You're Gonna Need Somebody When You Die.

It's a book review of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War, by Michael Gorra, and it reinforces the maddening complexity of all things Southern.

What to Do About William Faulkner, by Drew Gilpin Faust (The Atlantic)

A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.

 ... How should we now regard this pathbreaking, Nobel Prize–winning author, who grappled with our nation’s racial tragedy in ways that at once illuminate and disturb—that reflect both startling human truths and the limitations of a white southerner born in 1897 into the stifling air of Mississippi’s closed and segregated society? In our current moment of racial reckoning, Faulkner is certainly ripe for rigorous scrutiny.

Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith, believes Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the 20th century. In his rich, complex, and eloquent new book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, he makes the case for how and why to read Faulkner in the 21st by revisiting his fiction through the lens of the Civil War, “the central quarrel of our nation’s history.” Rarely an overt subject, one “not dramatized so much as invoked,” the Civil War is both “everywhere” and “nowhere” in Faulkner’s work. He cannot escape the war, its aftermath, or its meaning, and neither, Gorra insists, can we. As the formerly enslaved Ringo remarks in The Unvanquished (1938) during Reconstruction-era conflict over voting rights, “This war aint over. Hit just started good.” This is why for us, as for Jason and Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929), was and again are “the saddest words.” As Gorra explains, “What was is never over.”

In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic. But he also writes, he confesses, as an “act of citizenship.” His book represents his own meditation on the meaning of the “forever war” of race, not just in American history and literature, but in our fraught time. What we think today about the Civil War, he believes, “serves above all to tell us what we think about ourselves, about the nature of our polity and the shape of our history.”

The core of Gorra’s book is a Civil War narrative, which he has created by untangling the war’s appearances throughout Faulkner’s fiction and rearranging them “into something like linearity.” From the layers and circularities and recurrences and reversals of Faulkner’s 19 novels and more than 100 short stories, Gorra has constructed a chronological telling of Yoknapatawpha’s war, of the incidents and characters who appear in the writer’s extended chronicle of his invented “postage stamp” world. Faulkner took liberties with the historical order of events; what he sought to depict was the “psychological truth of the Confederate home front” and the war’s aftermath. This is work, Gorra argues, that actual documents of the period would be hard-pressed to do. And that psychological truth certainly could not have been derived from study of the racist historiography of Faulkner’s era, which he insisted he never even read. Instead, this understanding is the product of what Toni Morrison once called Faulkner’s “refusal-to-look-away approach” to the burden of his region’s cruel past.

Faulkner enacts this refusal through his practice of looking again, of revisiting the same characters and stories, and through the prequels and sequels and outgrowths of those he has already told, digging deeply into the hidden and often shocking truths of the South he portrays. Gorra endeavors to unknot and clarify Faulkner’s oeuvre by reconstructing it himself, but his act of literary explication is also one of participation—a joining in the Faulknerian process. Gorra renarrates these Civil War stories as he seeks to come to terms both with America’s painful racial legacies and with William Faulkner ...

COVID-19 has Dixie on its mind.

Just because Charlie Daniels has become a filter-less spittoon of repellent MAGA dogma in his old age DOESN'T mean he didn't make good music back in the day.

Meanwhile, as you enjoy Saddletramp (from which "Dixie on My Mind" is drawn, and for my money Daniels' finest album), here are ill tidings from the fiddler's favored milieu.

To live and die in Dixie: Covid-19 is spreading to America’s South with unnerving speed (The Economist)

Southern governors are beginning to reopen their states. For most, it is too early

“You could be looking at a perfect storm,” says Thomas LaVeist, the dean of public health at Tulane University in New Orleans. “When this is over, the South will be the region of the country that will be most severely impacted.”

At first glance, it makes no sense. Why are Republican governors down South targeting their own voters?

Dixie in the crosshairs (The Economist)

The South is likely to have America’s highest death rate from covid-19
It has unusually unhealthy residents and few ICU beds

If covid-19 does infect most Americans, the highest death rates will probably not be in coastal cities—whose density is offset by young, healthy, well-off populations and good hospitals—but rather in poor, rural parts of the South and Appalachia with high rates of heart disease and diabetes. Worryingly, the three states that announced plans this week to relax their lockdowns (Georgia, Tennessee and South Carolina) are all in this region.

Ah, yes. There HAD to be a time-honored GOP angle to this.

We Can’t Wait Until Coronavirus Is Over to Address Racial Disparities, by Junia Howell (CityLab)

Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Covid-19 exposed stark inequalities: Rates of mortality and severe illness are far higher among Americans of color. Politicians, journalists and scholars have been attempting to explain these racial differences by pulling from a wide range of past studies and assumptions. Many of these early suggestions emphasize how Covid-19 is illuminating pre-existing inequality.

Yet, early reporting and existing studies suggest Covid-19 is not simply exposing past inequality. It is also creating it. Like previous crises, such as natural disasters, war, and economic recessions, our response to Covid-19 is exacerbating racial disparities. However, this is not inevitable. Addressing unequal distributions of Covid-19 testing, racial biases in health care, and policy responses to racial segregation now could mitigate how unjust this crisis turns out to be.

Klansmen wear masks, kinda sorta.

Black leaders say reopening Georgia is an attack on people of color, by John Blake (CNN)

Magee believes Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's decision to reopen some businesses across the state starting today is an "attack" on African Americans -- one of the groups hit hardest by the virus. And he says it's no coincidence that the businesses being reopened -- including barbershops, nail salons and churches -- are communal gathering places for black residents.

Returning to music, the song "Saddletramp" finds Daniels' lyrical gaze stretching all the way to Arizona, home of the legendary lawman Joe Arpaio.

How many people watch you ride away
Wonder why you never promise
To come back some day
Maybe thinking you were holding
All the pieces in your hand
Or are they slippin' through your fingers
Like the endless desert sand

Ignore the lyrics if you must, and give it up for the late, inimitable guitarist Tom Crain.

"The South, Sickest Part of a Sick America, Falls Prey to Virus."

"Lost Cause" means different things to different people.

The South, Sickest Part of a Sick America, Falls Prey to Virus, by Margaret Newkirk and Michelle Fay Cortez (Bloomberg)

A region beset by obesity and diabetes is uniquely vulnerable.

A virus that is particularly lethal for people with underlying health conditions is now spreading into the unhealthiest part of the U.S.: the South.

For decades,­ people in the 11 states that seceded during the Civil War -- America’s poorest region -- have suffered from a scourge of obesity and hypertension, which intensify the danger of the coronavirus and the Covid-19 respiratory disease that it causes. Four of the five states with the highest diabetes rates are in the South. And eight didn’t expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving thousands of families without access to routine care, even as financially troubled rural hospitals wither away.

Those factors give the South a special vulnerability, as did the haphazard response from some governors as the disease began to course through the country. Without clear direction from the Trump administration, they were loath to mandate stay-at-home orders. Beaches were open in Florida, churches held services in rural Tennessee and Mardi Gras went on in Louisiana.

Now Covid-19 has infected 47 long-term care centers in Georgia, overwhelmed hospitals in New Orleans, spread into at least six Alabama nursing homes, forced the evacuation of scores of elderly residents from a Tennessee rehabilitation center and killed a country music star in Nashville.


“Covid-19 is going to be a disaster in the Southeast,” said Aaron Milstone, a Tennessee pulmonologist. “We’ll see higher morbidity, which is getting sick from the virus, and higher mortality, which is dying from the virus” ...

Suddeath: "You can love the South without loving its biggest mistake."

Daniel Suddeath and I jousted often during his tenure as News and Tribune reporter, and while our exchanges occasionally got testy, I viewed it as healthy in the main.

We barked and snarled, and kept talking. Both of us are prone to streaks of self-righteousness, which isn't always helpful when writing an essay such as the one linked here.

Speaking merely as an observer, one who toils at writing and feels like he never gets it quite right -- and who doesn't always feel obliged to practice what he preaches -- the objective is to maintain poise while in the throes of passion, making the necessary points with cool precision with just enough emotion to engage readers and keep their attention.

I believe the writer's ability to communicate in this fashion is a sign of maturity, skill and command, even when he or she occasionally decides to chuck it and go straight for the polemical jugular.

What I'm meandering around to saying is that Daniel does a damned fine job here, quite apart from the fact that I agree with his point of view.

Suddeath: Fake history, by Daniel Suddeath (Glasgow Daily Times)

There is a difference between remembering history and holding on to beliefs that were never right.

While I generally don't support removing articles of history, be they reminders of good or bad, it's hard to distinguish between those who want to keep Confederate statues in place for historical reasons versus those who would like to see our country revert to a time when it was OK to be racist, and frankly brutal and primitive to our fellow man or woman.

This paragraph is the anchor.

What's the point? What was so great about the Confederacy that it should be cherished? You can love the South without loving its biggest mistake.

Continued best wishes to Daniel in Glasgow.

Southern Republicans imitate Indiana Republicans, or maybe vice-versa.

In an essay charting this year's “God, guns and gays” legislative sessions, as occurring down yonder in the defeated Confederacy, during which reactionary laws were enthusiastically embraced, only to illicit backlash from the very business and economic engines sustaining local economies, we're unfortunately reminded that when it comes to geography, the Mason-Dixon line has a weird curvature near the shores of Lake Michigan.

"Following a pattern established last year in Indiana."

Jeeebus, that hurts.

Southern Republicans: Going rogue (The Economist)

Republicans in the southern statehouses are angry—fundamentally, perhaps, about the waning of the values they are fighting for.

 ... On the face of it, much of this seems odd. Judging by the rhetoric of the Republican presidential contest, the country is going to the dogs; in parts of the South, the infrastructure is indeed crumbling. Yet the region’s politicians are concentrating on problems that, to put it mildly, are often less than pressing. Florida passed a law stopping clergy from being dragooned into conducting same-sex marriages, a threat already neutralised by America’s constitution. Predatory men infiltrating women’s toilets, the spectre raised in North Carolina and elsewhere, is a similarly apocryphal fear. Remarkably some southern governors have elevated such concerns above job-creation. Many in Georgia think Mr Deal should have followed suit: predicting that “religious liberty” will haunt next year’s session, too, Josh McKoon, a disappointed state senator, says that while “prosperity is an important value, so is individual freedom”.

What explains this eccentric turn? It is a reaction, most obviously, to last year’s Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage, of the kind that often follows dramatic social change. Melton McLaurin, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, notes that this particular “rearguard action” resembles opposition to racial desegregation in emphasising the supposed endangerment of women and children. But many southern Republicans feel beleaguered by more than one ruling: they see Washington as at once insidiously liberal and hopelessly gridlocked. Religious-liberty bills and the like offer the consolation of decisive action (even if some are destined to be struck down), of a sort that, unlike new roads and bridges, requires no tax dollars ...

 ... Tension between urban liberals and their more conservative environs is an old story, given extra piquancy by the migration to some southern cities of sophisticated types from elsewhere in the country. Yet the role of demography in the South’s political convulsions runs deeper. As well as exemplifying the frictions between different levels of government and different strands of Republicanism (business-minded and religious), these flashpoints also illuminate a bigger clash: between the past and the future.