General Robert E. Lee lost the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. But his chicken is winning the war. Lee's Southern Fried Chicken roosts right across the street from America's most famous Civil War battlefield, huddled with tourist traps and burger joints under the cold gaze of bronze soldiers who guard hallowed ground.
That's about close enough. The clash between solemn marble monuments and neon cheeseburgers can raise disturbing doubts about the evolution of our species during the past 134 years.
But one of these days, tourists may scratch their heads and wonder why Lee's Fried Chicken crossed the road. If so, the answer will be simple: More money on the other side.
About 51,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded at Gettysburg from July 1-4, 1863. It was the South's first sharp taste of slow-poison defeat.
America, like the men who fought there, was young, and never got over the sorrow of so many lives crushed under the wheels of a nation changing direction. The ground is still soaked in sadness. It falls like dew in the night. People who walk the ground at Gettysburg say they feel ''something.'' Some call it history, or a sense of great events. Others say it's more mystical - the ghosts of clashing armies echoing on the breeze, raising chills in hot July.
Whatever it is, I don't think visitors will find it in the new IMAX theater that a private developer will soon open on the battlefield. The $43 million cash cow will offer Civil War movies, shops and - no doubt - fast food.
The U.S. Park Service says it has no choice. There's just not enough money in its $1.42 billion annual budget to take care of 374 national parks that need $4 billion in repairs. Gettysburg's $3.5 million budget is not enough to keep relics from rusting to dust, they say.
''We have got to tell a story in a compelling manner that will capture the MTV generation,'' Gettysburg Park Superintendent John A. Latschar told USA Today.
Some disagree the way Grant disagreed with Lee.
''The soldiers and veterans of the Civil War would have been appalled by what's happening today,'' said Paul Hawke, chief ranger at Shiloh National Park in Tennessee. ''They fought the rest of their lives to preserve the battlegrounds we have today, that their comrades fought and died for.''
Mr. Hawke said it's true about those special feelings. ''This is historic ground. You get a different experience walking it. If it wasn't true, I wouldn't be doing this. I don't do it because I like working for the government. I don't do this for the money.''
Shiloh was typical of the way Civil War battlefields have been treated, he said. ''There was a lot of looting around the early 1900s. The War Department asked people to bring in their wagons and get this junk out of here. They didn't understand the archaeological and historical significance.''
Civil War veterans did. They used their own money to buy land at the most important battles. Shiloh was one of them. ''It was the earliness in the war that made it significant,'' Mr. Hawke said. ''A lot of the soldiers coming here, big names later, learned the art of war here. There were more casualties at Shiloh than all other American wars and battles put together up to that time.''
About 24,000 were killed on April 6 and 7, 1862. Most were new recruits. The Union troops came from Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois. One of the markers at the Sunken Road, where Union regiments were finally surrounded and captured after holding out all day, honors soldiers from Cincinnati.
At nearby Bloody Pond, dying horses and men turned the water crimson as they died taking a final drink. The church that gave its name to the battle was destroyed. A sign there says Shiloh means ''peace.''
''There were 10 mass graves. We know of five,'' Mr. Hawke said. ''When they started loading cannister (cannon shells that were exploding cans of nails and shrapnel) at point-blank range, there's not much left of these people. There was nothing to carry away. The entire battleground is a cemetery. That's what hallows this ground.''
Nearly every Civil War battlefield is threatened by commercial encroachment. Preservation groups band together like Civil War veterans did, buying land at Fredericksburg, Antietam and Shiloh before it is bulldozed for Wal-marts, condos and fried chicken franchises.
The same U.S. Park Service that spent $330,000 on an outhouse can't afford to save our most precious history. The same federal government that squanders billions to study bovine flatulence and Belgian endive is too cheap to honor the men who died to save the federal government.
Most Americans probably don't know this. Those who do and ignore it deserve what they will get: the Civil War in an IMAX theater, burger-joint grease traps built on top of the graves honored in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
''The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here,'' Mr. Lincoln said. Maybe he was wrong.
I walked the battlefield at Shiloh last weekend. It's true. There's something special there. The same thing I've felt at Gettysburg and Antietam. Protecting it is not much of a sacrifice compared to Shiloh.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
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