>Back with my wife in Tennessee, When one day she called to me,
>"Virgil, quick, come see, there goes Robert E. Lee!"
>Now I don't mind choppin' wood, and I don't care if the money's no good.
>Ya take what ya need and ya leave the rest,
>But they should never have taken the very best.
Does this mean we're supposed to get all throat-lumpy about the head
general of the CSA?
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mbs: Not a bit. The narrative is seen thru the eyes of someone other than the reader ('virgil caine is the name'). The text doesn't say I am you, it says this is 'my' story. The speaker is explicitly naive. Like the fellow rube that she is, his wife invites him to come and gawk while the great man REL (and history) pass them by.
>I'm reminded of C. Vann Woodward's remark that
>the people of the South were a people "that
>history happened to."
You mean it was wrong to say "During the Civil War eleven states
announced drastic 'no confidence' in the federal government. This was
before Dr. Uslaner's time, but he might note that the people in these
eleven states simultaneously exhibited great trust and confidence in
one another"?
Doug
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mbs: there's not much of that in the song. It's about a poor shit-kicker, his family, their attempts at pride, and their illusions, IMO.
I saw "Das Boot" and could empathize with the submariners, notwithstanding the cause for which they nominally fought (nominally in the sense that in the movie, they do not seem at all involved in German national war aims). The crucial scene is when, as they all face death at the bottom of the ocean in a disabled craft, the protagonist blubbers like a baby about his simple delusion that this was what he thought it meant to become a man.
I told you I was a sentimentalist.
mbs