“ Before he died, the great Southern historian ,  Shelby Foote, in the mid 1990s,    gave an interview with PBS about the Civil War. The interview was replete with Proustian moments; Foote was Proust with a bourbon mellowed Southern drawl.   He took note that after the Civil War ended in Union victory; the white Southerner was bitter. But eventually, a compromise, a GREAT COMPROMISE,    was worked out with the victorious North; the South would accept that it was best for all that the Union won; however, the North had to acknowledge that the South had fought valiantly; which is why so many military bases were named after defeated Southern generals.   He gave insight into his bewilderment as to why Black Americans were bitter about slavery; he noted that Hebrews acknowledged their slavery and had risen above it. He never addressed that perhaps Hebrews were still bitter about their bondage, in the time frame of less than two hundred years from the ...

   Mississippian William Faulkner once famously said that the past is never really dead; it is not  even past. Two men hover over America's past, making it not even past, Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee.  Without Lincoln, there would not have been an American Civil War; without Lee, Lincoln would have won the war in less than a year; without Lincoln, Lee would have won the war in two years. The 700,000 Civil War American dead are a direct result of the deadly Lincoln-Lee historical placement in the same time and place. General Lee is not dead; he is not even past. We know that from the frenzied fetish the current protesters have shown in trashing, vandalizing and tearing down his statues. The protesters validate their vendetta against stone replicas of Lee because they call him a traitor. He was; he thought so himself. When he arrived at Appomattox to surrender to the Union General Grant, he wore his best uniform because he thought he would be arrest...

   On April 9, 1865, General  Ulysses S Grant closed out the Confederacy. General Ulysses Grant is the best writer among the Civil War Generals;   his book, PERSONAL MEMOIRS OF ULYSSES S. GRANT is a masterpiece. He won a brutal campaign of attrition to end the American Civil War with a Union victory. The first battle of the campaign of attrition was the Battle of the Wilderness, in  the dense thickets known as the Wilderness of Spotsylvania .  Grant hurled the Union Army of the Potomac into tangled woods, against Lee's Confederate Army of Northern Virginia,  to bloody results. The Army of the Potomac lost 17% of its troop strength in one battle. So many Union soldiers were casualties that, for the first time in American history, rumors had it that the Federal Government fudged the casualty lists downward, to assuage the public dismay. Grant was a drunk; he qualified his drunkenness by stating that he never drank when his wife was near or when...

  An English actor said it best: at his best, Shakespeare was the best ever, and is the best ever, and n o one has ever been at their best more than Shakespeare. Who has been better? Euripides? Sophocles?  Aeschylus ?  Racine? Moliere? Marlowe? Wilde? Shaw? Schiller? Inge? Williams? Sartre? Albee? Genet?  Saroyan? Brecht? Beckett? Miller? Ionesco? Osborne? Anouilh? Pinter? Chekhov? Too small a canvas. Ibsen? A joke, his only claim to fame is that he invented modern Liberalism, PREDICTABLE modern Liberalism. Shakespeare, did not create an arrogant, self  righteous  and boring  political philosophy but recorded Humanity, in war, peace, bravery, treachery, despair, anger, jealousy, rage, buffoonery and madness. Who is eternally greater?  HEDDA GABLER or LADY MACBETH? JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN or HENRY V? AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE or JULIUS CAESAR? GHOSTS or KING LEAR? THE WILD DUCK or ROMEO AND JULIET? Ibsen is a bad cable TV writer, paid by the wo...