Ain't Just Whistling Dixie

One hundred forty-one years ago today, General Robert E. Lee issued "General Orders No. 9," instructing all Confederate troops to "return to their homes." On the previous day, April 9, 1865, he had surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Civil War.

But what if the roles had been reversed? What if it had been Lee accepting Grant's surrender? Certainly, we'd be living in a very different America today -- or would we?

Those are the questions addressed by "CSA: The Confederate States of America," currently showing in theaters around the country. The film presents an alternative history in which the nation that emerges from the Civil War becomes, by the 21st century, an exclusively Christian imperialist power, run by and for prosperous white men and regarded by most of the world as a bizarre aberration. In other words, "CSA" is a work of fiction that's uncomfortably real.

The premise of "CSA" is that the Confederacy, with help from European powers, wins the American Civil War, annexes the Union states and enforces slavery as the law of the land. The film's writer-director, Kevin Willmott, an assistant professor of theater and film at the University of Kansas, tells the story of the postwar Confederacy through a faux "British Broadcasting System" documentary, complete with vintage still photos and film footage, talking-head historians and banjo music.

Broadcast on a present-day "Confederate Television Channel 6," the program is accompanied by racist commercials that you just might see if you lived in a full-blown consumer society in which, as one politician puts it, "a new generation of young Americans is excited about owning Negroes."

"CSA's" appalling words and images are delivered in what's probably the only packaging most movie audiences would tolerate: layer upon layer of outrageous humor. The few times I've viewed the film, most people in audience did manage to laugh out loud, even as they squirmed.

Gloom and passion

Like "CSA" itself, Willmott somehow combines a gloomy view of history and a passion for justice with affability and infectious humor. Last week, in Salina, Kan., I spoke with him about "CSA" and the mirror it seems to be holding up to the USA.

Willmott says he wants to help put to rest what he calls the Big Lie: that the Civil War was simply a war over regional differences, between an old agricultural economy and a new industrializing one. Not so, he says -- the war was fought "because Confederates wanted the right to own African people."

By plunging into that long-standing historical dispute, Willmott knows he's asking for trouble. "People say, 'Well, you know, not very many Southerners even owned slaves. Why would a whole nation fight a war for the benefit of just the wealthy few who did?' But that just makes the Civil War the same as all wars, doesn't it? Most people don't know why we're in Iraq, and it's doing them no good, but there we are."

America and the world have endured some nasty jolts since Willmott first wrote the screenplay for "CSA": Republican efforts to suppress the black vote in 2000 and 2004; a foreign policy that in the eyes of many has become a racist crusade, complete with torture; rising anti-gay and anti-immigrant fervor; the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina. That more recent history, says Willmott, has helped bolster one of the film's main themes: that the old Confederacy is far from dead.

Hard-line immigration policies, he says, are an example of modern slavery: "The economic need for immigrants is clear-cut. Corporations need cheap, cheap, cheap workers in big numbers. On the other hand, the country's saying, "We'll arrest you simply for working for us for nothing, arrest you for being poor."

In "CSA," there are no demands to build a wall along the border with Mexico -- it's a CSA colony. Instead, a wall is built along the entire Canadian border, to keep slaves from escaping to the other side of the "Cotton Curtain." But, says Willmott, in a real United States so heavily dependent on immigrant labor, just as in his fictional modern-day slave state, we live with an "invented reality": "Like magic, your hotel room gets cleaned up every day. You know that whoever did that for you, someone you never saw, may be technically illegal. And we come down hard on those people."