I will make known my lineage to you all

Remember the speeches we bravely shared
At the meadhall tables – we boasted from the benches
That we would be heroes, hard-fighting in battle.
Now we'll see who's worthy of his vow,
Who'll back up his boast in the rush of battle.
I will make known my lineage to all of you:
I come from a mighty family of Mercians;
My grandfather was Ealhelm, a wise nobleman,
A lord and landowner.  My people at home
Will have no reason to reproach me for flight
From the battlefield, for seeking safety
and skulking home, now that Byrhtnoth
Lies broken in battle.  This is my greatest grief –
For he was both my kinsman and lord."
Then he went forth, his mind on vengeance,
Reaching a seafarer's heart with his spear,
Piercing that pirate's loathsome life.
He urged the troops on, his friends and comrades.

AND SO CAME THE DAY I LONG EXPECTED: THE AMERICANS, LIKE THE RAMPAGING PIRATES OF THE OLD ENGLISH POEM, MADE TO BREAK OUR KINSMAN AND LORD. Workmen – anonymous, imported from abroad as Lincoln did so much of that mercenary hordes who secured their citizenship in this"the last, best hope of earth" by their murder of our people and the plunder of our lands – took up their torches and cutting tools and set to work.

First the Americans beheaded him. Then they ripped away his limbs, tore his arms from his shoulders and his legs from his torso. They piled his parts like so much garbage. A special desecration was reserved for his head.

The American newspaper serving the imperial capital and its legions of functionaries — they’ve flooded the administrative district once known as Northern Virginia since the Americans commenced their “War on Terror”— knocked together a “feature” for its “Weekend” section. The story profiled the two "activists" and their long struggle through the iron dark of racist oppression to achieve this, to witness and celebrate this . . . what is this? Revenge? Payback for a lifetime of microaggressions? The photographer posed the activists, gazing somberly into the middle distance. One, as I recall, was leaning against a tree.

They were Southerners, like me, from the African branch of our people. Both are near my age, with faces worn and mournful. Familiar faces, then, born of the same earth as me, an earth soaked with our sorrow and blood and mourning. Yes, there was darkness and horror but there was kindness, decency and millions of small graces unremarked by all but God. I felt no anger, no rage, only sorrow: Forgive them, Lord. They know not what they do.

But the others knew what they were doing: the spite, the hatred, the petty malice, the seething lust for vengeance and humiliation: intentional, every shred of it. The South's purpose in the hideous arcana of the American agit-prop is to be mocked, humiliated, scourged, held up as what “the exceptional nation” has escaped. Rapid-reaction historians, expert at reducing the complexity of history to a simple Manicheanism that supports American power; "thought leaders" assigned to re-write "narrative" to align with America's inhuman aspirations; lies larded with hatred and amplified able to summon shrieking covens of college-educated hags who gibber and prance around our monuments, frothing and spitting with rage. A college professor instructs how best to topple an obelisk commemorating our dead. A speaker of the Virginia house of Burgesses – not a Virginia native – orders a statue of our chief evicted from the old statehouse in Richmond. A congresswoman from another district inserts language into a bill requiring the removal of our monuments from the fields where our people died defending our land from those people – the Americans. The "new people" of the "new nation" summoned into being by Abraham Lincoln's incantation of a few stupid Enlightenment abstractions.

Americans. Here's an American: the former administrator of Virginia who selfied himself and his wife smirking like the shit-tier goblins while behind them, great cranes ripped the statues from Monument Circle in Richmond. Or Louisiana native Rod Dreher, a deeply sensitive man who cares profoundly for the feelings of others. He soberly concluded that our monuments must come down because former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said in this speech that feelings were hurt, and there's nothing more precious to America than feels. Or Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the founder of Instapundit, a blog popular among the Fox News/Christian Zionist boomer demographic. He came to prominence as a rapid supporter of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and any exercise of American power; he was an early cheerleader for Ukraine and promulgator of the "Russia is a gas station with an army" notion. His specialty, by the way, is "space law" and "constitutional law." Reynolds is a conduit for the agitprop created by Dennis Prager, whose PragerU is a reliable dispenser of brain-hammering stupidity: Dems r the real racists; Republicans are the party of Lincoln; our monuments are "participation trophies" for losers; Sherman showed how to win wars, he showed you traitors and all you enemies of the USA watch our, or you're gonna get Shermaned. USA! USA! USA!

So the Americans threw the head of our chief into the furnace. The photographer captured the moment. You may have seen the picture. The molten bronze coursed from the hollow eyes, over his cheeks, and mingled with his beard. Weeping for a fallen America, some said. I was struck by the sheer petty viciousness and spite of it all. Something surreal and Old Testament about it, Amalek eradicated: all of our works bulldozed away, the earth plowed with salt. To make it as though he – and we – had never existed.

The Americans failed. They failed because we do not forget. His face and his name and his deeds are burned into the memory of every Southerner, hard-coded into our DNA. Perhaps it is ill-remembered or buried beneath the garbage and stupidity of Americanism. I would know him anywhere; I would know him if I were blind.

I would follow that old man into hell. That's what our folks said then, and I say it now.

(The Texas Brigade and General Lee at the Battle of the Wilderness, 1864. “Lee to the rear.”)

On May 17, 1861, my great-great-grandfather signed his name on the muster roll of a regiment organizing in his state's capitol. He was twenty-four, married with a son who became my great-grandfather one day. His brother, 18, enlisted the same day. Their term: for the duration of the war.

The regiment traveled by train to Richmond and was mustered into the service of the Southern states in June. It was posted at Yorktown and in May 1862, "won its first laurels" at Williamsburg, blocking the Americans under McClellan from advancing on Richmond. Another tough fight came in early June at Seven Pines. Joseph Johnstone, the commanding general, was wounded. Jefferson Davis appointed General Robert E. Lee to replace him. General Lee named his new command the Army of Northern Virginia.

For four my great-great grandfather followed Marse Robert. He was one of Lee's men, a soldier of the Army of Northern Virginia: one of those hard and wolfish Southerners who at Gaines Mill unleashed – perhaps for the first time, and maybe because they were fighting for General Lee – the fearsome, terrible Rebel Yell, that battle-cry unique to the Southern soldiers, derived from some ancestral memory of Saxon and British and Irish war-bands.

General Lee and his army cleared the Peninsula of McClellan, then turned west to "suppress," as General Lee put it, the "miscreant" Pope. Pope's "Army of Virginia" was flicked aside almost contemptuously. My great-great grandfather's regiment came under heavy fire but stood in reserve for the battle.

During the Maryland campaign, my great-great-grandfather saw General Lee. The army was on the march toward a town called Sharpsburg. They passed General Lee, who stood on a stone beside the turnpike watching them pass. The regimental commander remembers:

We cheered [General Lee] as we passed. He stood with his hat off, the light of battle in his eyes, his grey hair glittering in the sunlight, and I have always remembered him as he stood then, as the noblest figure that is imprinted on my memory.

The regiment took part in the capture of Harper's Ferry, then quick-marched to Sharpsburg. Their arrival with the corps of A.P. Hill was fortuitous – the Southern line was bending. The regiment was deployed to the Bloody Lane and beat back the American attacks. He was granted sick leave after Sharpsburg. The complaint was "phthisis." His daughter was conceived on that visit. He never met her. She did not survive the war. Nor did he see his son or his wife or his home again. He returned to Virginia in April 1863 as the Army of Northern Virginia maneuvered against an Army of the Potomac, this time commanded by "Mr. F.J. Hooker."

At Chancellorsville, General Lee split his outnumbered army not once but twice in defiance of every maxim of military science; no American has ever matched the audacity of Jackson's march around the American flank and that attack on the evening of May 2, 1862. It is easy to conjure the picture. The evening sun winds down. The soldiers of the American 11^th Corps – primarily German immigrants, as it happens, are frying up their bacon and hardtack. Then, mysteriously, woodland creatures streak from the thickets: chipmunks, bobwhites, rabbits. Fritz and Hans trade puzzled looks. Was ist das?

Then, all at once – bugles, bugles, bugles; the Rebel Yell erupts as Jackson's men burst from the woods. The attack shattered the American 11^th Corps, though at terrible cost, and scattered Hooker's army. Charles Marshall, an aide to General Lee, describes the following day:

On the morning of May 3, 1863, as many of you will remember, the final assault was made upon the Federal lines at Chancellorsville. General Lee accompanied the troops in person, and as they emerged from the fierce combat they had waged in the depths of that tangled wilderness, driving the superior forces of the enemy before them across the open ground, he rode into their midst. The scene is one that can never be effaced from the minds of those who witnessed it. The troops were pressing forward with all the ardour and enthusiasm of combat. The white smoke of musketry fringed the front of the line of battle, while the artillery on the hills in the rear of the infantry shook the earth with its thunder, and filled the air with the wild shrieks of the shells that plunged into the masses of the retreating foe. To add greater horror and sublimity to the scene, Chancellor House and the woods surrounding it were wrapped in flames. In the midst of this awful scene, General Lee, mounted upon that horse which we all remember so well, rode to the front of his advancing battalions. His presence was the signal for one of those outbursts of enthusiasm which none can appreciate who have not witnessed them.

"The fierce soldiers with their faces blackened with the smoke of battle, the wounded crawling with feeble limbs from the fury of the devouring flames, all seemed possessed with a common impulse. One long, unbroken cheer, in which the feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle, and hailed the presence of the victorious chief. He sat in the full realization of all that soldiers dream of—triumph; and as I looked upon him in the complete fruition of the success which his genius, courage, and confidence in his army had won, I thought that it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient days rose to the dignity of gods.

Then came the march to Gettysburg.

My great-great grandfather's regiment, part of Longstreet's corps, took part in the July 2 attack on Cemetery Ridge. The Southerners broke the American line but could not exploit it without reserves. Half of the regiment fell. An American cannonball carried away his brother's foot. My great-great-grandfather was captured. Perhaps he was trying to carry his brother to safety.

But that was the last time they saw each other: the carnage of Longstreet's attack. My great-great-grandfather escaped and rejoined the army in Virginia. His brother endured three amputations: the first at the ankle, the second at the knee and finally the upper hip. A shot of whiskey, a bullet between the teeth and three men to hold him down; they cauterized the wound with a torch. He survived and raised my great-grandfather. Here is his application for an artificial limb:

In May 1864 a fresh Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan. The ostensible commander was George Meade, but the new overall commander of the American armies came along. This was, of course, U.S. Grant, the "quiet man from Galena." In Mexico, Grant served with the quartermasters in a "rear with the gear" sort of role. So he understood logistics and the importance of accumulating mountains of supply and moving them most efficiently from point A to point B. He would have made a first-rate regional VP for UPS. But he was an innovator in his way: he pioneered germ warfare by pitching dead horses into the Vicksburg water supply during the siege. More importantly, he grasped the iron logic of attrition, as Lincoln did. Neither cared how much blood was shed, provided their "union" was "preserved."

Plenty of new Americans in the ranks, too. The eager volunteers of Lincoln's first call-ups were dead or at the end of their three-year enlistments. There were a good number of fanatical, New England abolitionist types among them, the sorts that would be pussy-hat wearing male feminists or whatever the current thing may be. Plenty of draftees, despite the carnage of the New York City draft riots the prior year; more than a few were the sweepings of the New York and Boston gutters. One-third were foreign-born; Lincoln sent agents to Germany and Ireland or recruited sergeants to greet the immigrant ships. It's remarkable how many of the American generals were habitually drunk; a few even experimented with opioids, the new miracle drug.

This was the "Grand Army of the Republic" that Grant led across the Rapidan to commence the brutal Overland Campaign. First, the Wilderness, a tangled wasteland where the skulls of the Chancellorsville dead protruded from shallow graves. My great-great grandfather's regiment was "hotly engaged" there; it "suffered greatly" at Spotsylvania, where it spent a night in the "Bloody Angle." The regimental history records that it was under fire daily as Grant tried to flank the Army of Northern Virginia. The North Anna, Cold Harbor, where Grant threw musicians into the slaughter. He finally managed to get across the James, at the cost of 50,000 men, the size of General Lee's army. But Grand failed to take Petersburg. So he fell back on the one thing that had worked. A siege. That was the beginning of the end.

My great-great-grandfather died on January 20, 1865, in Howards Grove Hospital in Richmond. The cause of death was phthisis, the complaint that got him the sick leave in 1863. The contemporary name is tuberculosis. He must have had it when he enlisted.

And he enlisted for the duration. Did he, at some point, kick himself for making a terrible mistake? Did he consider trying to wrangle a medical discharge? Did he try? Did he consider, when on that sick leave, just staying? Did he consider just going home when he escaped the Americans after Gettysburg? Collecting his wife, son, and daughter he had never seen and fleeing somewhere new? California? Mexico? Canada?

Whatever he may have thought: he did not abandon his comrades nor his oath of service to General Lee.

Perhaps he had some premonition of the fruits of American victory. Maybe he saw the demons Lincoln had summoned with his abstractions and how Lincoln fed them with the blood of those murdered in his war of conquest. Perhaps he saw that the Americans would realize the fantastic, incredible profits that could be accrued by war and conquest, that an all-powerful central government most efficiently manages wars. And that this "new nation" of Lincoln's would, in short order, become aggressive abroad and despotic at home; and that the Americans had discovered the secret of tarting up the most wicked of crimes with high-minding abstractions: freedom, justice, "all men created equal." That America would become an exporter of degenerate perversion and an importer of low-wage serfs to keep the murder machine running along.

Perhaps he saw the desecration of the monument to General Lee. And maybe he saw all of this in the last days of his illness, shivering in the trenches of Petersburg, barefoot and wrapped in a thin blanket, maybe a chunk of fatty bacon and a handful of parched corn in his belly.

Better death than submit to these people, he may have thought. Better to die than to be an American.

He was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, the location recorded in a book. Once the state budgeted a minuscule amount for its upkeep. That was cut by the Democratic governor and legislature cut that: another display of the nasty, petty, mean-spirited viciousness that characterizes the American national character. How very American. The Sons of Confederate Veterans now guards the cemetery, just as it does these graves, hidden in northwest Louisiana:

I was born on the fifth anniversary – or was it the third? Or second? It doesn't matter – of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law. You and Freedom are twins! My parents used to say that. They were in Washington for the signing. Both were born in the Deep South but met at Yale, that finishing-school for the missionaries of Americanism. When better to launch a new one than after the great triumph of World War II, with FDR scamming Churchill out of the British Empire? We must continue the great work of Father Abraham! So my parents returned to the South, on fire to lift the South from its Stygian darkness of racist oppression.

I am not old (or that's what I am told). But I have always felt out of place, out of time, and even more so now. I am ancient, lost, alien. I do not like the "American Century." Kennedy's assassination and the elevation of LBJ broke something, I am convinced, or rendered the U.S. unfixable; it is as though governance of the nation passed to those who hate it. Vietnam; stagflation; the "false dawn" of Reagan, whose great "achievement" was the unleashing of Milton Friedmanism, aka the neoliberal economic order. Capital must be free to cross borders – provided it is denominated in U.S. dollars -- freedom of cross-border dollar-denominated capital flows; it is the duty of the corporation to prioritize shareholder returns; if margins must be bolstered by wholesale layoffs, so be it. Reagan's "revolution" also unleashed the private equity/private credit industry to practice some of that neoliberal-approved "creative destruction." Buy a company with junk bonds; load it with debt; pay oneself a dividend and fire workers to support cash flow; strip and sell the assets; and shift any remaining operations to a low-wage domicile. Citizens are no more than units of economic consumption – "consumers," they are called, like cattle. The business of America is business, and business requires "growth," and if mass layoffs are needed to show "growth," then that's what the C-suite shall do. If your job got sent to China or Vietnam – well, numb your pain with Oxycontin, approved by the FDA.

Sorry to be a downer, Uncle Sam, but I don't think you've deployed your "talents" wisely.

Grandma once told me a story that she had from her mother. It was the summer of 1864. A Confederate officer galloped up the plantation drive. Sherman and the Americans were coming, he said. And indeed, they could see, just on the horizon, the flags fluttering in the breeze. They – all of them, the women that would be my great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother and the twenty-nine slaves – fled to the forest to hide.

They heard shouting, gunfire, the screams of horses. Soon smoke and the reek of the burning drifted through the trees drifted through the trees and the reek of the burning. When they returned two days later, it was all gone but for charred timber and blackened bricks.

The Americans, Grandma said, killed the livestock. All of them, or such as remained: a milk cow, two hogs, the team of mules, the horses, the pony my great-grandmother rode. They just shot them, Grandma said. Shot them and left them to die. Mama said her pony was wheezing, she held the poor thing's head. Why? I asked Grandma. I was ten or thereabouts. We were on the porch looking toward the pond. Early evening in August, when the setting sun seemed to gild the air itself. They were just mean people, she said. Maybe the war made them mean. Something sour in them. Well, Grandma. Conservative "intellectual" Victor Davis Hanson would like a word with you. Hanson LARPs as a farmer but IRL he is the Martin and Allie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in California. His focus is classics and military history, and he considers himself an "expert" on "the American way of war." He, like the odious Reynolds, came to prominence during the neocon salad days, banging his fists for regime change. Remember when Bloody Bill Kristol had that cruise ship scam going? Hanson was a regular. He would say things like this: "In this new age the American military does not like fascists, and it thus will unleash horrific power to eliminate autocrats like Noriega, Molosevic, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein." Here is an example of Hanson's wretched prose: he is aping Churchill, or Churchill's ghost-writers, who themselves were aping the Georgians:

That is a little dated, obviously (it's also on National Review, to which I won't link). Perhaps you noticed Hanson beating the drums for Trump recently? He even made The Case for Trump – that's a book, and no link from me. Page after page of bombastic bullshit, an ex-warmonger sucking up to the new boss – who, if nothing else, has made the right noises about the wars Hanson cheered on with passion. Well, Trump is from New York, so he knows whores.

So, Hanson. These fascists. How shall we know them? Anyone who opposes American power. Unleash horrific power on a girl's pony? War is hell. Americans approve. Recently, in Vicksburg, I struck up a conversation with a retired autoworker from Toledo, second-generation Polish, a Civil War buff. Favorite general? Sherman. He showed the traitors that war is hell. I thought of my grandmother's story. I reminded myself that he was only repeating what he'd learned from the likes of Victor Davis Hanson. Then I remembered an urgent doctor's appointment and apologized to my new friend. I had to hurry! First, though, I gave him directions to the Port Gibson battlefield. The "scenic route," of course. He should be near Amarillo by now.

The Toledo man is a soulmate to Hanson, who cherishes Sherman. Somewhere in Hanson's "Private Papers" on his website is a nasty screed describing the American sack of Columbia, South Carolina. Hanson describes the burning and destruction carried out by those "brave midwestern farmboys" like a degenerate pornographer would an orgy. There's a book called The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny. Uncle Billy is a "great liberator." Then there's this one, called The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost. "Cump" is one, needless to say. Another is David Petraeus. You remember Petraeus. He emerged as the "hero" of the Iraq disaster in that he put enough lipstick on the pig to carry Bush II across the line for his second term. Petraeus was talked up as the second coming of Grant. We agree; both are utterly overrated by the Americans, but we understand they don't have a deep bench of military heroes.

Back to Petraeus, the Savior General. That appellation did not age well, did it, Hanson? We think Hanson was whoring himself after Savior Dave. Maybe he wanted to be invited to lunch at some Pentagon command center. Anyway, Savior Dave got named head of the CIA. But then he got himself into trouble – lined up a little piece of ass on the side or was a bit loose with security procedures or some stupid bullshit. The CIA found that problematic and fired him. Was it a #MeToo thing? We neither know nor care; it's probably some stupid bureaucratic infighting. But fear not, Savior Dave landed at KKR & Co., the legendary private equity shop that can always find a home for an American patriot. Savior Dave is Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a properly pompous title for a man of Savior Dave's accomplishments. So, what's he doing for KKR? He makes introductions. He provides access. He is a bridge between the American killing machine and the pools of capital needed to fund it. What's in it for Dave? What could there be after the excitement of commanding men in battle? "The upside of joining KKR is obvious: mad stupid loot."

But that's the American way, that's what Americans do, and so it's okay. But some stuff is not okay. Petraeus considers General Lee a "traitor." As does Stanley McChrystal and Mark Milley, and who knows how many more of the fifth-rate losers, shitasses, nonentities, flunkies and degenerates who command what Hanson calls the "the world's finest military." The architects of farces like the Afghanistan bugout, the disaster of Iran and the ultra-expensive weapons systems that haven't been working all that well against the Russians.

Petraeus also demands the names of "traitor" Confederates be stripped from American military bases. Well, Savior Dave. That's one place where we agree. Ain't it good to talk these things out? Here's what it is: I do not want the names of our men, of Southern men associated in any way, shape or form with the mercenary hordes that are the American armed forces, which have never in their history fought to defend the interests of the people that live here. What do you think of that, Dave? Something else, Dave: Got this new thing I'm doing. Do you want to hear it? You heard of Antifa? Got this thing called AntiRec. I'm gonna part the pickup outside the recruiting office and every time I see a kid even glancing at the door – I'm gonna pop out of my truck and convince him otherwise. And I'll start by telling him what a piece of shit you are, Savior Dave, and no way he should fight for a suck-ass courtier like you, much less a nation that hates him and spits on the graves of his ancestors.

I mentioned my father, the Yale man. You may have intimated he was not the Skull & Bones, Boola Boola type, which he wasn't. His father was a railroad man on the old Louisville & Nashville. He was the first of the family to go to college. He used to say that were it not for "the war" he would have been an auto mechanic in the sawgrass of Alabama.

He was drafted in 1942, trained as a medic. His divison fought in Italy: he was at Anzio, Monte Cassino. Sometimes he had nightmares, shouted in his sleep: terrible things. The "Greatest Generation" stuff infuriated him. So did "Company of Heroes" and the "Saving Private Ryan" stuff. He did not like Italians: too noisy, the hand gestures. But he admired Germans. His closest friends were a German, who spent the war in South America (a family of brewers) and an Austrian, whose father, a Lutheran pastor, vanished into the maelstrom of the Russian front.

He spoke only once of the war to me. I was young, maybe in my teens. I still believed much of what I was told. I said Hanson could have written: the courage and sacrifice and heroism of those young men, fighting for ideals, fighting for Freedom.

My father stared at me. It was a strange look: sadness, slight contempt – and something different, something dark that I did not and do not understand.

Finally he snorted. Bullshit, he said. Nobody thought that. It was stoic duty. Get the damn thing done. He made to say more, then stopped.

I waited. He was staring at nothing, his lips pursed, one finger tapping the table. I cleared my throat.

Incomprehensible, my father said. I can't. . . Then he looked at me. That dark emotion possessed him completely. I would never again see that look in his eyes. That darkness, a black fury, bottomless grief, the abandonment of hope.

What they tell you, he said. Is a lie. It's a goddam lie.

"The Good War" is one of the High Holies of America, just like Lincoln's war. America the good, America the liberator, America granted the divine right to impose its universal values on the entire world, and by the bayonet if needed. The South's role in its ridiculous fantasy? We are the cautionary tale, the road less travelled, the "original sin" that must be expunged from the body politic; we must die so that America might live and fully realize its promise. When the Americans say, "That's not who we are," Southerners are who, or what, the Americans desperately do not want to be.

Again, grounds for agreement. I do not want to be an American.

Shelby Foote once said we struck a deal with the Americans. We would fight in their wars, slave in their factories, pump the oil and keep the machinery working and putting up with their stupid insults with good humor – provided they kept their disgusting fingers from our monuments and our memories.

And they broke the deal. They lied. Has America ever honored an obligation? Americans break treaties with abandon, justifying themselves with the same abstractions used for all of their monstrous deeds: freedom, justice, equality. The Americans have not only drained those words of meaning: they have positively inverted them. Was it Kissinger who said it's dangerous to be an ally of the Americans? Ask the English, or the French. Or the Germans, de-industrialized by that mysterious Nordstream explosion. Is someone seeking to reduce Germany to a nation of peasant agriculturalists.

It does, though, remove me from an obligation to them. I do realize it's ridiculous; I cannot change my passport. But I want nothing to do with any "polity" whose national myth is a bullshit defamation of the Southern people. I want nothing to do with your flag, and your Air Force flyovers at the football games, your Black Friday sales, your endless movie remakes and whatever else it is that makes you Americans. A "nation of ideas," you say. A "propositional nation"; assent to these four points and you and your family are and will forever be, Americans.

That is not a nation. That's a political party. I don't assent to your bullshit propositions. Does that mean I’m no longer an American?

By God, I think we have a deal!

I am, as it happens, nobody in particular. Several years ago, I cut loose from a long career on or adjacent to Wall Street. I had the sense of a bad moon rising. I sold out and made myself scarce pre-Trump's first term and pre-covid. It's been a long drift sense then, much of it untangling family history and identifying those in my woodpile who wore the gray. T. There's quite a few once you get into cousins and whatnot, but with both branches of the family here since the 1660s they've spread out a bit.

I landed first in Odessa, on the Staked Plain of West Texas; one ancestor ended there after the war; a street bears our surname. Odessa itself is in Ector County, named for General Matthew Ector, CSA; a separate ancestor served under him in the 10^th Texas Cavalry (dismounted). Then Comanche County, Texas; two families fled the ruins of North Georgia and ended here; their descendants remain. Trinity County, Texas: some of my folks came here from Mississippi in the 1840s; some of them enlisted in the 5^th Texas Infantry, the "Bloody Fifth" of the Texas Brigade. Louisiana: a very distant relation to Major Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, the commander of the Louisiana Tigers; the Cajun branch of the family is around New Iberia and St Mary Parishes. The Anglo branch, which settled in Rapides Parish on a Spanish land grant, disappeared during the war.

I am now in Mississippi. Vicksburg drew me, one might say. My people were here: regiments from Georgia, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The Americans try to make Vicksburg about Grant. The quiet man from Galena, an "everyman" sort of hero; you can easily imagine him staggering into a gas station in Crocs for a case of Bud Light. But it is not. This is not Grant's city. There is a statue of Grant in the military park, and he can stay there.

Vicksburg is no longer the prosperous hub of commerce it was in the days of King Cotton. Cross Clay Street into the historic district, and there is no detritus of Americanism. There is no neon, no fast food, no strip malls and none of the cheap, prefab ugliness that characterizes the modern American landscape. It's a Southern Rivendell, in a way. Here the memory and beauty of the old things and the old ways are preserved.

Vicksburg is ours. It is now and will forever be a Southern city, anointed with the blood of the men and women – black and white, Southerners all – who fought, suffered, died and endured there. The state of Mississippi will be the last to surrender, I think, to the ugliness of Americanism, and Vicksburg will be the last to fall. And if the Americans come again, I'll post myself at the Railroad Redoubt, where the Texans beat back the last American attempt to storm the city.

Vicksburg is where I will – because it’s appropriate – “take my stand.” I am a ghost among ghost, a ghost with a memory; one that has seen and noticed and read the forbidden things. And now we return to where we began. The Battle of Maldon, an ancient Anglo-Saxon poem describing a battle between our more distant ancestors and a troop of invaders. Byrhtnoth, their lord, has fallen. The shield-wall is about to break. Then Aelfwine speaks:

I will make known my lineage to all of you, he says.

Aelfwine’s rallying cry is like a shaft of pure and unadultered light that bursts the blackness, the miasma, the stupidity and the absolute bullshit vileness of the American system and the world that the Americans made.

I will make known my lineage to all of you. Aelfwine does not appeal to abstractions or “our values” or “our democracy” or “that’s not who we are” and those other canting bullshit phrases so dear to the American mind.

I will make known my lineage to all of you. Aelfwine instead calls to what we are. A unique people from a particular place, one of the unique peoples of the earth. White and black, we are the Southern people. We were here before the United States. And we will be here when those people are no more than a bad memory, a nightmare to scare children.

The Americans enjoy a LARP, don’t they? Beacon of democracy, exceptional nation and all that. It’s especially funny when they LARP as “the resistance.” Okay, yanks. Consider this my little resistance.

I propose to describe what happened when the Americans came. Where we came from, and where they came from. How they came to wage war on us and what happened afterward.

At night when I sit on my porch, I see the ghosts of Southern soldiers – the ghosts of my forefathers – marching to the line to defend our lands from the demons. Perhaps one day we Southerners – and I will say it again: Southerners black and white – will rid ourselves of these demons. May we be worthy of our ancestors’ courage.

Enoch L. Cade

Mississippi (occupied)