It seems appropriate that somebody should mark the 160th Anniversary of the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House. I look around me at the media and I see nothing—I mean to say, bupkis—so I guess that somebody is me.
Perhaps the DOGiE brochachos/Proud Boys/Three
Percenters crowd are deep in denial about the event. And perhaps that’s because
not only did it represent the final loss of the Army of Northern Virginia and a
big win by the Army of the Potomac, but because after Lee surrendered, so did
every other Confederate general across the country.
It ended the War Between the States, and
the Confederacy absolutely, positively, unquestionably lost. And this is
something the White Christian nationalist lot really does not like to
acknowledge.
Not for nothing are they called the Lost
Cause. (Hint: because they lost.)
The pity is that Abraham Lincoln let the
11 Confederate states back into the Union without some kind of thorough
de-Nazification process. Well—okay, not his fault, really, him having been assassinated
six days after the Appomattox surrender by one of those sore loser Lost Causers. And yes—Congress
did pass the Fourteenth Amendment, which does provide for banning
insurrectionists from serving in elected federal office, but that doesn’t
appear to have stuck; viz: the current occupant of the White House, several
Senators and a whole flock of Representatives.
(The Fourteenth also guarantees birthright
citizenship, which the insurrectionists are currently riding over in APCs. It
appears that it’s one thing to pass laws and an entirely different thing to
follow and enforce them. The Constitution these days being more of a guideline
or a suggestion than the actual foundation of our civil society.)
So it turns out that that war didn’t
actually end 160 years ago, or at least that the ideals of the Confederates—White,
male supremacy floating on a completely unsustainable economy--have re-emerged
in recent years like zombies. SECDEF Pete Hegseth (who might possibly be able to drink more than Grant, although I'm betting the latter would be able to get up from the table while Petey would be under it) is busy texting war plans to random reporters and renaming military bases after Confederate (losing) generals. They're also rewriting history to blot out things like slavery and anyone non-White who accomplished anything. Ergo silence on this anniversary. So we have to do it all over again, somehow.
In the meantime, for our National Poetry Month entry I’m giving you Twentieth
Century American poet Carl Sandburg’s take on the endgame of all wars. Happy
160th, y’all!
“The Grass”
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and
Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I
am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What
place is this?
Where
are we now?
I
am the grass.
Let
me work.
©2025 Bas Bleu
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