Not with a bang

This time.

I’m sure, somehow, some way, this is all Clinton’s fault.

This from the LA Times.

Amid Changing Times, Selma Has Lost a Civil War Battle
This year's reenactment is canceled, in part because of the city's shifting demographics.
By Jenny Jarvie
Times Staff Writer

April 9, 2006

SELMA, Ala. — James Hammonds looked stoic as he surveyed Selma's Civil War battlefield, but he could not resist a sigh: The trenches' gray planks had buckled, leaving gaps in the city's defenses.

Hammonds, who 19 years ago came up with the idea of reenacting Selma's place in Civil War history, now fears that his town is losing another battle.

Almost 141 years after a ragtag Confederate army struggled to defend Selma against Union forces, historical reenactors have canceled this year's Battle of Selma.

Like their Confederate forebears, the reenactors lacked manpower.

Fewer than 200 reenactors had registered for this month's battle — a far cry from the 2,000 who took part in 1995, the battle's 130th anniversary.

…

Although organizers attributed the cancellation of the Battle of Selma to a national decline in Civil War reenactments, many Alabama reenactors said they stopped attending because it had become too elitist.

…

"The stitch-counters had taken over," he said. "If you didn't have what they considered to be the sufficient authentic kit, they looked down their noses at you."

The purist reenactors — called stitch-counters because of their insistence that buttonholes be hand-sewn and have a historically accurate thread count — have become more vocal in their quest for strict authenticity.
…

Town businessmen originally conceived of the battle as an event that would revive Selma's depressed economy. The town, which is on a bluff overlooking the Alabama River, was reeling from the demise of manufacturing and the migration of many residents to other towns.

With gusto, locals built a system of wooden trenches, with three full redoubts and two embrasures on a portion of the original battlefield. Each year, they erected a wood house and planted pine trees to blow up during the battle.

They also held a ball at Sturdivant Hall, a Greek-revival antebellum mansion, and encouraged reenactors from across the country to bring their families.

Civil War history, though, is less relevant to Selma today. It is now a predominantly African American town — according to the 2000 census, its population of about 20,000 is 69% black — that is led by an African American mayor. And it is famous for a modern battle: the 1965 standoff between voting rights marchers and state troopers on Edmund Pettus Bridge.

George "Cap" Swift, who opened the Selma Visitor Information Center in the front room of his home the same year that reenactors held the first Battle of Selma, says his best-selling product is a T-shirt commemorating the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

His back room, which was once devoted to Civil War books, is now stacked with "Profiles of Great Black Americans" and "Faces of Freedom Summer."

"The world has changed a lot in 19 years," Swift said.

Though Selma's Tourism and Convention Bureau has packaged the town as a destination for Civil War and civil rights history, the emphasis has gradually shifted toward civil rights.

The U.S. Department of Transportation recently announced it would provide more than $500,000 for a Selma Interpretive Center across the street from the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Lauri Cothran, executive director of the bureau, said that the cancellation of the Battle of Selma was regrettable but that it would not badly harm the town's burgeoning tourism industry.

"It's not the death knell to tourism in Selma, Ala.," she said. "The history of Selma is here whether [or not] reenactors have reenactments."

Yet with the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War just five years away, Alabama's tourism board is eager to revive the Battle of Selma, which it considers the most significant of the state's 20 Civil War reenactments. It plans to offer financial help to the volunteers.

"The people who celebrate Southern heritage are an independent lot," said Lee Sentell, Alabama's tourism director. "We want to help them. People across the country are interested in these events. It's too early to say that the Civil War is disappearing."

So as the Party of Lincoln has morphed into the Party of Jefferson Davis, the Battle of Selma is now being stage-managed by the fusspot ghost of George Brinton McClellan.

Bwahaha!

Man, the South just can’t win this fucking thing can they?

First they go down to the Union, and now their Civil War fun-fest is being undone by disinterest and merlot-swilling, SCA-type freaks (That sure doesn’t look like real pewter to me, Mister!).

Seriously, I understand the impulse, and there was that ill-advised interlude when I briefly participate in a historical re-enactment troupe (Non-Civil War, your honor. And in my defense, I was trying to tumble a particular and saucy lass.) But reenacting battles from the Civil War always struck me as creepy.

A sad blend of this from Faulkner…

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....

And this from Monty Python…

Announcer: That was last year's re-enactment of the Battle of Pearl Harbor performed by the Batley Townswomen's Guild. It was written, directed and produced by Mrs Rita Fairbanks.

Cut to Rita Fairbanks on the beach.

Rita: Hello again.

Voice Over: And what are your ladies going to do for us this year?

Rita: Well, this year we decided to re-enact something with a more modern flavour. We had considered a version of Michael Stewart's speech on Nigeria and there were several votes on the Committee for a staging of Herr Willi Brandt's visit to East Germany, but we've settled instead for a dramatization of the first heart transplant. Incidentally my sister Madge will be playing the plucky little springbok pioneer Christian Barnard.

Voice Over: Well off we go, then with the Barley Townswomen's Guild re-enactment of the first heart transplant.

(Rita Fairbanks blows her whistle. The two groups of ladies rush at each other. They end up in the sea, rolling about splashing, and thumping each other with handbags.)

Still, it is not likely “the Civil War is disappearing" as long as the despicable White Christian Male Privilege ideology that framed it continues to grow, flourish, mutate and dominate the theology and politics (Jesus, talk about a distinction without a difference) of the GOP.

On the other hand, given the ferocity with which Fundies and Segregationists defend their “heritage” while conspicuously eliding right over the century that followed Appomattox in which the same fight was fought insurgency-style, by the same people, for the same principles, using State-sponsored terrorism, it is a sign of progress that the emphasis “has gradually shifted toward civil rights.”

And that the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church isn’t restaged Disney-style, every day at noon, with animatronic Klansmen and little girls for the delight of squealing crowds.