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by Mark MalvasiLate in August 1965, a young boy not yet eight-years-old stood with his father on the field at Gettysburg near the spot where Pickett’s men formed in the woods. The boy’s father was not a learned man and had an uncertain grasp of the events that took place on that ground more than a century before. “Which side were we on?” the boy asked, interrupting his father’s halting explanation of Pickett’s charge. “We weren’t on either side,” his father replied, knowing that his son’s question was meant to discover what part his ancestors had played in the war. “No one from our family was here yet. Your grandfather didn’t come over from the old country until 1907. He wasn’t born until 1898. The Civil War was over a long time by then.” Sensing the boy’s disappointment at not being able to name an ancestor who had fought on either side in the war, the father added that the war was part of history and that anybody with sense could learn history whether his ancestors had been part of it or not.As you no doubt have guessed, I am what remains of that young boy. He may not have sense—indeed, his father has told him countless times that he has none. But he has struggled mightily all his life to learn the history of the nation in which his ancestors made their new home. Looking back on it now, almost thirty years later, he can see that his quest began as he gazed out from the edge of that wood, past those monuments and toward the stone wall over a mile away.I have long found comfort in the words of Robert Penn Warren. In The Legacy of the Civil War, Warren wrote that “the grandfather, or great-grandfather, of a high proportion of our population was not even in this country when the War was being fought. Not that this disqualifies the grandson from experiencing to the full the imaginative appeal of the Civil War. To experience this appeal may be, in fact, the very ritual of being American.”My ancestors came primarily from a tiny, rural village in Southern Italy near Calabria. If I am an American only by chance and circumstance—I might just as easily have been an Italian peasant plowing fields, harvesting grapes or blowing up magistrates and prosecutors—my connections with the South are even more tenuous. I am an Ohio native who has lived all but four of his thirty-six years in the North. I was educated at Northern schools, colleges and universities. I read William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and other Southern writers while an undergraduate at Hiram College, but I never studied Southern history until I became a graduate student of Eugene Genovese at the University of Rochester. Although late to settle my heart in Dixie. I have nonetheless developed a deep and abiding love for the South, its culture, its history and its people.There are, of course, a great many reasons for my devotion to the South. Among the most important is my growing recognition that the people of the South, young and old, male and female, black and white, are the most generous, gracious, courteous, decent, and civilized of any people it has been my privilege to get to know. I suppose that I am open to the charge leveled against all converts of being too zealous and too uncritical of my new faith. But so what?..........If we understand history as tragedy and not as melodrama, the past will invite our compassion and piety as well as our scrutiny and judgment. The modern repudiation of history and tradition thus weakens our appreciation of all that is worth caring about in the past. It encourages us to sever our connections with old ideas and values that we might still wish to venerate and to preserve.Once we cut ourselves off from our past and our traditions, there is no going back. We will become not provincials in space, but, as Allen Tate suggested, provincials in time, living each day as if there were no yesterday and as if there will be no tomorrow. As a consequence, we shall spurn the compromises upon which civilization rests. We shall reject, as we are doing, all limits to human activity, all discipline, all authority. We shall become, in the trenchant words of another Southern essayist, Richard M. Weaver, “moral idiots.”We weary of the past. We are disillusioned by, and even hostile to, the ideals, values and aspirations that molded us into a nation and a people. We are, for these reasons, also pessimistic about the future. Three decades ago James Burnham wrote of the “suicide of the West.” I see no reason today to revise his essential conclusion that the heirs to Western Civilization are openly defending the enemies that would see us annihilated. We are, I fear, a decadent race, poised for extinction, awaiting the arrival of our executioners.Southerners seem to be the only consistent exception to these developments and these attitudes in the United States. Southern ways are held up to ridicule, and Southern virtues are out of fashion. But because Southerners think, believe, live and act within an inheritance, they enjoy a sense of confidence, faith and stability that may prove an invaluable asset as the foundations of our society begin to collapse.In 1958, Donald Davidson identified the cause of the South, writing: For brevity, I might call it the cause of civilized society, as we have known it in the Western world, against the new barbarism of science and technology controlled and directed by the modern power state. In this sense, the cause of the South was and is the cause of Western Civilization itself.As the infirmity and treason of our political, cultural and religious elites become more conspicuous, excessive, and devastating, the nation may rally to the intransigent patriotism of the South that shines as a solitary beacon of hope through this long night of decadence and barbarism. Should that day arrive, we may once more understand the spirit of the men who stormed out of the woods with Pickett and charged the stone wall. Theirs was one of the last great flowerings of chivalry in the West. Those men did not forget, as their leader exhorted them, that they were from old Virginia. As absurd as it surely seems to us, those men knew the meaning of duty and sacrifice. They did not have to be told of their obligations, but only reminded of who they were and where they came from. They knew how to die and preferred death to defeat. But to die well, those men also had to know how to live, and what was worth living—and—dying for.http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/10/choosing-southernness-choosing-my-fathers-way-mark-malvasi.html?mc_cid=a5362cc3ea&mc_eid=c6776db871
Very nice essay. Some of it a bit too rose-tinted, but he makes some very good points.
