Gone to Shiloh

"Gone to Shiloh" (Elton John, Leon Russell, Neil Young)

Last year, we visited the Shiloh battlefield in Southern Tennessee.  It was a soggy, drippy day—perfect for a somber inspection of a place where nearly 24,000 young men were either killed or wounded in a two-day battle.  Most of the land is densely wooded, just as it was in 1862, and that somehow brought home the horror of the battle.  A soldier in those woods could know little, see little, and understand nearly nothing of what was going on around him, just smoke and slaughter.

Statues and monuments dot the battlefield.  Some commemorate Federal units, some Confederate. Most of them show where units were stationed, or the sites of the bloodiest battles.  Few honor individuals on either side, for their purpose is to help us learn and remember what happened here and its cost—and, perhaps, to warn us not to ever let it happen again.

Throughout the South, and much of the North as well, other statues honor the generals and leaders of the Confederacy.  A groundswell of people demands their removal, at least from public spaces.  Those who defend them argue that they remind us of our (or their) “heritage.”  It would be unthinkable to bulldoze the Shiloh battlefield and build strip malls on it.  How, then, is removing these statues any different? Aren’t we, in both cases, “erasing history?”

Not at all.

It is right and proper to commemorate what happened in those awful days.  The event can be divorced from the motivations of the young men who gave their lives there. I suspect that quite a few didn’t really know what they were fighting for; they were there because of loyalty to their family and community, because of a vague sense of “patriotism”, because of fear of “Yankees” (or, conversely, “Rebs”), because of a thirst for adventure.  Not so, though, with a statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson or Jefferson Davis, or any of the other “heroes” of the Confederacy.  These commemorate motivations, the cause for which they chose to lead their troops.  And that's the problem. 

To honor Robert E. Lee is, for all his qualities of courage and leadership, necessarily to honor treason.  To honor Jefferson Davis is to be proud of one of the most monstrous crimes against humanity ever committed, the institution of human slavery.  Stonewall Jackson was legendary for his bravery, all right—but it was the bravery of German soldiers in Normandy on D-Day.  They devoted their service to the cause of white supremacy. And not just to that, but to the oppression and exploitation of human beings they relegated to the status of livestock.

What, then, about such figures as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson?  They were slaveowners, and they too committed acts of treason.  Should their statues, their portraits, their images on our money—should these be erased too?

Yes, they were deeply flawed.  But they articulated an ideal that they themselves couldn’t live up to, but which became the country’s cause.  Washington refused a crown, and broke the concept of “divine right” once and for all.  Jefferson established the concept that “all [people] are created equal,” a concept so radical at the time that we’re still having trouble implementing it.  They set in motion a system that, while deeply flawed like them, has a noble, liberating vision to guide it, and us.

But you know … maybe the Old Testament injunction against “graven images” is the best practice.  Maybe we don’t need statues of “heroes” after all.  Not to get all Platonic here, but heroes usually have clay feet (or, in this case, bronze). A statue of George Washington or Robert E. Lee is really just a sculpted filter through which certain qualities pass to us.  The qualities are what’s important, not the particular representation of them.  What’s happening with the current controversy over Confederate statues is that, for perhaps the first time, large numbers of Americans are aware of just what these figures stood for and realizing that we don’t all agree on what those values should be.  It’s a discussion we need to have. 

It’s the sort of thing you think about on a rainy day in a forested field in Southern Tennessee.

Wet Dreams

Seattle lost a huge chunk of its soul last Sunday.

For 66 years, local television had devoted a day of live coverage of the Seafair Cup hydroplane races.  This year, KIRO declined to cover the event live, but promised to at least show highlights in the evening.

Came the highlight show:  twenty minutes of the Blue Angels, softball interviews with logboom spectators, some fluffy chatter.  Of the hydroplanes, nothing.  Oh, yeah—they announced who won.  At the beginning of the program, killing any interest we might have had in watching a clip of the race ourselves.  If, of course, they had shown one.

I can understand KIRO’s decision to end the live coverage.  There’s an awful lot of “dead air” to fill between heats.  In recent years, more spectators have come to watch the Blue Angels than the hydros.  They just weren’t that interested in watching a. small number of boats that sound like vacuum cleaners run around in circles three laps at a time.  Sure, they’re bright and colorful and they look spectacular when they run, but few know the names of the drivers or feel any bond with boats with names like Homestreet Bank or Graham Trucking.  But surely there are enough of us who still care to support a lousy highlight show.  There are hundreds of cable channels, after all, not to mention streaming on the internet.

For some years now I’ve felt defensive trying to explain why I’m a fan of hydroplane racing.  I watched the first race on the new technology of television when I was three.  As a child I, like many other young Seattle boys, made crude wooden hydros and towed them behind my bike.  I drove a patrol boat for one of the events when I was a teen.  And, as an adult, I spent a few years racing boats myself.

The boats of those years were woodworker’s art, dark wood polished to the sheen of a grand piano or painted brilliant colors, like the fabled Hawaii Kai’s coral and pink.  Stuffed into them were World War II fighter plane engines with over 1,000 horsepower.  And driving them were heroes, former pilots like Bill Stead  and Russ Schleeh, or even Cold Warriors like the popular Mira Slovak, who’d escaped Communist Czechoslovakia in a motorized glider.  It was a horribly dangerous sport; quite a few drivers, including the best of all like Bill Muncey and Ron Musson, died in crashes.

Seattle had no professional sport—no Major League baseball, no NFL team, no NBA basketball, not even hockey.  But we had hydroplanes, ever since a local car dealer, Stan Sayres, took a radically different boat back east and trounced the competition for the Gold Cup in 1951.  It was a major declaration to the East Coast and the sports media who paid attention only to them:  Seattle may have been out on the frontier, but it could excel at something. A rivalry quickly developed between two major hydroplane cities, Seattle and Detroit, and it was as passionate and fierce as Ohio State and Michigan or USC and Notre Dame.

Some of the boats had sponsors and some, owned by wealthy Captains of Industry, didn’t, but they all had histories and lineages that enabled us to form a bond.  My crude bicycle-powered model was pink like Hawaii Kai (when it retired I shifted allegiance to the Green Dragon, the Miss Bardahl).  Local television covered not only the Seattle race but other races around the Northwest, places like the Tri-Cities or Lake Coeur d’Alene, and we’d be glued to our fuzzy black-and-white tv’s for each of them.  When they’d test, I could hear the snarling modulations of the engine from my house, miles away.

But I’m old now, and it’s not the same.  Perhaps the sport lost its soul and detached from Seattle long ago.  Sponsors may change from race to race, and the drivers are faceless lookalikes. It’s impossible to form much of a bond with a billboard for a furniture store or a tire dealer.  And the boats have dwindled; only eight showed up for this year’s race.  The absence of television coverage just confirmed that something as precious to a city as any historic building or natural landmark has gone away. Seattle is a city for Amazonians and Microsofties now, and they have other dreams.