progressive citizens of his town proposednto build a hotel, arguing that itnwould give commercial travelers a placento stay and be good for business. Thencolonel listened with ill-concealed displeasure,nthen announced that any gentlemannwho came to town could staynwith him and anyone who wasn’t angentleman shouldn’t be encouraged tonstay the night. The hotel wasn’t built.nI admire that attitude, even if I don’tnentirely share it. If that had been all thenConfederates were fighting for, theynmight have deserved to win. But oldnNathan Bedford Forrest, that untutorednhorse-soldier from the unpolishednSouthwest, let the cat out of the bag.nAfter a session of high-flown LostnCause rhetoric at a veterans’ reunion,nhe grumbled that if he hadn’t thoughtnhe was fighting to keep his slaves henwouldn’t have fought. As the titlecharacternin Walker Percy’s Lancelotnobserves, “the Second Revolution inn1861 against the money-grubbingnNorth failed—as it should have becausenwe got stuck with the Negronmiddle and even lower classes, socialnelites discovered dubious newnuses of the printed word, for bothnpopular entertainment and politicalncontrol. In his Journal of the PlaguenYear, Daniel Defoe pioneered anninvestigation into what Illich andnSanders call “the bureaucratizationnof the word, authenticated throughnthe reality of type.” Defoe couldnalready see in the 18th century hownpublishing was buttressing the socialnpower of doctors and governmentnofl&cials, while discrediting unauthorizednword-of-mouth versions ofnthe events, even when the oral accountsnwere closer to the truth. Butnit was not until this century thatnGeorge Orwell outlined in 1984nthe grim political possibilities in anmodern culture in which nothingnnot currently in writing may benspoken or even thought. The readernneed not buy into the phony argumentnof the “moral equivalence” ofnthe United States and the SovietnUnion to lament the power of ournown mandarins of print to promulgatena kind of newspeak that short-nthing and it was our fault.” Lance doesngo on to call for a third Revolution, butnrecall that he’s in a hospital for thencriminally insane.nAnyway, Toombs’s attitude wasnprobably a minority view even amongnrebels. Many, like Forrest, seemed tonhave nothing against money-making,nat least for themselves. Certainly bynwar’s end and for decades afterwardsnthere were plenty who felt likenFaulkner’s Jason Compson: “I haven’tngot much pride. I can’t afiFord it.”nA sad story: when President Davisnand the Confederate government flednfallen Richmond, south to Danville,nthen south again into North Carolina,nwhat was left of the Confederate Armynwas prevented from destroying thenbridge across the Dan River—by thenDanville police. The mayor and othernDanville notables subsequently surrenderednthe town intact to the pursuingnfederal troops. In cash-nexus terms, thenDanville boys were right, of course.nThe war was over. Life would go on.nWhy tear down a bridge if you’re justncircuits I thought and destroys thenpast. After all, Orwell was speakingnof the free West, not the totalitariannEast, when he complained aboutnauthors intent on producing “a racenof enlightened sunbathers, whosensole topic of conversation is theirnown superiority to their ancestors.”nHowever, Illich and Sanders failnto point out that Orwell himself, asnan unbeliever, could not communicatenin his own works the ancientnwisdom which recognizes that, howeverncorrupted by fallen man, languagenis a divine gift, in speech andnin writing. But then Orwell wasnhardly alone in this deficiency.nEven the modern dictionary isnbased on the secular assumptionnthat current usage establishes meaning.nIn Plato’s Cratylus, Socratesnexposes the fallacy of modernndictionary-making. In Plato’s dialogue,nSocrates insists on “the truthnof first names” accessible only inn”the ancient form” of a word, whichn”shows the intention of the giver ofnthe name,” so revealing “the mindnof gods, or of men, or of both.”nnngoing to have to rebuild it? Maybenthat’s not the noblest attitude going,nbut we can understand it, can’t we?nIt’s harder, though, to understandnsome latter-day Southerners who cannafford pride but seem to have forgottennwhat it is. Consider, for instance, thenGreater Columbia Convention andnVisitors Bureau. They want you tonbring your meeting to some ofnColumbia’s 4,000-plus hotel rooms,nand they don’t care whether you’re angentleman or not: you’re welcome tonstay the night, and they’re spending thentaxpayers’ money to tell you so. Anfull-page advertisement in the Junen1987 issue of Association Managementnmagazine shows a photograph ofnthe ruins of Columbia, with the captionn”After Sherman’s March we firednour booking agent!”nNow, this strikes me as roughlynanalogous to a tourist ad for Japan withna mushroom cloud and the captionn”After Hiroshima we cleaned up ournact!” But in this, as in much else, thenColumbias of the South are just fol-nYet Plato realized that “the veryntruth” of things was “not to benderived from names,” spoken ornwritten. Whether in the crucible ofnsuff^ering or the transport of spiritualnvision, priceless truths distill in thensoul wordlessly. Concluding theirngraceful little book with a rare gesturenof reverence, Illich and Sandersnpay homage to “the power of thensilence that precedes utterance.”nThey even complain that “most ofnus have, at best, only an inkling ofnthe silence before words; and manynof us have gone the opposite way,nconverting silence into somethingnmechanical, into the no that separatesnbeep from beep.” It may seemnoddly self-deprecating that — likenWordsworth’s “The Tables Turned”n—ABC invites the reader to closenits pages to spend reflective timenaway from books. But amid thenmodern cacophony of speech andnprint, it is vital to recover that silencenof soul in which human voicesnare stilled that the divine voice maynagain be heard. (BC)nOCTOBER 1988/41n