Ignoramus movie reviewer calls for banning of ‘Gone With The Wind’

Two things never cease to amaze us. How the public can lose all perspective and fall in line with the ‘zeitgeist’ of the moment. And how ignorant can be some movie critics.

According to a report on AOL, On Wednesday, Lou Lumenick, an entertainment critic for the New York Post, called for the 1939 classic ‘Gone With The Wind’ to share the same fate as the Confederate flag. Lumenick argues the film romanticizes the confederacy and goes to great lengths to hide slavery’s role in the Civil War.

Apparently Lumenick does not understand the distinction from banning the Confederate flag from government buildings to banning the flag in itself. It would be bad taste and a sign of appalling ignorance (and perhaps dangerous), but people can fly it in front of their house if they wish.

We know of no streaming of ‘Gone With the Wind’ in a state capital. It is just a work of art with at least one of the greatest scenes in movie history (the burning of Atlanta.) Moreover, its Southern bias against Yankee ‘carpetbaggers’ displays a common outlook that was espoused by Southern historians for a century following the Civil War. (Oh how they blackened the reputation of Ulysses S. Grant!)

The outlook exhibited in the movie largely prevailed from the compromise that allowed Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to assume the presidency in 1877 in exchange for the withdrawal of union troops from the south until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The impetuousness and foolishness of the Southerners are well exhibited at the outset of the movie.

Rather than banning ‘Gone With The Wind’, we would incorporate into US history studies in college courses along with appropriate commentary.

As we have concluded during our college years and is better understood today, the North won the battle but, for a century thereafter, the South had won the Civil War through their control of their states and Congress. Slavery wasn’t ended; it was simply modified as African Americans were deprived of almost all of their rights.

Let’s not ban history. Let’s learn from it.