Spinning Dixie (27 page)

The voice in Bethesda requested, “Coordinates.”

“Arnold is receiving.”

“Confirm please.”

“We have latitude at three five point five six two one seven.”

“Confirm next.”

“Longitude minus zero eight seven point one five five nine. Awaiting optics.”

NASA in Houston shares a satellite with the Pentagon, which is nice. This particular satellite is used to track the flight of the space shuttle as it returns to Earth. It can also take pictures. With a barely perceptible maneuver, the satellite adjusted its lens on the burial grounds of my teenage heart.

“Optics received,” the voice calling itself Arnold confirmed.

The last word uttered at Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma, Tennessee, was “Engage.”

 

Claudine was in the house. J.T. and I were standing beside his Mercedes. Six was still gambling with a few Confederates at a picnic table.

The high-pitched whine fell short of being piercing. I felt a tickling sensation in my toes. I sensed J.T. felt something, too, because he looked down at his shoes. The trees rustled. Pebbles on the driveway danced like popcorn, betraying a greater force somewhere close by. We both craned our heads skyward—as did battalions of gray-capped heads. The whine climbed inside itself, a cirrus cloud slipping into a cumulus, as God slowly exhaled: Hhhaaaaaaaaaa…

There were stars, but they were red. No, they were not stars. Too close. Too bright. Too fast. And way too low.

The signal lights of five F-15 Eagle fighter jets flying in formation winked down at us, letting us know they were in on the cosmic joke. Six rose from a picnic table and pronounced the word “Holy!” Whatever followed was rendered inaudible by the deafening thunder from above. J.T. fell to the ground, as did many of the reenactors. I remained standing despite the rattling of my brains like dice inside my skull.

“How's the mileage on this baby?” I asked J.T., tapping his Mercedes.

When the Eagles crossed the plantation's property line, the two to our left banked to the west; the two to the right banked to the east; and the one in the center kept its needle nose pointing toward the Union. Dust flew. The red lights melted from our vision within thirty seconds.

“Senator Hunter's gonna hear about this, friend!”

“No doubt.”

A major Tennessee newspaper ran with the following headline and lead paragraphs the following morning:

 

U.S. WARPLANES STRAFE PLANTATION

Furor Over Confederate Gold,

Property Rights Escalates

By Stuart Eliot

Six blast e-mailed this story from his laptop to several hundred of his Confederate reenactors and Masonic brethren, one of whom was a National Press Newswire reporter in Atlanta. The story went out on the wire before the business day officially began in the central and western United States. A half-dozen cable news channels had news crews on the ground in Nashville by 11:00
A.M
. By noon, our cyber-spooks had counted eighteen million “click-thrus”—people who were actively monitoring the strafing incident online. By dinnertime more than three thousand Confederates were milling about old Will Polk's grounds and being segmented into color-coded divisions by his heirs.

I learned a valuable lesson last night: Twenty-first-century Confederates don't like to get buzzed by supersonic aircraft. As the Confederate crowd swelled to five thousand, the Tennessee National Guard increased its presence by two hundred.

Six and I watched the gathering from the second-floor living room, where multiple television receivers had been installed and linked to rooftop satellites. EBS News's latest installment of “Rebel Voices” featured a fine-boned woman holding up a photo:
“Do you see this picture? It's a Pizza Hut. You see them all the time, right? Wrong, because this one's in Franklin, Tennessee, not far from here on the grounds of a Civil War battlefield that left six Confederate generals dead. Now it's a Pizza Hut. Well, sister, do you want pepperoni or mushrooms with your Civil War? I hear the Polks don't even really own this land anymore. I hear it was sold to a Boston real estate company for development. That's right, check it out. I like pizza as much as the next guy, but I came to Rattle & Snap because I don't think history should come with a wide selection of toppings.”

“Are you ready?” I asked Six.

“I can't believe it's gone this far,” he said.

“Can't call it off now.”

“No. They know what to do.”

Six activated his walkie-talkie. “All colors: Fort Sumter,” was all he said.

From every corner of the plantation, the designated field captains received the call. The troops had been separated into divisions of roughly one hundred each. Four news helicopters were in perpetual circulation, trying to avoid crashing into each other. The Maury County Airport halted all flights in and out of Mount Pleasant because radar indicated that some of the choppers were crossing into the flight path. The ground-based camera crews began filming the concurrent assemblies from their positions on pickup and flatbed trucks.

The moment the Confederates picked up their rifles, reporters attempted to determine the cause of their actions from the field captains, who conceded nothing.

B-R-E-A-K-I-N-G N-E-W-S: Twelve letters designed to send a rush of bile through whatever bodily systems process bile. The combination of these words immediately after the rude interruption of scheduled programming signaled a promise that your life was about to change, and that you would always remember where you were when you heard the news. Presidential assassinations, wars, jilted prom dates on sniper rampages.

Global News Network shifted its programming status to Breaking News. The talent began, “We have a development here at the Rattle & Snap plantation in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee. As GNN was the first to report this morning, the Tennessee National Guard has increased its deployment significantly. This appears to have provoked the thousands of reenactors who have descended upon the plantation in the last several days in protest of the government's potential seizure of gold reserves that Confederate troops are said to have buried here toward the end of the Civil War.”

EBS's Liz Marsh: “We are now seeing what appears to be a systematic advancement by Confederate Civil War reenactors on the National Guard who were dispatched for the purpose of keeping the peace here at the Rattle & Snap plantation, which has become the epicenter of a firestorm of debate about the two Americas. I remember as a little girl watching the television footage of the massacre of students at Kent State University in Ohio by National Guardsmen…”

Grainy footage of the Kent State shootings now enveloped screens across the nation. The black-and-white photo of the young woman with long, dark hair, wailing as she kneeled over the body of a friend, slid across screens like curtains being closed for the evening. The young woman's festive white scarf eerily underscored the unexpected nature of the horrors unfolding. Even more disturbing perhaps were the other students milling about in the photo as if the carnage were as routine as a lit class.

I flipped to another cable network, which was feeding aerial footage from one of the helicopters.

“I recognize the ludicrous nature of my observation,” a Fox News reporter said, “but it appears as if Confederate troops are advancing on the National Guard….”

“Approximately fifty armed battalions of Southern Civil War reenactors are advancing on U.S. troops,” another reporter observed (in-correctly).

Universe News Channel displayed a computer graphic of Rattle & Snap, along with icons signifying plantation landmarks and dotted symbols depicting troop locations. A stack of frantic red arrows featured “troop movements” from the south, west, and east grounds of the property, sweeping north to where the National Guardsmen were aligned in formation.

“There is an ominous chaos in the air…,” another broadcaster began as a view from the clouds took in the migrating throng.

 

But, on the ground, there wasn't chaos. There was only gradual movement being reported as chaos. To be fair, the Confederates were bracing rifles against their shoulders, which lent a taste of menace; however, the antiquated weaponry—not to mention that they were being carried by men and women wearing comically ancient costumes—defused any promise of kingdom come.

No, the networks wanted a war, needed a war. At the moment, there were no other optical dramas playing out in the national theater. The cultural street fight over the president's Supreme Court nominee was weeks away. The press had exhausted funeral profiles of the poor souls who were killed in the recent terrorist attack in Philadelphia. The war against terrorism had become chronic—just another mind-numbing news filing from overseas—a grenade tossed into a cave in a hard-to-pronounce regime. Trashbagistan, Crapslapistan. No celebrities were on trial for driving naked and drunk through a kindergarten class. No expectant fathers raging against adulthood had opted to dispatch with their pregnant wives rather than grow the hell up. No fifth-grade girls had been snatched from jungle gyms by tattooed ex-cons. And no royal family members had been chased into tunnels by killer paparazzi.

In the age of news-as-profit-center, media conglomerates could not move equipment and personnel across the nation only to return with a goose egg: Nuthin' doin' here. Something had better been doin', or anybody who failed to produce would face budgetary and assignment repercussions.

Thus the rhetoric and imagery of war and protest. Computer maps with swooshing arrows and targets denoting rebel regiments with names like Purple and Double Red. Satellite views of the planet with frantic zooms and graphic call-outs to “Ground Zero.” References to battalions, divisions, and personnel movements. Experts explaining the difference between tear gas and pepper spray, lethal and nonlethal ammunition. Personnel ratios. Grave Voices of God scattering comparisons to domestic and international flashpoints prefixed with “another”: Another Kent State. Another Tiananmen Square. Another Chicago. Another Watts. Another Rodney King.

Occasionally the Grave Voices of God would shift from the prefix “another” to the suffix “all over again” (AoA). Antietam AoA. Gettysburg AoA. Sherman AoA. Richmond AoA.

Within fifteen minutes of Six's initial call to arms, the Confederates were only a few hundred yards from the front gates of the plantation. On one hand, their sheer number was menacing; however, they weren't marching toward the gates, they were simply walking. It was the helicopter views that lent the sense of doom—thousands of ragamuffin Grays quite literally facing one solid line of black-clad National Guardsmen with their medieval shields and weaponry readied for battle.

Choice Media commentary (Pulitzer Prize–inspiring sound bite for replay noted in
bold
):

HUSHED
:
“Confederate troops are advancing on the National Guard
. I repeat: Confederate troops are advancing on the National Guard.”

URGENT
: “Government-dispatched troops are taking their positions creating a
wall of firepower
directly across from the Civil War soldiers.”

CONSPIRATORIAL
: (graphic accompaniment): “This is what I would refer to as a
classic flanking maneuver,
” said the retired general who consulted for the network. “The Confederate troops will attempt to draw fire from the National Guard over here, while reinforcements move in over here.”

TRAGIC
: “No one foresaw that it would come to this, and tragically,
no one can stop it now.
Given the sheer tactical might of government forces, this has the potential to be worse than Kent State.”

REVOLUTIONARY
: “There is a sense of outrage over the government's
mishandling
of the events of the past seventy-two hours.
A furious sense of overkill.
”

The Guardsmen were ordered to stand in the ready position. Shoulder-launched tear gas canisters were at the ready. Two Chinook gunships, their two rotors slicing the cool, moist air in cycles of Vietnam-era peril, banked from the southern end of the plantation.

After evaluating the coverage and the visible tensions outside the window, I gave Six an anemic salute. Six then gave the order to engage. Air horns echoed through the hills, and within seconds, thousands of antiquated firearms…dropped to the ground. In one protracted wave, five thousand Civil War reenactors of various genders, ages, religions, and colors…sat down. While the sight appeared haphazard from the mansion's window, from the aerial views, it looked like performance art—souls blowing over gently like grain before a storm.

Some of the Confederates from the Red group withdrew to play cards. One Asian reenactor from Double Orange played with a yo-yo. A middle-aged woman from Black began to play a harmonica. Groups within Green began to sing songs ranging from hymnals to Lynryd Skynryd. A few from Double Burgundy practiced tai chi. A portly black man from Aqua read a book. The only consistent sounds were those of helicopter rotors and laughter conveying a hearty toast to a fraternity pledge well hazed.

The National Guardsmen's faces were not visible behind their masks, but their stillness betrayed their likely mental state: They were stunned. Because they looked like jackasses on worldwide television—grown men clinging to elementary school Delta Force fantasies. Pathetic. Secret agent wannabes who had never been in a real firefight, so they declared war on a ragtag band of Civil War reenactors, hoping they'd be cross-burning, epithet-spitting racists. No, even better, the Feds had ordered these chuckleheads to duke it out with a handful of amicable history buffs who were just ticked off about an overzealous government.

The National Guard withdrew from their battle positions but remained outside the plantation's fence. The two Chinook gunships did one tortured swoop over the highway, and then eased away. The news helicopters remained, but the on-air correspondents vacillated between artificially sweetened melodrama and inarticulateness to summarize what they believed they had just seen.

“They, uh, heh. They…sat down. They just sat down.”

“In a spectacular act of peaceful defiance worthy of Gandhi or Martin Luther King, thousands of Civil War reenactors laid down their arms in the face of overwhelming danger from Federal troops.”

“Well, folks, what we seem to have here is an American Civil War that ends in…a sit-in.”

As the cameras thirsted for a spark of conflict, the hills were at peace, as Elijah's ghost made his benediction of the pseudoevent.
My, my, my.