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A Confederacy of Dunces
I absolutely despise “alternative history” fiction. The distortion of real history is bad enough.
Enter David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and executives at HBO. Time-Warner’s pay channel has commissioned the creators of “Game of Thrones” to create “Confederate,” an alt-history series where the American Civil War ended in a stalemate and the Confederacy is now a 21st Century nation with institutionalized slavery. This is, as liberals would say, “problematic.”
The biggest hurdle the lead writers (the spousal African-American team of Malcolm and Nichelle Tramble Spellman) will have to overcome is the raison d’etre for slavery in the first place: large agricultural plantations needing vast numbers of cheap laborers to operate. At some point between 1865 and 2017 technology will overtake it. Will they suggest that slavery will be transferred out of the fields and into the factories? Will they be able to plausibly explain why white people will have no jobs in an industrialized South? And what about the rest of the world? Will there have been no world wars? No Great Depression? No Holocaust? Just 152 years of peaceful co-existence between the US and the Confederacy? No uprisings before 2017? It’s absurd.
What it will be is a Social Justice Warrior wet dream, a conglomeration of every hatred and prejudice in their own stone-cold hearts. It will lay bare exactly what they think. It will be the biggest “reelect the president” ad buy in history.
Published in History
The proposed series has also come under assault from SJW’s because the producers are white and . . . well, read for yourselves.
Or this, from an anxiety ridden writer at the progressive sports/entertainment blog, The Ringer:
Hang On….the early steps in industrialization were waterpower-driven….Arkwright’s Water Frame was called that because of its power source. What steam did was allow expansion of power machinery beyond those locations were good waterpower was available.
Both the Romans and the Greeks did use waterpower (for milling) to some extent, but it was limited because of the competition from slave labor. In the Middle Ages, waterpower expanded immensely, with many applications beyond milling, such as furnace bellows.
It has been suggested (by Terry Reynolds, in his book Stronger Than a Hundred Men) that the more-positive attitude toward technology in the medieval versus the classical era was driven not only by the absence of slavery (although some forms of serfdom came pretty close to it) but also to a heightened respect for *work* given the religious belief that Jesus had been a carpenter.
What a joke of an idea. The ratings will suck.
And they’ll tell us it’s a hit show anyway.
If HBO really wants to be cutting-edge, they should make a series based on Kurt Schlichter’s People’s Republic and Indian Country.
Lena Dunham’s ratings always sucked. Didn’t stop them from talking about it endlessly.
I was able to apply suspension of disbelief to those circumstances when watching the 1st movie. It’s in line with what an engineer needs to do for most fiction. What I couldn’t accept was the antagonist referring to the protagonists as “free thinkers”. There is no way they would use that label.
I assume that was a weakness in the novel rather than something added to the screen play.
Setting the talk of alternate universes aside for a moment, what’s really going on with this proposed show?
Racism is almost dead in America. Sure there are rednecks of every stripe (I used to know a Hispanic guy who thought the influx of Asians into the country was destroying us) but as far as “we don’t allow your kind in here” that’s gone, really. So racism has to be invented now, and a lot of people end up scratching their heads and saying, “What exactly was racist about that?” all the time.
I believe that Democrats have gotten the most success with their base by throwing the Slavery Card, rather than the Race Card. But even that was starting to get threadbare once we left the 1900’s and got into the 2000’s. Even though it wasn’t 200 years ago, slavery is two centuries ago at this point, if you get what I mean.
What the Democrats need is to remind their base of what it was like two centuries ago. I expect this show to have vicious brutality against black men, women, and children, performed by smiling, even laughing, white caricatures. I expect slave auctions to be common, probably with nudity for humiliation’s sake. Rape, murder, and lynching will probably happen at least once a show, all against blacks and performed by whites.
Expect at least one black hero to execute (brutally, of course) a minimum of one white per show.
Think: An X-rated “Roots” and “Mandingo” mash-up. This will be one ugly show.
I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I will be.
I couldn’t deal with the universal recast for each movie. Other than Sean Hannity, only one actor appeared in more than one movie, a guy with a bit part in each of parts 2 & 3. (Jeff Yaeger, last seen in V: The Series in the mid-80’s.)
This would be like writing an “alternative history” where, after the 1991 reunification of Germany, the Nazi party came back to power and instituted Holocaust 2.0. That would be hugely offensive to Germans, just as this will be to Southerners.
Isn’t that the whole point? Insulting the right people?
The fractured nature of media redefined the meaning of “hit.” Now it only has to be a popular within a certain demographic. Hollywood doesn’t program for America as a whole. They now program for the self-loathing American and an international audience that shares their views.
I was thinking that today as I was in a Wal-Mart in rural Indiana and noticing mixed-race couples and women with their mixed-race children. What was it, maybe forty-five years ago when The Jeffersons had a mixed-race couple on TV for the first time?
I’m from NYC but even as a teenager I didn’t like southern stereotypes on TV. In fact, TV Guide, then one of the most influential weekly magazines in America, ran a Southron-sympathetic article about that phenomenon called, “Come On! We’re Not All Dumber Than Two-Dollar Dogs!”
February 2, 1980
Maybe we’ll be surprised. I’d love to see the slaves living much like the personal shoppers and blood boys of Silicon Valley.
Maybe an episode can feature the revolt of household slaves when they learn they are moving to modern day Detroit?
To be fair, even when I was a kid back east, there was also a more positive attitude towards the South and it shouldn’t go unspoken or ignored. In my personal experience anyway, the relatively few household and neighborhood guests who were actual, honest-to-goodness southerners were treated kind of like English people: well spoken, a little strange, very polite, with a charming peculiar accent, appealing to the ladies. Big on family tradition and bloodlines, and military valor. Religious, but we Catholics liked that as a personal trait, even if our respective faiths had not, shall we say, always seen eye to eye.
And the jokes on “Hee Haw” about yowling hicks? Yeah, I have to admit, when they were good, we laughed at them. Come on, it’s not like you never laughed at us. Every culture has its less dignified side.
Never sell. Everyone knows Holocaust 2.0 is being produced and directed by Iran.
To be followed by:
“We will never forget. And this time, we really mean it.”
All things are political these days and this may be a simply a vehicle for the BLM followers. Just ratings Ya Know, just ask CNN.
Why doesn’t any of our fiction address the rising tide of Islamic fascism?
Seems likely, but are you assuming Britain would have won such a war? What if the CSA had won? Perhaps they form an alliance with France or Prussia, inflict a humilating defeat on Britain, and force it to sign away much of its overseas empire.
I don’t know if it’s plausible to imagine a world where feminism took root while slavery persisted, but if middle-class families could afford a slave or two it would solve the “have it all” dilemna of modern feminism: with slaves to handle all child rearing and domestic duties, middle-class (white) women would be free to persue full-time careers without the “burden” of family life.
It would be intereting to explore feminists grappling with the contradictions of such a system. “How can I call myself a feminist while ignoring the rights of my enslaved sisters? I feel like such a hypocrite, but without Angelica here to take care of our children, I’d have to give up my law practice… it’s not like we abuse her, we treat her as part of our family!”
Not that I expect anything remotely along those lines from HBO.
So you don’t think HBO will be adapting Robert Ferrigno‘s Prayers for the Assassin any time soon?
Can’t buy into this one. At best, the CSA might convince Britain to abandon the effort to impose its will. But it wouldn’t be much of a defeat, and it certainly wouldn’t involve surrendering overseas possessions.
And in the meantime, even to get to that point is highly unlikely. Britannia rules the waves.
Admittedly it becomes more plausible if you defer the timeline until closer to WWI. Imagine that shortly after the Battle of the Marne, with Germans and French locked in a stalemate on the outskirts of Paris, a large army of fresh Confederate troops land in Bordeaux and march on Paris from the west. The British Expeditionary Force tries to head them off, and gets outmanuevered by the grandson of Robert E. Lee, who manages to get between them and the coastline, cutting off their supply line and route of escape.
Ruling the waves is no help when your army is landlocked.
Other than preventing that invading army from arriving by sea.
#51 Henry Castaigne
I don’t know whether we’ve hit “Peak Zombie” by this point, in Zombie-themed movies and TV, but to my mind the onset and vigor of the phenomenon tracked with 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror.
The fight to survive against and overcome the Zombie onslaught, thematically, has been a sublimated take on fighting Islamofascism; the Hollywood powers that be won’t explicitly own up to this, but they’ve been preying on what are effectively “Islamophobic” anxieties — they can pretend all they want to be socially-“woke” and Muslim-sympathetic using a handful of other projects and vehicles, but they know that the lucrative scripts have a very different subtext and play on audience subconscious fears that none dare verbalize.
Maybe you haven’t been reading the right books? The Sum of All Fears is hardly even a new book, for instance.
“Ruling the waves” means nobody gets to throw an army across an ocean without you having a say in it.
The CSA would have had as much chance of winning such a war as the various Boer republics had. Britain had the world’s most powerful navy and was the world’s greatest industrial power. It had a first-rate army, too. (Remember, the United States placated Britain during the Civil War after the Trent Incident rather than risk invasion from Canada.) The CSA had virtually no industrial base, and much of what it did have was destroyed in the American Civil War. Had there been a negotiated settlement Tennessee, Maryland, and at least northern Missouri would have likely remained with the US. Kentucky and West Virginia certainly. (The Confederacy was unpopular in the upper south, until after the war ended and the Lost Cause movement started in the 1890s.)
Plus (and this is the big thing) Britain would have not fought alone. It would have recruited allies (it always did). If it failed to talk the US into joining (with the idea the US reclaim the Confederate states), Britain would have raised an indigenous army from residents of the CSA, to wit, the slaves. (They raised several regiments of blacks from runaway Colonial slaves during the American Revolution.)
The Confederacy’s only likely ally would be its neighbor to the north – you know, the US. But the price of that would have been reunification and most probably with the abolition of slavery included. (Although it would most likely have been the type of gradual abolition seen in New York state – slaves remained slaves for 25 years and their children were born free.) But the only reason Britain would have gone to war with the Confederacy was over the CSA expanding slavery, so that would effectively end the war. (Britain really would not have wanted to rule the Confederate states – which is why I posited them recruiting the US. Britain granted Canada independence in 1867. New Zealand became a self-governing colony in 1835. Britain was willing to rule lesser breeds without the law – to civilize them – but really did not want to rule English-speaking peoples.)
Prussia was playing power games for control of the European continent and unlikely to want to challenge Britain. It had more to worry about a combination of Austria and France. (Prussia was involved with the Six Weeks War in 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.) Similarly France was tied up trying to put Prussia in its place, and had France gone after Britain Prussia would likely have come to the aid of its traditional ally, Britain. (It would have been too good an opportunity to establish dominance over France.
Seawriter