It seems Bill Maher aimed a few nasty barbs last night at one of the nation’s must unique subcultures: Civil War reenactors.
No doubt about it – and pardon the pun – but reenactors do march to a different drummer.
I’m reminded of a piece Tony Horowitz wrote for the Wall Street Journal some 13 years ago about a a passionate Civil War reenactor, Robert Lee Hodge, who specialized in depicting battlefield corpses. He assiduously researched the subject, especially photos of body-strewn battlefields, becoming particularly obsessed with capturing the blank stare of corpses and their rigored hands.
Apparently, he is only one among many such specialists. Crowd-sourced instructions are available on the Internet about how to specialize in battlefield corpse depictions.
Indeed, in some cases, describing reenactment as a pastime would amount to a rank understatement of fact: Some reenactors readily admit that it has drawn them into an all-consuming psychological fixation comparable to a drug addition.
As Horowitz relates, the addiction even led one so-called “hardcore,” Joel Bohy, to abandon his girlfriend of several years when he moved from Massachusetts to Maryland to join Hodge’s regiment – a move that also forced the then 27-year-old construction worker to settle for considerably lower-paying job.
To be sure, some of these people are benign, decent, albeit rather overzealous souls with a passion similar to those stereotypically endearing but daffy elderly women who run local museums from one end of this continent to the other. On other hand, I’ve encountered several who exhibit an almost overweening arrogance, often bordering on belligerence. It’s as if they’ve stumbled onto to some sort of hidden knowledge that the rest of us are too unenlighted or undisciplined to acquire.
Watch this piece and decide for yourself.
