My sister-and-law and I are both fans of Ambrose Bierce (he of the original Devil’s Dictionary). We were i-chatting about this yesterday, and she mentioned that she had been reading Bierce’s Civil War story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. A story of a military hanging, of a would-be Confederate saboteur. Bierce was a veteran of the Civil War, an officer, and would have seen, perhaps directed, several such episodes. Which got me to thinking …

About the animosities that war spawned, the conflicts between states, communities, families that started it and continued after it. Long after; for the war not only defeated the Confederacy, it destroyed it – its infrastructure and social system. Rebuilding – the process called “Reconstruction�, took, officially, twelve years. Unofficially, it took much longer – for outlaw bands such as the James-Younger gang began life as Confederate guerrilla units. Longer still – American attitudes and practices towards, and by, its black citizens still hearken back to when We the People lived in one of the last, and largest, slave-holding nations. It doesn’t take much of a careful reading of history – for example, as presented by James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, one of my all-time favorite books – to get this message. Which led me to thinking …

Of another war six decades later, when, although the infrastructure of the nation blamed for World War I was spared, its social structure was dismantled. A “republican form of government� was imposed upon a Germany that, for the previous seventy years, had known only absolute monarchy. And that “republican� government, which few Germans knew how to run, was then given the hopeless task of reconstructing a nation whose assets had, forcibly, been pawned by the Allies into the foreseeable future. For fourteen years, the German nation lurched from crisis to crisis, with international calamities at every turn of the screw, and armed bands, many of which were led by prominent figures from the ancien régime, parading through the streets. Until a Strong Hand took charge, with his swastikas and his hygienic salutes and his proclamation of the Leader Principle: follow me and all will be well. Which got me to thinking …

We think we’re going to get out of Iraq when??!?

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.