Over the holidays I began a post that I will now finish. I had just read James McPherson's book Battle Cry of Freedom on the American Civil War (Thus the Christmas Eve post on the 1913 Gettysburg reunion. (That and The Nutcracker coming on the radio for the 50,000th time.)). I had read that book a few years ago. What I noticed upon re-read is the number of times the word "excitement" came up, that is, how excited the people of America were at the beginning of the war. IknowIknowIknow, homos always have gotten excited about war, it's one of our most becoming features. No, what struck me, on Christmas Eve, was the parallel emotion in the people of China during the Cultural Revolution that I--on Christmas Eve—was viewing again on my office computer in Morning Sun (Also because of the swine Nutcracker. (Thus the Christmas Eve post that I was listening to The East is Red.))  “A lifetime of experiences and emotions was crowded into those four years,” McPherson quoted a number of Americans as saying. The Morning Sun interviewees, “veterans” of the Cultural Revolution, described their experiences similarly, at least to me. Horrible experiences in both cases, both described with excitement, with “nostalgia” (providing the transition from last post to this).

What does that mean? (I shouldn’t have been in the office on Christmas Eve.)  What does it mean that Americans in 1861 and Chinese in 1964 felt the same frisson at the prospect of the Apocalypse?  Common human psychology: the people of Russia were excited at the beginning of Napoleon’s invasion; the people of Germany at the onset of World War I; Americans at the beginning of World War II. The prospect of war does excite human beings. We do get nostalgic for the “good old days” even if they were the bad old days. There are these psychological “war” polarities that humans have: war to create peace; chaos to create order; disunion to bring about union. I think those were present in both circumstances.  Insouciance: Americans thought the Civil War would be over in a few months; Chinese didn’t think the Cultural Revolution would become “the most severe setback” in the history of the People’s Republic. “Common cause:” homos do like to be, or feel ourselves to be, part of something larger than ourselves, to band together against a common enemy, even if that enemy was yesterday’s fellow countrymen. That is what makes civil war psychologically distinct from war. Brother against brother in the American Civil War; child against father in the Cultural Revolution. That is harder to grasp than us versus them.

So there are commonalities between the American Civil War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. There is also this un-commonality: The Cultural Revolution was not a civil war. Yet the Chinese people reacted, psychologically, as if it were. That is harder to grasp than civil war.