Oregon's amputated Civil War memory

While Oregonians celebrate the coming of "The Civil War” football game on Saturday, we will continue to blindly forget that the words "Civil War" have chilling meaning.

In is now believed that some 700,000 Americans died in our American Civil War. That’s a number larger than the population of Portland. Imagine a city erased by death.

And yet we persist in calling a football game “The Civil War.”
 
For decades Americans and fought and died abroad in what were civil wars: in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq. Today they fight and die in Afghanistan. Tomorrow young Americans could join the civil war in Syria. As I write the fighting going is going on in Gaza, a battlefield in an endless, intermittent civil war between Palestinians and Israelis.

And yet we persist in calling a mere football game “The Civil War.”

To Duck and Beaver fans and other Oregon sports spectators, I commend reading THIS in today's New York Times:

The article closes with the following words:

Amputation was the most common Civil War surgical procedure. Union surgeons performed approximately 30,000 compared to just over 16,000 by American surgeons in World War II. One postwar British traveler noted that amputees were “everywhere in town and farm communities through the South.” The men who had survived the surgeon’s knife were a visible reminder of the Civil War for decades.
No longer. Today's veterans more often suffer from the torment of memory. The haunted have taken their own lives by the thousands.

Yet today, in Oregon, we and the media have amputated the darker meaning of “Civil War” from our minds. We are victims of our own ignorance and insensitivity.

Oregonians, it is well past time for us to come up with a joyful, playful name for our friendly, passionate rivalry — and to end our "Civil War."

Speaking of offensive names, drop "The Civil War"

Now that the Oregon Board of Education has demonstrated ethnic sensitivity by ordering the dropping of high school sports mascots variously representing stereotypes of Native Americans, isn't it time the Oregon Board of (allegedly) Higher Education showed the same sensitivity about "The Civil War," the pathetic name of the overheated and much hyped rivalry between Oregon State and the University of Oregon.

If we can mandate the end of the 'Braves," the "Warriors" and the "Indians," we can certainly end "The Civil War," a name which celebrates death, destruction and internal strife without regard to skin color, ethnicity, gender or combat status.

It should offend us all.

Consider the view of Tom Ball, an assistant vice president at the University of Oregon’s Office of Institutional Equity and Diversity, regarding the Native American names.

In a March 8 Oregonian article, Ball, who is a member of the Klamath Tribes, recalled a 1978 incident at Siletz Valley High School, whose mascot is the Warrior. A coach loudly yelled to his players to “kill” their opponents, using an expletive and a pejorative term for Native Americans.

“That’s what this kind of stuff allows,” Ball said. “It builds up over time. Little cuts and big ones. They build up and build up.”

Likewise, this is the kind of "stuff" "Civil Wars" allow. And they too build over time.

My rage against a dying light

Each year in the week leading up to the UO/OSU football game I protest the rivalry’s name, “The Civil War.”

What's the problem? friends and family ask. Lighten up!

Simply put, I find it abhorrent that a collegiate football game would call itself a war, even metaphorically.

And so I persist in a losing cause.

As far as I can tell, the name for the Oregon rivalry has been around for 80 years, thanks to some long-forgotten sportswriter. No one even thinks about it any more. Except, seemingly, me.

Of course, there’s the play on the word “civil” that softens the name. But at the same time “the Civil War” raises the specter of real civil war. One-hundred-and-fifty years ago our "War between the States" took the lives of a half million Americans. (Matthew Brady recorded the war dead in the trenches at Fredericksburg in the photo shown below. Above, the "Civil War" "trenches" between OSU and UO.)

On Sunday The Oregonian ran the headline “Dark precursor to war.” You’d think the headline was attached to an account of the deadly shelling between the Koreas, but, no, it ran above a story about the upcoming game in Corvallis.

The sports page loves to milch the war image. “Dark precursor to war.” Give me a break.

Civil wars, real ones, are very much with us, in the Congo, in the Sudan, in Somalia, and potentially on the Korean peninsula. There are bombings and shoot-outs in Iraq, China and Mexico with civil war overtones.

We don’t need metaphorical civil wars on our campuses. All they do is amplify the bellicose tone for already violent football games.

My family refers to my annual protest as “Rick’s rant.”

If for some reason I miss a year, they might worry. “Is the old boy winding down?”

Strangers have reacted to past Red Electric posts on the subject with “You’ve got to be kidding!” and “Get a life!” responses from avid Ducks and Beavers. I must seem a timorous lamb. “The Civil War” name to them is as much a part of the game as trash talk, hobbled quarterbacks, brain-jarring hits, and unnecessary roughness.

I’ve tried to take a positive approach by suggesting other names, but none of them expresses the chest-pounding gusto and testosterone rush that “The Civil War” does.

Somehow Stanford and Cal can get by with “The Big Game.” Harvard and Yale simply face off in “The Game” and Auburn and Alabama manage with the “Iron Bowl.” (Hey Oregon fans, how about The Silicon Forest Bowl? The Spotted Owl Bowl? The Visit-but-don't Stay Bowl? The Anti-War Bowl?)

I’m not sure why Oregon needs to invoke war to get its competitive juices flowing. Perhaps it’s to ward off the onset of hibernation. Or maybe it is ignorance of the terrible costs of war on our sheltered campuses. (I wonder what Oregon veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts feel about the name. “War” for them has an indelible meaning that is beyond the comprehension of college undergraduates and "Civil War" fans.)

Maybe the Oregon rivalry’s name persists because Oregon has never experienced a real civil war. Would a football rivalry in Kentucky or Tennessee or Virginia be called “The Civil War”? Would a soccer rivalry between German and Belgium be named “The Battle of the Bulge”? Don’t even ask about “The Holocaust” describing a rivalry in Israel.

So there it is: another year, another rant. Is anyone listening?

In this year of my seniority, the words of Dyan Thomas come to mind:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Try this metaphor on for size

It's curious. When I write about significant problems here, they rarely draw a response.

But when I oppose "The (so called) Civil War," the name of the game, devoted Ducks and Beavers go ballistic. And I'M the one who is supposed to "get a life."

See comments on my post.

OK, let's choose another (mere?) historical event in which multitudes (millions, in fact) were killed. I guess you would call it a real rout, in football terms. Let's suppose that one of Oregon's teams runs away with today's game. Why not call the rout "A Holocaust"?

Offended yet?

First, count to ten.

Think.

Now ask yourself where you draw the line and why.

Extra credit: Who was that sports editor who voted "The Civil War" off the sports page? What could he have been thinking?

"The Civil War" — unworthy of Oregon

Each year in the week before the UO/OSU "Civil War,” I rail against this over-the-top name for a simple football rivalry.

I argue that the universities' stature is lessened because of their rivalry’s appellation.

Today’s Oregonian sports page gave me a “peg” for this year’s lament.

The headline reads, “It’s not civil nor is it war.”

Well, duh, if it’s not civil and not a war, in the name of mere accuracy, LET'S CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE!

The Oregonian's writer, Ryan White, tells those of us who are agitated (outraged?) by this abominable name, to lighten up. It’s only a metaphor. He might have added that “Beavers” aren’t really beavers, and “Ducks” aren’t really ducks.

Problem is, thanks to “The Civil War” and the name's inhumanity, I’m not so sure.

To Ryan, I recommend George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s little book, “Metaphors We Live By.” Metaphors (and words, for that matter) shape how we think about our world. When we say “I fell in love,” we do in a way surrender ourselves to the helplessness of falling.

Metaphors reinforce and even guide how we behave, write Lakoff and Johnson.

“The Civil War,” as a name for a mere intercollegiate rivalry, also cheapens the word “War.” It also dishonors the 500,000 American lives lost in the real American Civil War.

Worse it suggests an ignorance and lack of respect for that event by the faculty, administration, students and alumni of Oregon’s two major universities.

After 9/11, I actually wrote the presidents of the University of Oregon and Oregon State University to urge them to drop the name once and for all because of anguish about real war, violence and terror. To my surprise, the president of OSU wrote to say that the administration had taken the name change under consideration. Nothing became of it.

White’s story in today’s Oregonian refers to an enlightened past sports editor who banished the term from the sports page. Writes White, “The Civil War, he told reporters, was between the North and the South and took place between 1861 and 1865.”

Exactly.

White doesn’t tell us the name of the editor, but it should be inscribed on the tombstone of Oregon's "Civil War.” Metaphorically speaking, of course.