[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Eating three different varieties of Hot Pocket. ]
What would possibly inspire anyone to make this?

Syphilis, cornbread, and the cotton gin!

So apparently, I haven’t updated my game queue in a while. My fault, I know. I probably shouldn’t even have this game on my list, but I have a morbid curiosity about gangrene, and how a first person shooter will play when you need upwards of a full minute just to reload.

The Civil War was my childhood play ground. My mother used to dress up as a Union nurse and drag us around ninety degree Virginia summer heat to watch all the local reenactments. We used to visit a stop on the underground railroad that was turned into a neat little tavern out in Gettysburg all the time.

Speaking of Gettysburg, there was one particularly brutal part of that battle in a bit of terrain called Devil’s Den. It was a series of tightly grouped together, slippery, natural rock formations. The confederates would retreat carefully along the top of the rocks and hide, while the union soldiers dashed along quickly to follow them, they would slip, and get themselves trapped in the barely man sized cracks. Some of them were finished off with a bullet from above, some of them were left to die, trapped between the rocks. A hundred and thirty years later, me and my little brother would hop from rock to rock playing tag. Fun times – we gathered many a rock and claimed they were spent bullets from the battle.

Home base was in Maryland, in another two century old house. During the war, my state was sort of a neutral, middle state, and sat back and watched as the rest of the country went at with each other. With that kind of history, the public school system has a bit of a different slant on what went down than those in other places. In the north, kids seem to learn that Southern states refused to give up their slaves, and then attacked Fort Sumter unprovoked in order to secede from the union, illegally, in order to pursue a more secular, greed driven, immoral life style. In the south, the "war of northern aggression" was a land grab by Lincoln that limited states’ rights and expanded the role of the federal government to the detriment of all our lives. Which version did I get? Neither.

We were taught, basically, that both sides were dicks. The north went to war for tax purposes, the south went to war for fear of economic oppression.

Slavery was used by the north as propaganda to keep Europe off of the Confederacy’s side, and was used as propaganda by the south as a chief example of why secession was as justified then as the revolutionary war was four score and six years before. Lincoln even agreed to allow the state of Maryland, and several other middle states, to keep their slaves, during and after the war.

Sorry, Geordi, nobody really cares.

When it was over and the south had lost, it was left in economic ruin for, arguably, sixty to a hundred years – which is exactly what Jefferson Davis and friends had feared would happen. In the north’s defense, slavery had to end some time, and it was the south’s own fault for becoming so heavily dependent on it. Nothing short of a war would have ended it, but there would have been nicer ways of doing things – like softening tax, tariff and trade policies on states transitioning to free lands.

Whelp, Monday morning quarter backing the events of 1863 was fun, as always. I can’t wait to start popping off head shots at Bull Run. You watch your forehead, Stonewall Jackson.

The south shall fall again!