Adventures in the Old South

Today we played hookie from baseball and went to two places: the Civil War Cyclorama, a 360 degree painting and diorama of the Seige of Atlanta, and then out of town to Stone Mountain Park. Stone Mountain is an enormous, bald pate of granite. The side of it has been carved into a 4 story relief of the "heroes" of the Confederacy, Lee, Jackson, and Davis. It is surrounded by an enormous amusement park, like a low-rent Disneyland. The scale of the thing is amazing and impressive, but it made us think and engage in a long discussion on the ethics of the whole endeavor. Richard asked me whether I thought it was tantamount to painting an enormous swastika on the side of the mountain, and I said no, but I didn't do a very good job of explaining how and why it was different. We eavesdropped on some pretty funny and interesting conversations by families of the area, and butted in on one of them in which a little kid wanted to buy a popgun and be just like his heroes in the Civil War! I naturally had to be snarky, and said, "You'll shoot your eye out!" thinking about that movie, Christmas Story. They didn't get the reference. Truly an interesting experience. Of the two, the Cyclorama was far more palatable. We didn't make it to the MLK museum or the History Center yet.