I’m not really looking forward to the next couple months. Listening to the news last night, it seems obvious that the next Supreme nominee is going to become a lightning rod for the entire culture war. If Bush nominates the kind of person I wish he would nominate — someone who is actually on the record as being pro-life, pro-family and pro-values — you’ll be able to hear the shriek from Bangor to Berkeley. The media will go boldface. Talking heads will predict the end of all things decent. And the Democrats in Congress — since the country hasn’t seen fit to give them a majority — will probably recant on their promise not to filibuster. And so the siege will be on.

The siege. Kind of reminds me of the Civil War battlefield I visited on Wednesday. (And so begins another of my rambles.)

I like visiting Civil War battlefields. I’m not a big Civil War buff or a military history buff, but I find that a lot of the ones that are left are quiet places. Around them, life has gone on and looks the way it does everywhere. But if a battlefield hasn’t been plowed under or paved over, and if it’s not one of the big ones like Gettysburg that attracts many tourists, chances are it’ll be like turning a page back in history. And chances are you’ll have it more or less to yourself. That’s especially true for me in my battlefield excursions because my sense of timing is just as errant getting to these destinations as it always is, and I tend to show up towards the end of their operating hours. So the afternoon light had started to change when I used the opportunity of a long drive home after a meeting to follow the brown Park Department signs to the Lexington Battle Site.

The town of Lexington is really just cute, but I could say the same for a number of population-challenged Missouri towns. The sidewalks aren’t all that straight, and it’s all parallel parking on Main Street. Somewhere there’s bound to be a dog waiting patiently outside a small grocery store. And somewhere there’s a sign that looks like a joke announcing that the next couple hundred feet of old brick buildings that look like they could say “Horses shod while you wait” comprise “the business district.” But when I pulled onto the road leading to the battleground, even the town looked urban. There’s just something about the way streets used to twist and pitch around that lets you know they came from a different era. They’re narrow and hilly, and this one led to a circular drive that looked out on a totally placid field ringed by trees.

I had watched the aged video in the park office, and so I knew what I was looking at: the former site of a Masonic college that became for a short time the nexus for all ambitions for several thousand Union soldiers and the site of a great early victory for a larger Confederate force. I’ll leave it to this link to hand out the detailed account, but here’s the short story: An inexperienced Confederate commander Major General Price left the area to the Union with 7,000 or so men and, after winning a decisive victory at Wilson’s Creek, coalescing his forces with numerous rebel bands and generally getting his groove back, he returned in spring of 1861 with 15-18,000 men to reclaim the important outpost to the Missouri River from 3,000 or so entrenched Federal troops. In the interim, the Federals had taken out a “forced loan” of all the assets of a local bank and cut down a large forest to prevent sniper attack — neither of which activity endeared them to the local populace. They had also had time to make the college their base of operations and dig extensive trench earthworks to defend it. (The earthworks are one of the only visible remains of the battleground. The college burned down in the ’30s.)

When Price arrived, he could see there wasn’t much point in wasting ammunition and costing lives. He set up troops on all sides of the area and laid siege, exchanging cannon and rifle fire on the first and second day and accepting surrender on the third. Given the disparate numbers, no other outcome is conceivable. But I imagine it was a sweet vindication of both Rebel tactics and Southern gentility all the same. The Confederates had shown great ingenuity in using the enormous bales of hemp from farmers’ warehouses as “moving earthworks” behind which they could fire and approach.

And Price employed a wonderful, if weird, graciousness after the battle. (And this part isn’t in the link I gave, so you’ll just have to trust me that it was on the crackling video.) He didn’t misuse the defeated soldiers or even take them prisoner. He let them go as long as … well, as long as they promised not to do it again. He made them sign an oath that they would never take up arms against the Confederate army again. I mean, it’s just a lovely gesture, but what are the odds? The Federal commander refused to sign, but then he probably understood he’d be taken as a prisoner for barter in any case.

That’s the oddity in this battle, the thing that keeps it on my mind. It was such a wonderful thing to do, but so naive and so contrary to the usual rules of engagement. Perhaps it seemed like the best way to educate the Northern aggressors in the grand ways of Southern gentility. The video had much to say about the greatness of that way of life and the irreplaceable loss to American society. It’s difficult for me to imagine how much longer that style of courtliness and mannerly aristocracy might have lasted, and perhaps its loss is a terrible one to us all. Despite the victory of Lexington, the state of Missouri was already lost to the Confederacy, and as the war turned more desperate, such gentility apparently gave way to more brutal tactics. Not far from Lexington is the town of Centralia, where in late 1864, a ragtag Confederate coalition of bushwhackers (in whose ranks Frank and Jesse James developed some worthwhile skills) pillaged a town, stopped a train and killed 23 unarmed Union soldiers.

I think of those of one sympathy taking on those of another. I think about the useless gesture we make in societies to educate each other on the advisability of our point of view. And when education doesn’t work, we lay siege. We use what power we’ve got and try to bleed power out of the other side. We hope they’ll come around and see that we have the high ground. If they don’t, each side has got big guns and snipers, spies and propaganda, sorties and all-out assaults.

I’m not sure there’s any backing down from the place we’ve gotten ourselves to, where the left-of-Stalin crowd won’t seem to ever stop screaming and so we go from one nasty skirmish to the next — each one getting uglier, each one erasing lines, each one introducing some new low and requiring either capitulation on the grounds of self-respect or engagement at the risk of any of the human decency we’re seeking to defend.

I’m not looking forward to the next few months.