next Senate call and ugly historical flukes
We are watching the vote tallies of various Mississippi counties named after Confederate generals, and everyone’s smiling in triumph at Scott Colom’s vote tallies — the black guy won the county named after Jefferson Davis, woot!. And you throw in the reference to the last Democratic Senator out of the state, John Stennis from Segregation land, and declare it a victory against the nation’s original sin.
There are blips of history which I don’t really know what to do with for response and relation to some of the triumphal commenting. Like, there is nothing about the co-founder of the KKK’s Nathan Bedford Forrest’s redemption arc — ditched the klan as it evolved from a fraternal order of Confederate generals to the pre-emiment state sponsored terrorist organization, denounced them, was denounced by them, Freedman organization had him in at a dinner — which should save statues and monuments of him or — methinks the county named after him should officially be declared to be named after forests in general. But this does give a suggestion that a quick gleeful line — “has Forrest rolling in his grave” is — well, no more than any other white man of the nineteenth century. But only possibly no more — there is some questioning of the sincerity of the man’s posturing — plausibly just needing to save his bacon during the brief period of Reconstruction when anyone cared about civil rights in the US Congress.
On the case of John Stennis — there surely was a decent reason Scott Colom’s father was a Republican with the Reagan administration. There was no harsh break in 1964 –the Democrats let these discoverers do a light mea culpa “my bad”, and then die or retire out. The light mea culpa at the very least rankles against the quick “and the last guy was an arch-segregationist” — what? Everyone’s just going to drop his “my bad” speeches from the record? Actually, yes, they probably should… But, I guess by some definition the last decade of his career, we are in the land of quick political ‘re-posturing away from that which defined him.