O, I’M A GOOD OLD LIBERAL

—A revised poem by Black Cloud, The Council Chief Poetic Justice Warrior

There is an occupational hazard in writing parody: sometimes the people you are parodying decide they like it.

O, I’m a Good Old Rebel appeared in the aftermath of the Civil War and is generally attributed to James Innes Randolph, a former Confederate officer who later became a journalist and poet. Sung to the already familiar tune of Joe Bowers, its speaker is an extravagantly unreconstructed Confederate who hates the United States, hates the Constitution, hates Reconstruction and remains magnificently unwilling to admit that his side has lost.

There is good reason to read the song, at least in part, as caricature rather than simple confession. Randolph himself retained Confederate sympathies, but his “Good Old Rebel” is a deliberately exaggerated character. The difficulty with a successful caricature is that the character may eventually escape his creator. In time, O, I’m a Good Old Rebel came to be sung quite sincerely as a Confederate anthem.

Which raises a question of particular interest to the Council:

If people adopt your parody as their anthem, have you written a bad parody—or an exceptionally good one?

Black Cloud has been considering the matter and has arrived at another question:

Whatever became of the Good Old Rebel?

Perhaps he never disappeared. Perhaps the uniform changed.

The language of rebellion, resistance, sanctuary, civil disobedience and defiance of established authority did not vanish with the nineteenth century. Black Cloud merely suspects that much of it can now be heard coming from the opposite side of the political street.

He makes no claim of historical equivalence.

He has done something considerably less responsible.

He has written a song.

Sung, naturally, to the tune of O, I’m a Good Old Rebel :