I won this battle. Well, it was really more of a skirmish. I didn't need to use many resources to take care of this one. No matter the scale (it wasn't hard at all, it was a very pleasant experience), the final result is one less book on my to be read pile. I also picked up a bit more of the atmosphere and experience of the Civil War. This series of books does a nice job of getting behind the battle fronts to recount the experience of the people not engaged in combat. The Civil War evolved into a total war. The people involved didn't realize that victory would require the complete dedication of each nation's industrial output, part of this book tracks how early efforts to supply soldiers were strained by the Army's failure to procure the total output of Virginia's limited fabric manufacturing capabilities. The level of cohesion and commitment war demands from the population is so easy to overlook in the flood of detailed accounts of battles and military strategy. It takes the resources of a nation to enable those military maneuvers.The people had to believe in the cause and justice of the war. An indifferent population will not carry a nation to victory.
The essentially total breakdown of mass culture and the sense of a national identity has probably made total war a near impossibility for us now. We are slowly creeping into such highly curated and customized cultural niches that a shared sense of anything is gradually eroding. The sense of our individual importance dwarfs anything the nation may need. Even the fixation on Trump derives more from the perceived threat he presents to the continued evolution of particular cultural trends than any sense that he is altering the fundamental tenets or principles of our shared notion of The United States. The simple desire to bring back the sense of the United States as a unified nation with its central role of spreading democracy and freedom to the rest of the world is a threat to numerous sects and niches groups that fill people with purpose and meaning. Progressive politic's excessive focus on the individual and all the superficial traits that make us different, and how those differences have been used to exploit and oppress, has been a central driver in breaking all of us up into distinct, and rival, mini-cultures. A nation of rival mini-cultures will never coalesce to support total war.
My newest front in the war that is Book Shelf Zero is The Confessions of Nat Turner. I have the 25th anniversary edition of the novel. The book was written over 50 years ago. (Translation, I've had this book for a long time.) I was wise to read the afterword before plunging into the novel itself. The origins and history of the novel with its many years of controversy was good to know before I started the story. I could say that the story definitely feels like a white man putting himself in the place of a black slave, but that could just be the influence of that afterword. Any book written now would be an imagined experience of slavery. Nat's arc and descent into rebellion feels very contrived. The overwhelming power of the writing pushes these concerns very much to the margin though. Styron creates powerful images and scenes. He puts you right into the Tidewater plantation. The book is moving along smoothly enough. I've been splitting my reading time between Nat's story and another book (which I recently finished) so the going is a bit on the slow side. I would like to have this done by the end of the month but I'm not sure that's going to happen.
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