Dixie Rebel

The Abbeville Institute published a letter by L. Q. C. Lamar written on December 5, 1870, to commemorate Robert E. Lee’s death, which offers view of Lee very different from what we hear today.  Lamar wrote: The day of his death will be the anniversary of the South’s great sorrow. But it was not his darkest day. I was at Appomattox when the flag which had been borne in triumph upon his many battlefields was torn from his loving and reluctant grasp. After the terms of capitulation had been arranged, chance brought him to the spot where my tent was pitched.   I had seen him often before. On one occasion, especially, I remember how he appeared in a consultation of leading men, where, amid the greatest perturbations, his mind seemed to repose in majestic poise and serenity. Again, I saw him immediately after one of his grand battles, while the light of victory shone upon his brow.   But never shall I forget how completely his wonted composure was overthrown in this last sad inter

I have had two brushes with Vietnam during my life: one was serving in the Army artillery in Vietnam during the war, the second was overseeing databases of Vietnamese who wanted to go to the United States after the war.  When I was in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, I had very little interaction with the Vietnamese. I was in a heavy artillery battery that supported American Army soldiers on the ground.   Most of the time we were stationed at firebases in the middle of nowhere, with no Vietnamese around.   A few times we had Vietnamese units on the same firebase, but we did not interact.   They supported Vietnamese units and we supported American units.   We were in northern South Vietnam, which the Army called I Corps.   Occasionally I would ride into town with supply trucks; so, I occasionally saw Hue and Quang Tri. At Firebase Barbara, on a lonely mountaintop not too far south of Khe Sanh on the Laotian border, all of our resupply was done by helicopter.   When Saigon fell, I had no per

I was disappointed by this Atlantic Magazine article by Anne Applebaum about Mike Lindell, the “My Pillow” guy.  The title says, “The MyPillow Guy Really Could Destroy Democracy,” and the subtitle says, “In the time I spent with Mike Lindell, I came to learn that he is affable, devout, philanthropic – and a clear threat to the nation.”  After reading the article, I failed to see the threat he presents. Presumably, this is the threat that Democrats see everywhere: Trump’s attempt to undo the last election and reinstate himself as President. I don’t see this a likely to happen and I am thus not alarmed by it. Apparently, Lindell has something called “packet captures,” which are some kind of computer data proving that the Chinese stole the last election from Trump. But her article never makes clear what these packet captures are, or how the Chinese altered electoral results. I do not believe that there is anything to this. Perhaps, if you thought it would prove that Trump won the ele

  The book,  Lieutenant Dangerous , by Jeff Danziger  sounds familiar to many of us other Vietnam veterans. It’s interesting to me that he ended up as an ordinance officer in Vietnam replacing artillery tubes. Since I was in a heavy artillery battery, we had many tubes (gun barrels) replaced because heavy artillery tubes could not fire very many rounds. Heavy artillery tubes were large and weighed tons. The worst place for this was called Firebase Barbara. One tube exploded there, killing two men. Another replacement tube was being hauled up the mountain we were on by a huge truck, when almost at the top, the tube began to slip off the back of the truck. It did, and rolled down to the valley floor. I suppose it is still there.

Both the Democrats and the Republicans want to change American voting laws. The Democrats want to make it easier to vote and make it more difficult to confirm that voters are legally eligible to vote. The Republicans want to make it easier to confirm that voters are eligible to vote without denying any eligible voter the right to vote.   I favor the old-fashioned method of having every voter to personally to a voting booth in his precinct. He should have picture ID which would be inspected by poll workers to make sure that he is someone on their list of registered voters. The precincts should be small enough that they do not have to handle thousands of voters trying to vote at once, creating unwieldy lines and long waits. Americans voted like this for hundreds of years and can keep doing so. Black voters were discriminated against and prevented from voting, but not because they had to vote in person; it was because of other requirements imposed specifically to keep blacks from vo

I was stuck that very little of the media coverage of the recent 4th of July mentioned that the day celebrates the American colonies’ independence from Britain. All the criticism of present-day America and its racism seemed to hypothesize that America emerged fully formed from some dark womb of non-history, when in fact it was many years old and had already formed much of its nature from its years of colonization before 1776. The hatred of the 1619 project should be directed at Britain, which ruled the colonies in 1619. The 4th of July marks the independence of the American colonies from the oppression of the British king and his rule. To ignore America’s colonial past is not just revisionist history, it is made-up history to justify hatred of the white race. Despite what blacks claim, the first slaves in North America probably did not come directly from Africa, but from trade with the existing Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and South America, which began in 1

A recent blog by the Abbeville Institute was about the book I’ll Take My Stand, The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Google has a preview of the book which is missing a number of pages but still provides an oppotunity to see what it contains. Published in 1930, there are essays by twelve well-known Southern authors. Here is a link to the Google preview. A lot has changed since 1930, but these essays give some inkling of what the Old South was like after the Civil War and before wide-spread industrialization, a useful counterpoint to the seemingly ever-present condemnation of the South by liberal politicians and the liberal media. In Gone with the Wind, I see Rhett Butler as the representative of the New South, and Ashley Wilkes as the representative of the Old South. I’ll Take My Stand was the voice of the Old South, a call for gentility and grace, peacefulness in the face of industrialization It was made up of the voices of twelve Southern writers, including the poets from The Fugi