First of all, my day...
- Got up, took a shower, ran some extra laundry, fixed lunch (turkey sandwich with the bread nicely toasted).
- Dragged my dad along on a trip to Best Buy, where I bought:
*2 CDs (Dream Theater - Greatest Hit, In Flames - A Sense Of Purpose)
*FINALLY grabbed the last volume of Kurau Phantom Memory
*Fullmetal Alchemist: Season 2, Part 2 set on sale for $19.95
*Blue Harvest. Star Wars spoof, here I come!
-Got home, had some soup, watched TV...
Which is where this post focuses. After awhile I flipped over to IFC to see what was on, and came across one of the strangest things I have ever seen in my life.
Imagine, if you will, that the history we knew were radically changed. Say the Confederacy won the Civil War. Well, that's just what this film was all about. C.S.A.: The Confederate States Of America is an imaginary documentary set in a world different from our own, in which the South won the war between the states, and slavery never ended.
Here are a few of the things that went wrong:
- Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin was able to bring in the British and French to fight on the side of the South. This overwhelming force led to Union defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg, after which Grant surrended to Lee.
- The Confederate army marched on Washington DC and captured it. Lincoln fled, and turned to Harriet Tubman in order to escape the country. She disguised him with blackface, but eventually they were captured. Tubman was executed, while Lincoln was conivicted of war crimes and spent two years in prison before being exiled to Canada.
- Reconstruction was reversed: the South devastated the North, razing cities like Boston and Ney York to the ground.
- Slavery was reinstated in the North to bring both sides of the country back together. A "one drop" policy was put into effect, selling off even light-skinned people of mixed ancestry.
- Because of Manifest Destiny and a renewed sense of 'racial superiority', the Confederacy not only took western America, but also conquered Mexico, Central America, and South America, instituting apartheid systems of descrimination.
- With no separation of church and state, the Confederacy outlawed all non-Christian religions. They accepted Roman Catholicism later after much debate, and in recognition of Judah Benjamin they allowed Judaism, but all Jews were ghettoed.
- During World War II the Confederacy had a non-agression treaty with Germany, although they argued against the Holocaust, teeling Germany that they should enslave Jews rather than exterminate them. Also, there was no Pearl Harbor: the Confederacy struck Japan first, even going as far as bombing Kyoto.
- After the Civil War, most blacks who had managed to escape fled to Canada, which was now the way we would think of the USA: multiculturally diverse and supporting freedom for all people. But during the 50s, the Confederacy once again ramped up its propaganda machine, warning people about Abbies, abolitionists from Canada, as well as 'Red Canadians' (with abolitionists replacing Communists in this alternate timeline).
Another aspect of the film was a series of commercial breaks, fictional ads for products, some of which actually were based on real products that had been sold in America from the 1880s all the way to the 1980s. Some of the ads included:
- "The Shackle", a hightech wrist device to be worn by slaves so if they run, authorities can track them down and return them to their owners.
- A number to call to rat on your neighbors if you suspect them of 'passing' for white.
- A TV home & garden show called Better Homes And Plantations (the next episode includes information on what to look for when buying a Chinese gardener).
I didn't get to see the end of the film (had to go take care of grandma for the night), but all of this I did see just made me thankful we don't live in a world like that. Things in our reality can get bad, and they do a lot of the time, but we're still way better off than if we had to live in a country where people still owned slaves.
If you haven't heard of or seen this film before, go check it out. It will make you shake your head in disbelief and relief at the same time.
