma. Conservative "intellectual" Victor Davis Hanson would like a word with you. Hanson LARPs as a farmer but IRL he is the Martin and Allie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in California. His focus is classics and military history, and he considers himself an "expert" on "the American way of war." He, like the odious Reynolds, came to prominence during the neocon salad days, banging his fists for regime change. Remember when Bloody Bill Kristol had that cruise ship scam going? Hanson was a regular. He would say things like this: "In this new age the American military does not like fascists, and it thus will unleash horrific power to eliminate autocrats like Noriega, Molosevic, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein." Here is an example of Hanson's wretched prose: he is aping Churchill, or Churchill's ghost-writers, who themselves were aping the Georgians:

That is a little dated, obviously (it's also on National Review, to which I won't link).  Perhaps you noticed Hanson beating the drums for Trump recently?  He even made The Case for Trump – that's a book, and no link from me.  Page after page of bombastic bullshit, an ex-warmonger sucking up to the new boss – who, if nothing else, has made the right noises about the wars Hanson cheered on with passion.  Well, Trump is from New York, so he knows whores. 

 
So, Hanson. These fascists.  How shall we know them?  Anyone who opposes American power.  Unleash horrific power on a girl's pony?  War is hell.  Americans approve. Recently, in Vicksburg, I struck up a conversation with a retired autoworker from Toledo, second-generation Polish, a Civil War buff.  Favorite general? Sherman. He showed the traitors that war is hell. I thought of my grandmother's story. I reminded myself that he was only repeating what he'd learned from the likes of Victor Davis Hanson. Then I remembered an urgent doctor's appointment and apologized to my new friend. I had to hurry! First, though, I gave him directions to the Port Gibson battlefield.  The "scenic route," of course.  He should be near Amarillo by now.  
 
 
The Toledo man is a soulmate to Hanson, who cherishes Sherman.  Somewhere in Hanson's "Private Papers" on his website is a nasty screed describing the American sack of Columbia, South Carolina.  Hanson describes the burning and destruction carried out by those "brave midwestern farmboys" like a degenerate pornographer would an orgy.  There's a book called The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny.  Uncle Billy is a "great liberator." Then there's this one, called The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost. "Cump" is one, needless to say.  Another is David Petraeus.  You remember Petraeus.  He emerged as the "hero" of the Iraq disaster in that he put enough lipstick on the pig to carry Bush II across the line for his second term.  Petraeus was talked up as the second coming of Grant.  We agree; both are utterly overrated by the Americans, but we understand they don't have a deep bench of military heroes. 
 

Back to Petraeus, the Savior General. That appellation did not age well, did it, Hanson? We think Hanson was whoring himself after Savior Dave. Maybe he wanted to be invited to lunch at some Pentagon command center. Anyway, Savior Dave got named head of the CIA. But then he got himself into trouble – lined up a little piece of ass on the side or was a bit loose with security procedures or some stupid bullshit.  The CIA found that problematic and fired him.  Was it a #MeToo thing? We neither know nor care; it's probably some stupid bureaucratic infighting.  But fear not,  Savior Dave landed at KKR & Co., the legendary private equity shop that can always find a home for an American patriot.  Savior Dave is Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a properly pompous title for a man of Savior Dave's accomplishments. So, what's he doing for KKR? He makes introductions. He provides access. He is a bridge between the American killing machine and the pools of capital needed to fund it.  What's in it for Dave?  What could there be after the excitement of commanding men in battle?  "The upside of joining KKR is obvious: mad stupid loot."  

 
But that's the American way, that's what Americans do, and so it's okay. But some stuff is not okay. Petraeus considers General Lee a "traitor." As does Stanley McChrystal and Mark Milley, and who knows how many more of the fifth-rate losers, shitasses, nonentities, flunkies and degenerates who command what Hanson calls the "the world's finest military." The architects of farces like the Afghanistan bugout, the disaster of Iran and the ultra-expensive weapons systems that haven't been working all that well against the Russians.  

 
Petraeus also demands the names of "traitor" Confederates be stripped from American military bases.  Well, Savior Dave. That's one place where we agree.  Ain't it good to talk these things out?  Here's what it is: I do not want the names of our men, of Southern men associated in any way, shape or form with the mercenary hordes that are the American armed forces, which have never in their history fought to defend the interests of the people that live here.  What do you think of that, Dave?  Something else, Dave: Got this new thing I'm doing. Do you want to hear it?  You heard of Antifa? Got this thing called AntiRec. I'm gonna part the pickup outside the recruiting office and every time I see a kid even glancing at the door – I'm gonna pop out of my truck and convince him otherwise. And I'll start by telling him what a piece of shit you are, Savior Dave, and no way he should fight for a commander like you for a nation that hates him.  

 
I mentioned my father, the Yale man.  You may have intimated he was not the Skull & Bones, Boola Boola type, which he wasn't.  His father was a railroad man on the old Louisville & Nashville.  He was the first of the family to go to college.  He used to say that were it not for "the war" he would have been an auto mechanic in the sawgrass of Alabama. 

 
He was drafted in 1942, trained as a medic.  His divison fought in Italy: he was at Anzio, Monte Cassino.  Sometimes he had nightmares, shouted in his sleep: terrible things. The "Greatest Generation" stuff infuriated him. So did "Company of Heroes" and the "Saving Private Ryan" stuff.  He did not like Italians: too noisy, the hand gestures. But he admired Germans. His closest friends were a German, who spent the war in South America (a family of brewers) and an Austrian, whose father, a Lutheran pastor, vanished into the maelstrom of the Russian front.  

 
He spoke only once of the war to me. I was young, maybe in my teens. I still believed much of what I was told. I said Hanson could have written: the courage and sacrifice and heroism of those young men, fighting for ideals, fighting for Freedom. 

 
My father stared at me. It was a strange look: sadness, slight contempt – and something different, something dark that I did not and do not understand.  

 
Finally he snorted.  Bullshit, he said.  Nobody thought that.  It was stoic duty.  Get the damn thing done.  He made to say more, then stopped.  

 
I waited.  He was staring at nothing, his lips pursed, one finger tapping the table.  I cleared my throat.  

 
Incomprehensible, my father said. I can't. . . Then he looked at me. That dark emotion possessed him completely. I would never again see that look in his eyes.  That darkness, a black fury, bottomless grief, the abandonment of hope.  

 
What they tell you, he said.  Is a lie.  It's a goddam lie.  

 
"The Good War" is one of the High Holies of America, just like Lincoln's war.  America the good, America the liberator, America granted the divine right to impose its universal values on the entire world, and by the bayonet if needed.  The South's role in its ridiculous fantasy? We are the cautionary tale, the road less travelled, the "original sin" that must be expunged from the body politic; we must die so that America might live and fully realize its promise.  When the Americans say, "That's not who we are," Southerners are who, or what, the Americans desperately do not want to be. 
 

Again, grounds for agreement.  I do not want to be an American. 
 

Shelby Foote once said we struck a deal with the Americans. We would fight in their wars, slave in their factories, pump the oil and keep the machinery working and putting up with their stupid insults with good humor – provided they kept their disgusting fingers from our monuments and our memories.  
 

And they broke the deal. They lied. Has America ever honored an obligation?  Americans break treaties with abandon, justifying themselves with the same abstractions used for all of their monstrous deeds: freedom, justice, equality.  The Americans have not only drained those words of meaning: they have positively inverted them. Was it Kissinger who said it's dangerous to be an ally of the Americans?  Ask the English, or the French.  Or the Germans, de-industrialized by that mysterious Nordstream explosion.  Is someone seeking to reduce Germany to a nation of peasant agriculturalists. 
 

It does, though, remove me from an obligation to them.  I do realize it's ridiculous; I cannot change my passport.  But I want nothing to do with any "polity" whose national myth is a bullshit defamation of the Southern people.  I want nothing to do with your flag, and your Air Force flyovers at the football games, your Black Friday sales, your endless movie remakes and whatever else it is that makes you Americans.  A "nation of ideas," you say.  A "propositional nation"; assent to these four points and you and your family are and will forever be, Americans.  
 

That is not a nation.  That's a political party.  I don't assent to your bullshit propositions.  Am I now officially not an American?   
​

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I am, as it happens, nobody in particular.  Several years ago, I cut loose from a long career on or adjacent to Wall Street. I had the sense of a bad moon rising.  I sold out and made myself scarce pre-Trump's first term and pre-covid.  It's been a long drift sense then, much of it untangling family history and identifying those in my woodpile who wore the gray.  There's quite a few once you get into cousins and whatnot, but with both branches of the family here since the 1660s they've spread out a bit. 

 
I landed first in Odessa, on the Staked Plain of West Texas; one ancestor ended there after the war; a street bears our surname.  Odessa itself is in Ector County, named for General Matthew Ector, CSA; a separate ancestor served under him in the 10th Texas Cavalry (dismounted).  Then Comanche County, Texas; two families fled the ruins of North Georgia and ended here; their descendants remain.  Trinity County, Texas: some of my folks came here from Mississippi in the 1840s; some of them enlisted in the 5th Texas Infantry, the "Bloody Fifth" of the Texas Brigade.  Louisiana: a very distant relation to Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, the commander of the Louisiana Tigers; the Cajun branch of the family is around New Iberia and St Mary Parishes.  The Anglo branch, which settled in Rapides Parish on a Spanish land grant, disappeared during the war. 

 
I am now in Mississippi. Vicksburg drew me, one might say. My people were here: regiments from Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The Americans try to make Vicksburg about Grant.  The quiet man from Galena, an "everyman" sort of hero; you can easily imagine him staggering into a gas station in Crocs for a case of Bud Light.  But it is not.  This is not Grant's city.  There is a statue of Grant in the military park, and he can stay there.  

 
Vicksburg is no longer the prosperous hub of commerce it was in the days of King Cotton. Cross Clay Street into the historic district, and there is no detritus of Americanism.  There is no neon, no fast food, no strip malls and none of the cheap, prefab ugliness that characterizes the modern American landscape. It's a Southern Rivendell, in a way.  Here the memory and beauty of old things is preserved.  

 
Vicksburg is ours.  It is and will forever be a Southern city, anointed with the blood of the men and women – black and white, Southerners all – who fought, suffered, died and endured there.  The state of Mississippi will be the last to surrender, I think, to the ugliness of Americanism, and Vicksburg will be the last to fall.  And if the Americans come again, I'll post myself at the Railroad Redoubt, where the Texans beat back the last American attempt to storm the city.  
 
 
And so here I am, a ghost among ghosts.  But a ghost with a memory; one that has seen, and read the forbidden things, and noticed.  

 
This memoir, then, is my small act of resistance.  I will make known my lineage to all of you, as did the Saxon warrior in the opening poem. I will make known my lineage to all of you, and explain, to the best of my ability, what happened when the Americans came. 
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Consider it a work of comparative demonology, if you will.   ​