It was bad enough not being aware that his ‘good friend’ Pavarotti has been dead for 10 years. Hey, people are dying all the time and if you’re not following the news closely, you can miss stuff like that.
But now everybody’s up in arms at his comments over the Civil War and Andrew Jackson, which indicate that he probably flunked 5th grade history and hasn’t learned anything since then.
I’m going to defend him here, sort of. Just sort of, of course, because he really is an unbelievably ignorant man.
Sure, the hero of New Orleans was long in his grave by the time the Civil War began, a fact that Donald Trump seems to be ignorant of, but tensions between the North and the South were already a thing by the 1830s, when Jackson was president. In fact, they were already in play at the time of the revolution, which helps to explain why we have the electoral college. The South has never trusted the North.
Then, there was the comment, and I paraphrase because I don’t want to flip screens again to look it up: “Why was the Civil War? Why couldn’t all that have been avoided?”
In fairness, he’s not the first person to ask that question. Sure, if we hadn’t had a war, slavery would have continued, probably for decades more, but hundreds of thousands of people who died would have lived. So, would avoiding it have been a good thing? Hard to say.
But, it could have been avoided. Slavery was a great evil but there were plenty of people, even in the North, who weren’t too fussed. Sure, Lincoln was a Republican, the leader of the anti-slavery party, but he was hardly the most radical person in that party, and he would have gladly avoided the war. So, yes, it could have been avoided. Right up to the point when the South attacked Fort Sumter.
This is the part that Southerners, who wave the Stars and Bars and talk about heritage and how Lincoln invaded the South, tend to leave out. They started the war. They asked for it. They insisted on it.
And the descendants of the racist assholes who started that war are the same people who support Donald Trump.
So, it’s possible we would have been better off just letting them go in 1861. But, that really wasn’t an option. They saw to that.
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