In the South, the Civil War Still Rages

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT To some passing a law to haul off a statue of Robert E. Lee and changing the name of the space it occupies from Lee Park to Emancipation Park is a capitulation to the politically correct and worse an assault on time-honored Southern values

M ost forms of ancient idol worship are extinct so at first glance it is incomprehensible that a statue of Robert E. Lee who in today’s parlance would be called a “failed general ” could trigger such emotion.

After all the Civil War at least the way it was taught in the Northern states was a battle for morality. One that pitted the Union states — which favored relegating slavery to the same historical dustbin as idolatry — versus the Confederacy and its pampered plantation owners who sipped cool drinks in the shade while their slaves picked and baled cotton in the hot summer sun.

That perspective was rudely shattered during my four years as a journalist south of the Mason-Dixon line. Two of them were spent in Charlotte North Carolina today a cosmopolitan Southern city of 800 000 people. But even then in the mid-1980s it was a booming sunbelt city of 400 000 and a regional financial capital.