Clarissa’s Reviews > The Man from Skibbereen: A Novel > Status Update

Maybe reading this will help?: tinyurl . com / yck66uke Not that you have to like him as much as L'Amour does, but he's not quite the villain of Gone with the Wind, either.

Oof. Um...well...I'm afraid reading that just made my loathing of the man much worse, not better. Nothing in that article presents him as any less of a villain to me (I still haven't gotten around to reading GWtW, or watching it, so most of my dislike of him comes from historical references and biographies--and most of those, from a Northern perspective). And this actually kind of makes me see him as even more despicable as an individual than I first believed. The arguments made in excuse of his actions really just make me shake my head and wonder if anyone's actually hearing the words the man had to say for himself, and what they mean. My appreciation of the government of the time has shifted considerably lower, as well. Not that it wasn't already delicately scraping the earth in my estimation...

There were so many ways that time period could have gone, so many ways things could have been handled (yes, by the south, too, but as they aren't the victors, and are more and more villainized by the supposed "right side" of history, their point doesn't get to be clearly heard often enough), and so many ways things could have been repaired afterward. Few of the choices made that led to the destruction of the South were fair, right, or considerate of the entirety of the nationwide picture--the reasoning for each side's push for war buried in hatred from both sides. Sherman's bloody march is just the tip of the endlessly tilting iceberg.

As far as L'Amour goes, there's been some redeeming quotes as I keep reading, that recognize the brutality of the man in question, and the hardships left in his wake that were never truly relieved. The thing about L'Amour is that he writes from varied perspectives and writes his characters thoughts with such great skill, I can't actually tell his own perspective on a lot of things. A lot of my original comment was intended as tongue-in-cheek, since everybody pretty much knows my views on the War of Northern Aggression are far from politically correct :-P (Also funny at my own expense: The Irish in me roots for the Irish lad in the story to be successful. The Southern in me grumbles about the main plot's target, and wishes the darling Irish lad would find himself far away from the conflict so I can have my cake and eat it, too. lol... xD "So I'm gonna suffer, but I'm gonna be happy about it. Sort of." )

Ah, I see. Thank you for clarifying your perspective. I guess it's dangerous to villify or lionize someone when they're very human living within a certain time frame that shapes their behaviors and their perspectives. That article showed me how human Sherman was, just as we all are, which I thought might help. But if it didn't, no worries.

Along those lines, I can have sympathy for the people of the south whose lives were so upended by the war, but that doesn't mean I think they were ever, ever in the right. The founding of this country was flawed from the very start by slavery, and when people inevitably had to reckon with the fact that their entire way of life was built on a foundation of pain and suffering and the denial of an entire population's humanity...well, there's no escaping the psychological toll of that, even if by some miracle, they'd managed to escape the political and physical toll.

We live on the surface of people's suffering right now. To have the luxuries we have, others are struggling. And if they rose up and fought not to be in pain anymore, they would be right. None of us would be right if we said, "No, my immigration policy says you have to suffer" or "Jeff Bezos says you have to suffer" or "My priest says you have to suffer." I hope it won't come to something so violent as the Civil War was, but we do like our comforts. And our power. And we like that so much more than loving our neighbor and diminishing into humility.

So, yes. I can see where those southerners were coming from, feeling so at sea and so distressed at losing their way of life. But their way of life gave them comfort at the price of others' pain, and if a war had to be fought to balance the scales, it was a necessary war. Not a just war, because the people who fought in it were human and imperfect and incapable of true justice, but a necessary one. And if that means I'm politically correct, I literally thank God for that.