I love Westerns. I always have and probably always will.
While there are a number of genre tropes that are well-worn in Westerns, the one that grates the loudest and is most offensive is that of the former Confederate Army soldier.
The former Confederate is almost always brave and noble - someone who fought an impossible war with unwinnable odds. Returning home to find his plantation/homestead ravaged and his fortune and/or family in shambles, he leaves the South to head West for a new life on the frontier.
Countless Western movies and television shows are devoted to main or guest characters. For the Western genre, screenwriters must have warmed to have a goldmine of plots and intrigue involving the chivalrous, admirable ex-Confederate soldier.
Give me two breaks because one isn't nearly enough!
People from other countries must laugh America to scorn at the thought of traitorous, rebellious scalawags being afforded such honor and prestige.
This predilection includes
The continued obsession with all things Confederate or quasi-Confederate - the antebellum south, plantations, and the like. Much of this is to be blamed on Gone With The Wind, which is still one of the best, if not the best selling work of fiction of all time, selling an estimated 37 million copies worldwide. (It has been said that it is the second best selling printed work in history, ranking only behind the Bible).
The continued proliferation in both North and South of the Confederate Battle Flag.
And without a doubt, the worst, most evil symptom of this obsession is the "Lost Cause" motif - the idea, spread far and wide by Gone With The Wind indirectly, and directly by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, but was actually about preserving "states rights," which attempts to make ignoble motives seem just by making the Confederacy an appeal to freedom (sound familiar?)
The Lost Cause movement has worked tirelessly to make a saint out of Robert E. Lee, even though he was so cruel to his slaves that whippings were topped off by pouring literal salt into the slaves' wounds.
"Stonewall" Jackson is lionized as a pious Christian when he was in fact a raging, bloodthirsty psychopath.
An entire region propped up by unpaid labor fancied itself a genteel, benevolent aristocracy when it was in fact a morally bankrupt, foundationally depraved society of White Supremacists who used their supposed superiority over Black to enslave, terrorize, and massacre.
The Lost Cause may be burnished by Gone With The Wind, propped up by revisionist history, and polished to luster by frustrated regressives who want to erase time and Black civil rights, but it's time for the Cause to be dead and buried, and for the Confederacy to be relegated to the dust bin of history where it belongs.
Let's be rid of it.
And the flag.
And the statues, monuments, and carvings (especially Stone Mountain).
And the racism, prejudice, and White Supremacy that underpinned and enabled it in the past and do so in the present.
Let it all be gone with the wind indeed.