Response to Cats of the Confederacy

My first impression of the Cats of the Confederacy was that it was selectively told. In describing the scenes he experienced, it seemed to me that Horowitz chose certain details to focus on and that there was possibly some part to the story that he was leaving out. In the scene where he sat in on a Sons of the Confederacy meeting, Horowitz mocks the people in the meeting by explaining how they introduced themselves by rank but “none of the men wore uniforms.” Horowitz also does this in portraying the scene of the Children of the Confederacy event by juxtaposing the Kmart to the “faux-plantation” as a comparison of reality and fantasy.

I also feel like a lot of the things he observed are very true. From reading the chapter, I get an overall sense of pride from the neo-confederates that stems from the thought that the South’s prime was during its rebellion and its uprising. When visiting the color sergeant Mike Hawkins, Horowitz asks if Hawkins thought “there,” meaning the past was better than “here,” meaning the present. Hawkins replies by saying that he felt “like it was bigger somehow … I just feel like the South has been given a bum deal ever since that War.”

I was surprised to read that the president of the Children of the Confederacy, 12-year-old Beth, didn’t agree “with all this ‘South is great’ stuff” and that she was actually more fascinated with the Jews oppression in the Holocaust than in the Confederacy.