Nick Fury from the Beginning (reviews by shaxper)

[prince hal]

Shax, I agree with the revisionism charge. Like all wars, this was ginned up by all kinds of profiteers. All you have to do is look at the 1863 draft riots in NYC, a classic fight for the next lowest rung on the ladder to know that slavery was way down on the list of reasons Northerners fought. And I se your frightening point about the Confederacy and the Tea Party. No matter how much part of the anti-gummint sentiment that the Stars and Bars is supposed to truly represent, it's impossible for me to separate it from the enslavement of millions.

Just as the Northerners were used by those who sent them to war (and bought their way out) many of the Southerners may have thought they were fighting for freedom, but they were all enlisted in a fight to save a corrupt and evil system. I will check out that old reliable Mr. Young, the only major artist to have put out an anti-Iraq, anti-Bush album in the middle of that insanity (that I know of; I hope others can supplement the list).

Good work, Shax. We teachers never stop trying to teach, do we? :)

PS: Which brings me to the reason I can't stand Forrest Gump, which is that it promulgates the notion that if you really want to be happy, be simple-minded: it makes everything so-o-o-oeasy.

[dan bailey]

old reliable Mr. Young, the only major artist to have put out an anti-Iraq, anti-Bush album in the middle of that insanity.

Perhaps partially in expiation for his having thought a few years earlier that the vile cretin Reagan hung the damned moon. I don't know what drugs ol' Neil might've been partial to, if any, but I like to think some mind-altering substance or another was responsible for such perfidy.

[dan bailey]

A digression: It's a truism by now that slavery is our nation's original sin, whose taint will be with us forever. I don't know how far we can carry that analogy, as analogies aren't usually sturdy, but the redeemer was Lincoln and/or all those hundreds of thousands of soldiers in blue. Which is why I just will never get the Dixie flag. I hope I don't rouse the ire of the fellow poster and proud son of the South whose thinking I so respect, but man, I will never figure that out.

Of course not. I've posted on this subject before, & I plan to do so again tomorrow. (Too tired tonight -- thank you, next-door neighbor's dog who never, ever barks at night but did so for hours on end last night, which tells me either something was amiss or a possum or some such creature was hanging around -- to compose anything worth writing or reading on such a consternating subject for a Southerner; haven't eaten yet, either, because damn if I didn't get home, pop the just-arrived-from-Blockbuster Super into my DVD player, & find myself unable to get up off the couch till it was over. I don't think I've ever been so whipsawed by a movie; in just the last 20 minutes or so I actually found myself saying "Oh, god" out loud in shock at one scene, flinching with revulsion at a couple of others, & then genuinely tearing up at the final scene. Jesus!).

[Cei-U!]

Sorry, guys, but the notion that the Civil War *wasn't* about slavery is the true revisionist BS. An entire chapter of Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is devoted to refuting this calculated lie. He quotes dozens of Southern newspaper articles, political speeches and the Confederate states' own secession declarations that all make it crystal clear that protecting their "right" to treat human beings as chattel was exactly why they forced Lincoln into the war. That it is now mostly believed otherwise is the result of over a century of propaganda by Confederate apologists unable and/or unwilling to confront their history of opression and racism. Why do you think so many Southern states insist on teaching their kids using expurgated, censored textbooks?

Cei-U!
I summon the controversy!

[dan bailey]

Why do you think so many Southern states insist on teaching their kids using expurgated, censored textbooks?

What's this? Some Southern states are insisting on teaching their kids?

Burnin's too good fer such as them, Ah say. Ah didn't have no book-larnin' when Ah was a-comin' up, & Ah done turned out jeeeeeeeeeest fine, thank yew very much.

[berk]

Fury and Rock occupy such different worlds tonally that I have a hard time imagining them co-starring without one or the other being seriously mischaracterized. Might as well as team up Sad Sack and Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe.

Cei-U!
Hmmm...!

Can you elaborate on that? I never read much of either series so I'm curious, although I have to say I've never been a big war story buff, whether in comics or movies. I had a very vague impression that Sgt. Rock might be a little more serious, a little less whimsical, but that was probably due as much to the look of Kubert's covers as anything else.*

[benday-dot]

because damn if I didn't get home, pop the just-arrived-from-Blockbuster Super into my DVD player, & find myself unable to get up off the couch till it was over. I don't think I've ever been so whipsawed by a movie; in just the last 20 minutes or so I actually found myself saying "Oh, god" out loud in shock at one scene, flinching with revulsion at a couple of others, & then genuinely tearing up at the final scene. Jesus!).

Very good. I've been meaning to track down and watch that movie foe a while now, but never got around to it. Your endorsement gives new incentive.

[prince hal]

Kurt, I didn't mean to imply that slavery was not a motive for many who fought and died, just that not every motive for fighting the war was pure. I should have been clearer in my post. As always, there are those who use noble causes as a means to a profitable end. Zinn was/is a hero: a clear-thinking, passionate scholar and excellent teacher who was also a man of the people in the best sense.

Don't you love when they call the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression?

The Dixie flag waved as if it's really a symbol of states' rights and not racism is like the Nazi flag flown as if it's a symbol of good luck among pagan peoples and not of anti-Semitism.

[Scott Harris]

I don't want to get into a debate here so I'll just say I'm with Kurt. He pretty much said what I was going to not say.

I I find it disturbing that so many Northerners who are bothered by the Confederate Flag can rock out to Lynard Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama"

I find it disturbing that anyone can rock out to any Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Blech.

[MDG]

I find it disturbing that anyone can rock out to any Lynyrd Skynyrd song. Blech.

You beat me to it.

[dan bailey]

Very good. I've been meaning to track down and watch that movie foe a while now, but never got around to it. Your endorsement gives new incentive.

I'll be interested in learning what you (& of course anyone else here who might seen or have seen it) think. There's a definite edge of, for want of a better word, nihilism here, especially as compared to writer James Gunn's The Specials from 10 years earlier, which I watched a few days earlier for the first time. Gunn also directed Super; as it happens, when I rented Super I hadn't the vaguest idea that he was involved in it.

The worst thing about Super is that I now feel obligated to watch a movie I would otherwise continue to stay well away from, Kick-Ass, based simply on my distaste for the first couple of issues of the comic & for every fiber of creator Mark Millar's odious, smarmy, self-obsessed being. They feature very comparable concepts, though according to Gunn's commentary he came up with his script back in 2003. (Both films came out in 2010, Netflix tells me.)

Added point of interest for me -- about 99 percent of the flick was shot in Shreveport, where I visit every December & where I spent more time than I care to think about when I was growing up about 90 minutes away. (My dad's family is from that area; he died in a motel room across the river in Bossier City.)

[dan bailey]

PS: Which brings me to the reason I can't stand Forrest Gump,

You can't stand Southern accents? (Mine supposedly isn't at all pronounced; I've had people peg me from the way I talk as being from Connecticut or somedamnedwhere, or even New Zealand, but that was back in grad school. For all I know, of course, my fellow Alabama transplant MWGallaher sounds like Foghorn Leghorn.)

which is that it promulgates the notion that if you really want to be happy, be simple-minded: it makes everything so-o-o-oeasy.

Hmmm. Never thought of that movie's popularity (I found it enjoyable enough but seriously overrated; I remember being taken aback when a friend & co-worker proclaimed it the greatest movie ever made) as being a precursor of the amiably doltish, drug- & drink-addled Cheney puppet's relative success with the electorate a few years later.

[Jolly Mon]

Perhaps partially in expiation for his having thought a few years earlier that the vile cretin Reagan hung the damned moon. I don't know what drugs ol' Neil might've been partial to, if any, but I like to think some mind-altering substance or another was responsible for such perfidy.

Hmmm. Never thought of that movie's popularity (I found it enjoyable enough but seriously overrated; I remember being taken aback when a friend & co-worker proclaimed it the greatest movie ever made) as being a precursor of the amiably doltish, drug- & drink-addled Cheney puppet's relative success with the electorate a few years later.

Wow. Nice bashing of both Reagan & Bush in the space of less than a page. Well done.

[dan bailey]

Let's see if I can finally grab a bit of spare time to hold forth on the matters addressed above ...

First, given my sociopolitical leanings, I prefer to think of slavery as the nakedly demonic face of untrammeled capitalism at its most exploitative, which in my eyes doesn't make it any less than the unspeakable evil that it was. The Northern workers cast by fate & necessity into the "dark satanic mills" (hat-tip to the great William Blake, of course) of their section may not have been materially much better off than their black counterparts down in the Confederate states (& above them, for that matter, Delaware & Maryland having been slave states as well), but even so I can conceive of no system as cruelly & unforgivably dehumanizing & damaging as slavery.

The war was fought over economics, certainly, but the rebelling side's economy was inextricably intertwined with slavery, so IMHO if there's a distinction, there isn't a difference. Even given its industrialists' own ghastly treatment of their factory chattel, the sad fact remains that the North would have had to make some kind of superhman effort not to have been able to make a claim of moral superiority, however relatively scant, over the slavery-sodden South.

That said, I also don't doubt for a moment that a goodly portion of Southern soldiers were fighting for their kith, kin, homes & way of life, though again it's rather difficult to try to parse "Southern way of life" up through 1865 in such a way as to extricate the peculiar institution of slavery. For instance, I learned back in the '90s, I think, that the Bailey who established my paternal line came over to the U.S. from Ireland around 1850 or so. I probably learned then, though I didn't pay any attention to it till I moved here from my native Arkansas, that he fought in an Alabama infantry regiment (though dim memory tells me that he first settled in Georgia, & of course he wound up in the Shreveport area in northwest Louisiana along with the rest of that side of the family; I saw his gravestone when I finally visited my own father’s burial place for the first time in my life in my mid-40s, just a few years ago).

Now, I seriously doubt that an Irish immigrant gave two figs about slaves or about the monied classes’* freedom to own & grow parasitically wealthier off them. At the same time, I strongly suspect that that lack of concern applied to the slaves’ plight as well, so it’s not as if he were some especially ennobled being. (Nor, of course, were most of his Northern counterparts, who tended to be just about as scornful of the abolitionists as any Southern fire-eater was. After all, it’s not as if John Brown – who happens to be one of my favorite figures in U.S. history – was overwhelmed with financial or popular support when he was in Ohio, in Kansas, in New York or anywhere else in the North, much less at Harper’s Ferry.) I also suspect that he was pretty typical of the Confederate foot-soldier in those respects.


*As well as, to a certain extent, the not-so-monied classes. Returning to examples from my own lineage, I was told that the great-aunt who largely raised me had, as a child born in 1879, interacted with at least one former slave of her father's who hadn't wanted -- read: wasn't socioeconomically able -- to leave the family home after the war. Her father, my great-grandfather, was a physician, but unlike now that didn't automatically mean he was lousy with money, & he wasn't, particularly with 7 kids to raise in an impoverished backwoods area.

[dan bailey]

Don't you love when they call the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression?

The preferred term in these parts, suh, is "the Late Unpleasantness."