Doing Our Bit to Avoid a Civil War
Leave your bubble, get out in the U.S.A. — it’s too easy to fear and loathe people you encounter only second-hand, on screens
How very American of America to swipe an ancient phrase referring to the outcome of war — from the Latin status quo ante bellum, things as they were before a war — and then shrink and redefine it to make it American, referring exclusively to life in our South before our Civil War.
I discovered the etymology of antebellum while researching Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, my history of America’s founding weakness for exciting falsehoods. And I realized the word could usefully apply to modern times and places and situations.
For instance, the way many white Southerners, after losing the Civil War, romanticized their slave-based antebellum period as a golden age, plenty of Americans in the 1970s, after our 1960s wars — after Vietnam, the civil rights struggles, the countercultural explosion — instantly mythologized the 1950s and early ’60s as their own late lamented antebellum era of American Graffiti and Grease and Happy Days.
And now here we are in 2021, approaching the first anniversary of a mob attack on Congress as it certified a presidential election, with more and more people routinely…
