Game of Thrones (GOT)
just started its seventh season on HBO, and I admit I’m a fan. I’m a nut for dragons
and mothers of dragons, and giants, and really evil women like Cerci Lannister, and
really creepy girls like Ayla Stark, and really tough ugly guys with hidden
hearts like The Hound, and really smart little guys like Tyrion Lannister, and
on and on.
In addition to the
great characters, the complicated plot is written as well as anything I’ve seen
on TV, and I’ve been watching since black and white 15 inch screens were the
norm. Ask me sometime about Paladin. Talk about a member of the Black Watch. I bet he could have stopped a Night Walker. Anyway, kudos to the writers of Game of Thrones.
Yesterday the online news
included a bit that the writers of GOT have been tasked with writing a new
cable TV series about a modern Confederacy, complete with slavery. Sigh.
Another ‘what if’ alternative history series.
Please understand I like
alternative-history novels. From Harry Turtledove, Gingrich and Forstein, to my
friend Jeffrey Brooks’ alternative Civil War novels, I’m intrigued by those
authors who dare to change history. Ballsy writers, every one. I’ve also
enjoyed some of the episodes of the cable TV series where the Japanese and
Nazis have divided the USA after winning WW II. Spooky, that.
Nonetheless, as a
Southern man, and a GOT fan, Im fretting over the prospect of a tightly-written, visually exciting,
action-driven cable TV portrayal of a modern Southern Confederacy as a bastion
of slavery in modern times. I find the idea chilling, repugnant and socially dangerous. I
agree with the person who just posted on a Civil War online forum that nothing
good can come of such a TV series. Why go there? It’s would not be history, it would be entertainment that crosses that invisible line that keeps being shoved backwards.
Protecting and
understanding our history, warts and all, is an honorable obligation, even the
uncomfortable parts. That includes museum exhibits focusing on the horrors of
slavery, just as it includes museum devoted to the Jewish Holocaust. It
includes museums that display military artifacts from the Confederacy, and places
like Andersonville Prison. You get my point.
To me, protecting
history also includes holding the line on preserving stone monuments erected to
honor the common citizen soldiers of the Confederacy. That said, I’m not so sure
about defending those monuments outside public buildings honoring the political
leaders who ruled the Confederacy. In a museum, yes, on the courthouse lawn,
not so much. But that’s a different social conflict that will work itself out.
All that is to voice
my opinion that it is unwise and needless to titillate TV viewers with imagined
visions of modern institutionalized Southern slavery. One hundred and fifty-two
years after the Civil War ended, we Americans are still uneasy about race
relations.
I simply don’t see any benefit from a TV series that panders to the
worst facet of our historical national story in a non-historical ‘what-if’
context.
Taking a deep breath
and moving on, the manuscript for A Different Country Entirely progresses.
The end is on the far horizon, like first seeing the Chisos Mountains as you
enter Big Bend National Park.
I’m excited about my first novel set in Texas. It’s
a tale of 1855 and is awash with ‘differences.’ Issues and people may have been similar to today,
but were also very different back then. And, Texas was geographically way out there, and truly different
from the rest of the states back then, likely even more than now.
Maybe I jumped on the
GOT writers story because I’m spending a lot of keyboard time writing about the
slavery aspect of my historical Texas story. Like with my McBee Civil War
novels, I don’t want A Different Country Entirely to ignore
the reality of slavery in Texas in 1855, but neither do I want to use slavery as
a gratuitous sideshow.
Human bondage was, and is, a disgusting evil, surely,
but forced slave labor also underpinned Texas’s cotton and agrarian economy
until 1865, a decade beyond my story. It's ugly presence deserves a place in historical novels set in that time and place.
So, a prominent minor
character is a slave named Thompson. But I can’t spoil my own plot, so enough
of that.
Enjoy what’s left of
a hot July.
Well said. I too, have been thinking a lot about the confederate monuments, and although I don't think they should "disappear," I applaud your solution for putting them in a museum. Or at the very least erecting a monument side-by-side, of the Northern counterpart, OR, better still, of a brave African American that fought back in whatever way they could against slavery.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, thanks for getting me riled up! ;) Can't wait to read more of your novel.