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The struggle over the Civil War, which celebrates -- perhaps that's the wrong word -- its birthday today, continues. It's been a 150 years since Fort Sumter was shelled, and Time magazine features a sobbing Abraham Lincoln on the cover with the cover line: "Why We're Still Fighting the Civil War: The endless battle over the war's true cause would make Lincoln weep." Meanwhile, The New York Times features op-eds by documentarian Ken Burns and writer Edward Ball on what The Civil War Means to Us. Burns offers the paradoxical thought that the further we get from the war, the more "central and defining it is." Burns doesn't go much further than that stirring sentiment except to use it as a jumping off point to tell how he and his brother made the PBS "Civil War" documentary. Burns' air of hushed and airless reverence clashes with Ball's central idea (another paradox) that despite our obsession with the Civil War -- books, films, reenactments -- "we cannot come to terms with the Civil War because it presents us with an unacceptable kind of self-knowledge."
Ball may well be right. But why are we surprised? Is it really a shock that Americans layer on different meanings and adopt different, even radically divergent interpretations on such a large, violent and deeply rooted event in American history? In fact, it's a surprise only in a nation that truly believes the kind of therapeutic nostrums that follow every rupture, every shock, every controversy: The nation, goes that truism, must (it's always must, like you must take the cod liver oil) achieve resolution, catharsis, closure, an acceptable self-knowledge; otherwise the "event" occurred for no good reason. But in fact, both historically and emotionally, closure and resolution prove, again and again and no matter how many Ken Burns documentaries we sit through, elusive. Have we achieved closure on the events of Sept. 11? The Vietnam War? The Red Scare of the '30s? The Great Depression? Hell, the Salem witch trials? Indeed, our little brush with depression reopened the wounds and the arguments of the Great Depression. We never achieved closure, we gained distance and, historically speaking, a broad and conventional view of what happened and why, even as historians themselves continue the debate. And suddenly, in 2008 and 2009, the lessons of the New Deal and the slump were once again open for disagreement, sparked in part by House Republic's discovering Amity Shlaes' 2007 book, "The Forgotten Man." 
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