au naturel

Big thanks to Aubbers for blogging Memorial Day Weekend.


More substantively, I'd like to ask Harris Miller to stop sending me junk mail. Nevksy—who by the by, recently met Steve Carell—has already endorsed Jim Webb. I'm going to go so far as to give him my endorsement as well. Not necessarily because I believe in Jim Webb's specific brand of politics, but because I don't believe in having political beliefs anymore.

Let me explain. You see, the second people to go against the wall in any revolution are those who have enough brain power to think for themselves—greats like Trotsky, The Dixie Chicks, and Christine Todd Whitman. Why is this? This is simply because most of us want to create a schema by which we can understand the world and are uncomfortable when there are ideas or facts which don't fit into the pattern. I'm not just talking about my fellow Commonwealthsmen, Tsunami Pat and Lynchburg Lemonhead, but all of us who have ever had ideals. I have no doubt that most people with whom I vehemently disagree earnestly believe that their ideals are the best for the world.

This is the fundamental problem, ideology does not lead to solutions, but rather to greater problems. This is tragically demonstrated by the movie Downfall, which I finally got around to watching. Of course, this was also amazingly demonstrated by the New Market Battlefield State Historical Park, "Where 257 Cadets from the Virginia Military Institute made the difference between victory and defeat..." Of course, the irony is, that the cadets did not make any difference between victory or defeat, in fact, the battle only delayed the retaliatory burning of their own Institute by a month.

This weekend, we drove right past the Battlefield of Port Republic, which merits merely an old historic marker.


If any battlefield in the Shenandoah Valley is underrated and forgotten, this one might qualify. It was the culmination of Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign, in which he gave the Confederacy a free hand to ship the agricultural bounty of the Shenandoah Valley to Richmond via the Staunton railroad (which passes right through my fair city). This allowed Lee to feed the Army of NoVa right up until a month after the Battle of New Market, at which time Union General David Hunter captured Staunton, and then marched south to burn down much of VMI's campus in Lexington. Another two months after this battle, in August, Philip Sheridan came barrelling down the Shenandoah Valley to fulfill Grant's Command that, "If a crow wants to fly down the Shenandoah, he must carry his own provender with him."

The New Market "Hall of Valor" exists because of VMI. However, it also exists because of Virginia's peculiar adoration of aristocracy. There is a 45 min. orientation film to a battle which lasted an afternoon and at which approximately 8 cadets perished (in a war that claimed upwards of 600,000 lives). This film follows the lives of the grandchildren of our wealthiest founding fathers. One specifically touching segment was the homoerotic adventures of one Moses Ezekiel—VMI's only Jewish cadet, whose bacon consumption and New Testament reading the film makes a special point of mentioning—and one Thomas Jefferson, the grandnephew of our own venerable TJ. Of course, the film never explicitly mentioned any man-on-man action, but I've never in my life seen two men snuggling in bed so much. I don't care if one of them was dying. Which one lives? Which one dies? You'll have to pay $9 to find out for yourself.

Of course, the battle-tested lower-class veterans, whose duties during the war did not mostly involve guarding baggage trains, get scant mention in the museum or the battlefield tour guide. In fact, one has to walk underneath highway I-81 to see anything of the Virginia regular's perspective, or even the Union perspective, to say the least.

What does all of this have to do with political beliefs, you may ask? The Confederacy seceded over some vague notion of "states' rights," which really meant the right to enslave other human beings. The internal contradictions of any ideology are inescapable and damning. In the Confederate case, they were fatal. After General Hunter cut the railroad line from the Valley, Lee's troops began to slowly starve to death, or at least the ones foolish enough to stay and fight. Many left because it was entirely unclear for what the average man was fighting. It was not a conflict that could be portrayed to the Confederate foot soldier as a matter of religion, cultural superiority, or even the triumph of order over chaos. It was an ideological conflict based on a weak idea, that people should be free to be a despot in their own household.

Even the most compelling ideologies have the same weakness in the end. The problem with morality is that it does not lie in absolutes, as many would have you believe. It lies in thoughtful and compassionate action. This is what I hope Jim Webb stands for, because I certainly don't know on what other platform he might be running.