Woah

Just noticed this today, a review of a civil war exhibit, from the Washington Post no less.  Will wonders never cease?  Money quote:

The show proceeds thematically rather than chronologically. It raises large questions -- What led to the secession of the South? Were there efforts to avoid war? -- and then offers documents that should help visitors form answers. Early in the exhibition, viewers confront what might be called the Southern-apologist listening station, where you can both read, and listen to, a document laying out South Carolina's reasons for secession. After some boilerplate language about the Constitution comes reason No. 1: The right to property, which for South Carolina included the right to human chattel, had been infringed. 

There it is, in black and white, and coming at you through a very 1980s hand-held listening device: Slavery is the cause -- the essential, primary, undeniable first and sufficient cause for the war. While much of the exhibition aims at nuance and complexity, this should be sufficient to unmask the old masquerade about what the South was fighting for. Efforts to make it seem problematic and complex are all too often part of a nostalgia game, nostalgia for a time when every white Southern man had a God-given right to be a racist, if he so chose.

Ah-yup.  Nice to see some reporting without the usual dog-whistle phrases.