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Before I retired from the industry, I photographed a whole lot of weddings.
Met good people.
Shot in some beautiful venues.
Enjoyed some fabulous experiences.
Made great money.
The history of a venue has nothing to do with the here and now of the people having the wedding, unless the location is a family property. Which might happen once in a blue moon.
If the photographer has a problem with it, then they can move on. Plenty of talent out there ready to step in.
I felt the same about the Masterpiece bakery. People don't like it, they can simply move on. Plenty of talented pastry chefs out there.
The point is if there's no problem having Marie Antoinette- themed weddings, then what's the problem with Southern aristocrat style weddings if that's what one desires?
You mean "slave owner" weddings, strutting around in front of a plantation house?
You mean "slave owner" weddings, strutting around in front of a plantation house?
Your logic would lead to the abandonment and eventual destruction of most of the older buildings in the United States. It is dumb.
Grow up. Ghosts don't exist.
Are you living a "liars life" or "wife beaters life", because you are "strutting around" in a house where those things occurred?
Should we abandon all buildings from which massive financial fraud was directed (promoting economic slavery), or where someone was killed at any point in history?
What does the insurance look like on a structure that, should someone be killed within its walls, the entire thing can't be used?
Will residential mortgage companies, from here on out, require armed guards in mortgaged residences to insure that no one is killed, beaten, abused, raped, or defrauded within the walls and therefore that the value of the structure doesn't go to zero?
What should we do with the Wall Street Bank buildings, from which the Thirty Year in-scope Mortgage Debacle developed that eventually led to the massive unemployment that caused tens of thousands of American lives?
Your logic would lead to the abandonment and eventual destruction of most of the older buildings in the United States. It is dumb.
Grow up. Ghosts don't exist.
Are you living a "liars life" or "wife beaters life", because you are "strutting around" in a house where those things occurred?
Should we abandon all buildings from which massive financial fraud was directed (promoting economic slavery), or where someone was killed at any point in history?
What does the insurance look like on a structure that, should someone be killed within its walls, the entire thing can't be used?
Will residential mortgage companies, from here on out, require armed guards in mortgaged residences to insure that no one is killed, beaten, abused, raped, or defrauded within the walls and therefore that the value of the structure doesn't go to zero?
What should we do with the Wall Street Bank buildings, from which the Thirty Year in-scope Mortgage Debacle developed that eventually led to the massive unemployment that caused tens of thousands of American lives?
Hit a nerve, didn't I?
Plantation houses were not built by contractors as convention centers. They were built using forced slave labor, as a place for their owners to live and survey their livestock.
There is no way to sugar coat it. To glamorize these places is to pay homage to the suffering, mistreatment, and killing of millions of people, and particularly to the ones who had the mansions built and were the authors of that suffering.
I agree they should not be torn down. They should become museums that dispense an accurate version of the history that occurred in the era they were built to remind us never to allow a recurrence of such a time. They are beautiful but not happy places, and should never be used for happy occasions.
Plantation houses were not built by contractors as convention centers. They were built using forced slave labor, as a place for their owners to live and survey their livestock.
There is no way to sugar coat it. To glamorize these places is to pay homage to the suffering, mistreatment, and killing of millions of people, and particularly to the ones who had the mansions built and were the authors of that suffering.
I agree they should not be torn down. They should become museums that dispense an accurate version of the history that occurred in the era they were built to remind us never to allow a recurrence of such a time. They are beautiful but not happy places, and should never be used for happy occasions.
So we should abandon the White House and Capitol?
Never again is much more relevant to the Holocaust than slavery.
No one freakin' romanticizes those eras to the point of having weddings in Nero's palace or insisting on a Marie Antoinette-themed wedding or whatever the Egyptian equivalent would be. (Incidentally, the pyramids were built by free workers.) The decadence of the ruling classes in ancient Rome and pre-revolution France is looked on with disdain. No one softens up the concept of gladitorial combat with commentary on how well cared for popular gladiators were.
The rosy-eyed insistence on putting a romantic, glamorous finish on the antebellum South is actually fairly unique. And that is without getting into the differences in social and economic conditions that made slavery even less defensible in the 19th century.
There are Roman themed toga parties all the time. And we have Caesars Palace and Luxor in Las Vegas and nobody criticizes that. There's also the medieval times restaurant.
There are Roman themed toga parties all the time. And we have Caesars Palace and Luxor in Las Vegas and nobody criticizes that. There's also the medieval times restaurant.
But anything to do with the Old South is taboo.
You make a good point, but I think the obvious difference is that the Antebellum South is here in America, as opposed to Europe, involved Americans, as opposed to Italians, and is, relatively speaking, not that long ago.
We are still feeling the effects of African-American slavery in our culture and there are people living who can directly trace their roots back only a handful of generations to that era and the slavery that their ancestors endured.
Time doesn't make evil ok, it's still evil, but when everyone living is removed from it by centuries and no longer feeling the effects of it, it greatly softens the edges and takes away the personal feeling of it affecting our ancestors, making it somehow more palatable, as in, "People in Ancient Rome were so stupid but that was so long ago and people were so unenlightened then".
African-American slavery has only been over legally for about 150 years, and it was only about 50 years ago that the Civil Rights movement occurred. Still way too recent to dismiss as ancient history perpetrated by ancient people.
For years I have admired the grace and beauty of the Antebellum mansions in places like Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, and I am about as far from being a liberal as one can possibly be. However, it is increasingly difficult for me to admire these beautiful structures without visualizing the economic system that made them possible. I don't think that makes me a liberal, I think it just makes me realistic. Conservatives like me do care about these things too.
I feel the exact same way about the robber baron mansions and mansions of other wealthy Northerners who built their fortunes on the backs of poor, exploited European immigrants and blacks. Evil is evil. No mansion is worth the things these people, both North and South, did in order to have them.
Never again is much more relevant to the Holocaust than slavery.
Absolutely not, any more than we should abandon the plantation houses. They are monuments to the people who actually built America while in bondage, and should be presented as such. But they should not be romanticized into something they are not and have never been.
Just because the White race had power doesn't mean they used it well. America's history is really ugly when you study it for a while.
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