​My heart has ever been a parched and stony ground on which the seeds of Patriotism found no purchase. The empire’s civic rituals left me with the taste of wormwood. As a child I quietly declined to pledge allegiance to Old Glory or the “republic” for which it claimed to stand. In this, as in so much else, my father provided valuable instruction. For sixth-grade assignment I asked his favorite president. He looked up from the baseball scores (this was the era of the Big Red Machine). Millard Fillmore, he said. Why? I asked. My father stared at me for an extra beat before replying: Because he didn’t do anything.


That made no sense to my tender ears. So I tried again in 1980, the election year. The speech class teacher asked us to “endorse” a candidate: Carter, Reagan or Anderson? I had no idea, so asked my father.


He looked up from the baseball pages (by then the Reds weren’t doing so well). His jaw literally dropped. He stared at me, his head cocked slightly, like one of the dogs (we had German shepherds) puzzling out some weird noise from the TV (which was frequent: it only caught a signal if I stood on the roof and rotated the antenna).

Perhaps, in that moment, he thought he had failed as a father.


Millard Fillmore, he said finally, and went back to the league standings.


He hadn’t failed; I was merely slow.

I last exercised “the sacred duty and obligation of the citizen” in 1988 or thereabouts. A friend, back from the Army and laid off from the local plant, decided to run for some bullshit county job. I volunteered as campaign manager. His daughter drew a bunch of Vote For My Daddy! posters. I spent an afternoon hanging them in little country stores along the rural routes. To our amazement, he won. Something of a landslide, I recall. He had much to learn about public service: There ain’t but four hours of actual work in a god-damn week, he whispered to me incredulously. And they’re paying me for forty. He looked around furtively. Man, this has got to be illegal. God damn sheriff’s gonna come and impound my ass. He asked around the courthouse: what should I do? His fellow county employees looked at him with pity. Finally he figured it out, and spent those 36 “free” hours/week collecting fallen brush from the local golf course. Fridays he’d build a bonfire between holes 11 and 12 and ruminate on the Great Questions with a bottle of Wild Turkey. Sometimes I’d join him. I’d discovered Solzhenitsyn around that time (the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago were on my father’s shelves, as were the Dostoevsky novels I’d discovered four years earlier) and had a sense of what the Russians endured under the Bolshevik regime. One of those Fridays (I was young and foolish, so the Wild Turkey likely helped) it struck me: we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.



That was 1988, remember. I was young and foolish; the amazing promise of American life wide open before me. But there were already strange things afoot. I had considered a scholarly sort of career: the history of ideas, the history of Christian doctrine, Russian history or literature, the sort of thing that would require multiple advanced degrees. A recruiter from an Ivy League grad school came and pitched its school’s doctoral programs. She spent forty minutes talking about “inclusive language” in the Bible; all this Mists of Avalon type shit about how the Patriarchy Oppressed Strong Women. I decided grad school was not for me and chose what was then called “white man’s welfare”: the U.S. military, in whose combat arms Southerners have until recently been overrepresented[1].



Also in 1988: the publication of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom. Intellectual types (my father subscribed to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, among others) touted it “the definitive history.” I was young and dumb, but I knew an “agenda” when I saw one. McPherson’s first book was a laudatory account the New England abolitionists. His second argued that Emancipation was a “second American revolution.” He’s correct there too, but not in the way he thinks.


More on McPherson in a subsequent chapter, but here’s the TL;DR. McPherson is not a historian. McPherson worked for Princeton, which is a finishing school for the empire’s missionaries. What they teach is what the empire wants you to think. McPherson is an evangelist of the Exceptional Nation, his gospel the eternal righteousness of the American state and its mandate from heaven to advance the cause of freedom by any means necessary. We will drag humanity to outer space kicking and screaming if necessary because we are Americans, it’s who we are because Lincoln. In that he merely revived and put fresh lipstick on the Holy Cause myth invented by the Republicans after the war: Father Abraham a literal prophet, leading “his people” to a New Birth of Freedom, which by necessity demanded the “terrible swift sword” of Sherman and Grant’s armies burning and looting across Georgia and Mississippi.

More on that later. In 1988 Back my primary interest – no, it was a haunting, an obsession – was “the Good War.” My father was drafted in 1942. He trained as a medic and landed at Anzio, fought up the boot of Italy, including Monte Cassino.
He had nightmares about the war sometimes. I would sit outside the bedroom door and listen. He shouted things from the war: stretcher bearers, pressure bandages, god damn it he’s gone.


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.



I didn’t realize it, but Providence at that moment assigned me my life purpose: I wanted to know what happened to my father. What is the goddam lie and what is it to do with what he saw in the war; who told the lie and who is repeating it.


That was thirty-seven years ago. This is where my hunt for the goddam lie led me: to my great-great-grandfather, one of General Lee’s men, a soldier of the Army of Northern Virginia who like hundreds and thousands of Southern soldiers fought with a courage and fortitude unmatched by any U.S. Army – to defend their land, the land of my fathers, my father’s land, my land, from the Americans. They fought with unmatched hopeless perhaps because they knew what America would become.


I did not vote for Trump, simply because I do not vote. I am not particularly shocked or outraged by what Musk and his lads have unearthed, and I cannot imagine I’m the only one. The internet has done horrible things, but their crimes cannot be hidden. None of it can be unseen or unheard or buried on page seven because it confirms what we already knew or at least intuited: it’s fake, it’s a fraud, it’s bullshit; the United States is a chaos agent ruled by demons.


Lincoln refounded the “republic,” his cultists claim. Indeed he did. But not as a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” As H.L. Mencken noted, the Confederates fought for self-determination. Not Abe and his conscripts. Abe sought tariffs and taxes to shift to the railroads and banks for Internal Improvements: a public-private partnership, in other words, and if 700,000 had to die, so be it. Yes, Lincoln and the Republicans gave us a “new nation” founded on radical egalitarianism and the belief that God assigned it the task of imposing it on the world at the point of the bayonet.

Dangerous Nation, in the words of Robert Kagan, one of the Kagan neocon clan that has ruled American foreign policy for at least thirty years. “A lot of what the United States wants to do is to bring what we regard as, you know, the blessings of liberty to other peoples.”



This, Kagan and the neocons claim, is what makes America “exceptional”: it, and it alone, has the prerogative of imposing its system upon the rest of the world. Another word for that is “empire.”


America did have a chance to be exceptional. The United States could have remained these United States, a loose confederation small farmers and craftsmen who would prefer to be left alone.


But Lincoln chose empire.


And for all my scathing remarks about “Americans” – I’ll explain what I mean by that in a future chapter – Americans did not want empire. Lincoln won with a minority of the vote in 1860, was reviled throughout the war and may have on in 1864 only by cheating, but was lionized ex post facto by the republicans seeking political advantage. Americans were firmly isolationist after that: majorities, featuring a coalition of poor Southern whites and Scandinavian progressives in the Midwest – opposed U.S. entry into the first world war. In 1940, a poll found that 96% of Americans had no interest in a war with Germany.


But neither Wilson nor FDR liked the sound of that. How dare these Americans decline to fight, die and suffer for our ideals! Fortunately, Lincoln was there to remind us of our duty to fight and kill people we do not know in the name of abstractions tossed about by lying politicians and ideological fanatics.


Perhaps that’s what haunted my father: the sheer volume of lies, their distortion of language, their inversions of meaning and their draining the world of beauty and truth; the way they made it a howling waste where demons now dwell.

Here’s hoping that this really is a “revolution,” as people, and not just the MAGA people, are saying. Both Trump and Vance have stated the U.S. is out of the chaos, war and murder business. That also means an end to the lies.


Defeat can be the impetus for reflection, and reflection to repentance.

For this, Trump deserves some thanks. Because he, alone of the Republicans and the political class in the “West”, had the courage to admit the obvious: Russia won.

Russia won. I’ll repeat that: Russia defeated the Americans. Russia and the United States met on the field of battle and the Americans lost. It’s true. The Ukrainian Army was an American army. Maintain the NATO fiction if you like – and enjoy it while you can -- but the Ukrainians were trained by Americans and supplied by Americans; the Americans planned their operations, the Americans fed them intelligence. Americans sent Boris Johnson to crash the peace deal Zelensky cut with Putin; American vassals like Germany chose to disregard the Minsk agreements. Every drop of blood, every grieving widow, every fatherless child, every freezing apartment block and every acre of that ruined nation: that’s you, Uncle Sam. The same as you did to us, but on a far greater scale. And let’s not even discuss Gaza yet.

The empire of the goddam lie has caused enough misery and thank God Trump stopped it.

And it’s encouraging that Trump, less than a month into his term, is seeking to repair one of the empire’s more odious lies. In 1991 James Baker III, George Bush’s secretary of state, told Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not proceed “one inch eastward.”

It only took eight years for the Americans to break Baker’s promise: NATO admitted the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary in 1999 when Clinton was president. Here he tries bullshitting his way out of it via The Atlantic. Here is a more accurate account. The neocon-dominated administration of the hapless George W. Bush first floated the jaw-droppingly stupid idea of bringing Ukraine into NATO in 2007. Obama, it appears, empowered the noxious Victoria Nuland of Team Kagan to organize the color revolution of 2014. Once Biden was installed, the neocons got their heart’s desire: death. Lindsay Graham chortled that it was a great way to “weaken” Russia; what are a few hundred thousand Ukrainian dead to us? And don’t worry about those hillbillies in western North Carolina, what about Israel?

The cynicism, nihilism and outright evil of these American exceptionalist neocons beggars belief.


Baker, born in Houston when it was still a Southern city, was a Texan of the old school. An honorable man, he understood the importance of keeping one’s word for both nations and individuals.

As do the Russians. Not that you’ll learn this at Harvard or Yale, but Russia is known for honoring its obligations, from the time of the Czars until now. As for the Americans?

The United States is notorious for breaking treaties -- wantonly, arrogantly, joyfully. Grant, after gold was discovered in the Black Hills, sent George Armstrong Custer to look around. That violated a treaty with the Sioux. Custer and the 7th paid for that at Little Big Horn. Sad! Many such cases.

Trump and Vance’s tacit admission of American duplicity and dishonesty is a most commendable first step to repairing America’s soiled image. And there’s much more that the Trump Administration can, or should, do. Especially on the domestic front.

​I’ve somewhere alluded to the “Great Compromise” or “pact” between the U.S. and the South after the war. Shelby Foote talks about it here:

The TL; didn’t watch is like this: the South agreed to say it was better that their “union” remain “indivisible.” The U.S., for its part, would graciously admit that we fought with courage in a cause we believed was just.


It took a while, but the Americans finally got around to it discarding that one. South Carolina governor and fanatical Republican warmonger Nimrata “Nikki” Haley used the tragic murder of churchgoers as an excuse to remove the Confederate battle flag from where it flew before the State House. Nikki used the “inclusion” argument. The Republicans applauded; they had a winner.


There’s no need to review what happened after the death of George Floyd; other than to note neocons like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal wrote “opinion pieces” slandering General Lee, and the Americans removed the “Reconciliation” monument from Arlington Cemetery.

Which was and is fine by me. The Americans broke the deal, and I am perfectly happy and would prefer to remain unreconciled. Just as is the case with the Russians: there’s an issue of trust and honor.

Trump in his first term refused to strip the names of Confederate generals from U.S. military (e.g., Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Bragg in North Carolina). Biden made it happen, which to be honest was fine with me. I did not want our commanders associated with the U.S.’s mercenary hordes.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans (I’m a member) is seeking to right that wrong and have made their case in a letter to Secretary of Defense Hegseth. (Their letter notes “Fort Liberty” in North Carolina — the name ironically assigned by the Americans, has been changed back to Fort Bragg. But not the Confederate general. I’ve been told the U.S. Congress passed a law banning Confederate names from military bases. Like I said, I’m fine with that. The Americans should use names more aligned with their propositions, like The Azov Battalion in Ukraine maybe, or ISIS.

But anyway. Who was it that said there’s always a “second act” in America? Or the opportunity for one? Okay, Uncle Sam. I’ll allow you an undeserved “second act.” You admitted your dishonesty to the Russians. Certainty you will do the same for us, considering we were your first conquest. Here’s my ask:

​

1. Immediate restoration of Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, which USAID-funded rent-a-mobs desecrated in 2020.
2. Immediate replacement of the Charlottesville statue of General Lee, melted down by U.S. activists;
3. The immediate return of the Reconciliation Memorial to Arlington Cemetery;
4. The Arlington Estate returned to the Lee family, and the United States pay back rent, with interest, from 1861 onward, for those portions of the estate used for the veterans of America’s wars;
5. The City of Memphis fund a proper grave memorial for General Nathan Bedford Forrest in Columbia, Tennessee after their desecration of his grave in 2017;
6. The City of Dallas restore the statue of General Lee it removed in 2017 and the Confederate War Memorial removed in 2020;
7. San Antonio restore the Confederate monument it removed from Travis Park in 2017;
8. Houston restore the statue of Col. Richard Dowling it removed in 2020; and with regard to the Texas cities, a public apology from Governor Greg Abbott. He, like too many Texans in those cities, has too much of the Bushie carpetbagger and thinks like the Chamber of Commerce;
9. The City of New Orleans restore Lee Circle and the Beauregard monument;
10. David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal and Ty Seidule publicly stripped of rank and decorations, dishonorably discharged and pensions revoked; they will become employees of the National Park Service and serve as janitors at the tomb of U.S. Grant.

​The mayors and governing assemblies who approved these desecrations will fund the restorations from their own pockets. Liens will be attached to the entirety of their personal estates until the restorations are complete and all damages paid. Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia who spearheaded the destruction, will bear responsibility for the entirety of Monument Avenue; if any remains of his estate, it will be used to restore other monuments destroyed during his governorship.

​
So there’s your beginning. When you’re done, come back for another ten. This isn’t going to be easy. Repentance never is. The damage you’ve done is great. We want it all restored. Everything.

​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.

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?   
​

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.   ​