I’m a middle-aged man. I think? I’m not totally clear when middle age starts, and, as a queer trans man living through this particular phase of history and capitalism, a lot of the markers of middle-aged manhood don’t feel like they apply to me. But as the joke goes, I’m definitely into that age where men seem to get into wars or meat, and I’m not that into meat.
OK, I’m not that into wars either. Over the holiday weekend, I watched this very good YouTube video about labor history and the games industry. The video mentions Reconstruction, which made me realize that we learned very little about it when I was in school in Connecticut in the 90s. This made me realize that actually I don’t know very much about the Civil War either, beyond having researched religion around that time period due to an interest in Spiritualism and other faith movements that came out of the Great Awakenings. (America is very good at making weird religions.)
I did once go to Antietam when I was on a bike trip from Pittsburgh to DC, but that was less out of interest in historic battlefields and more because it was a national park that was too along my way to miss out on. As very much not a wars guy, I was surprised to find my time there meditative and interesting; I biked around the giant battlefield and read all the informative signs and learned a lot.
Despite how deeply middle-aged man coded biking a Civil War battlefield is, I have never seen the famed Ken Burns Civil War miniseries. Watching an 11-hour documentary about a war is definitely a middle-aged man thing to do, maybe even more so on a patriotic holiday weekend when the other option is grilling meat, which I did not do because I was watching the documentary instead. I’m about halfway through Civil War; so far the most interesting part is seeing all the historical photographs in one place.
I was also introduced for the first time to Shelby Foote, a Southern writer with a cliche accent who spends his copious screentime telling suspiciously charming anecdotes about the Confederacy. I got curious about what precisely his deal was and looked him up, and his deal was not great! He appears to have been a proponent of the Lost Cause idea, something I also didn’t know very much about having grown up in the north. So then I spent a while learning about that, which means now I side-eye Foote whenever he comes on-screen. I feel like I had always heard of the Ken Burns documentary spoken about as some gold standard for historical documentaries, so learning all the ways it’s suspect was definitely eye-opening, but also had the consequence of making me want to learn more about how narratives of the Civil War have been shaped over time.
That led me to a book about memory and the Civil War, which I’m excited to get from the library to add to my current pile of library books whose due dates are rapidly coming up. But that book also led me to a book full of primary sources on religion during the war, which I could not resist, and then, because it was by the same publisher and so came up when I was browsing its catalogue, a book about capitalism and the Moody Bible Institute, which has nothing to do with any of this but sounds interesting as hell. On the one hand, “pile of books about history” is a very middle-aged man thing to have, but on the other, “too many books to read” makes me feel like I’m in grad school again, which makes me feel young.
Beyond Shelby Foote, the documentary is a lot of war stuff, with generals whom I keep getting mixed up and lots of information about how battles work. I sometimes found it confusing to follow precisely why battles went the ways they did or what people were doing during them, with lots of mentions of walls and hills and troop movement that I struggled to picture. This made me wonder exactly how Civil War battles worked, a question I had two ways of answering because I’m definitely not going to read a book about military strategy: calling my military veteran sister, or trying to find a video game about it.
Luckily for me, there’s a Steam sale on right now, which meant scrolling through the war games on sale until I decided to pick up Ultimate General: Civil War. It’s an RTS, one of the game genres I’m the least familiar with, but it looked full of nitty-gritty battlefield stuff and also appeared to have a pause button and lots of big arrows to make me feel like I might be able to understand it. Having played it for about an hour, and then spent another hour scrolling through YouTube for “teach me to play this game like I’ve never played an RTS before” explainers, do I understand Civil War battles any better? I do not.
Ultimate General: Civil War doesn’t have a tutorial, which Luke told me is because it came out of the Total War modding scene and so assumes some familiarity with the genre. In the first level, I played as the Union attempting to capture a town; after my superior forces cleared some Confederates off a hill and reinforcements arrived, things swiftly went off the rails as we approached the town. I do not understand what my different guys do and how to position them strategically, given the lack of military understanding that gave rise to my buying the game in the first place, so I decided to just play it like I’d play a shooter and send my guys straight through the enemy. This made the Confederates retreat to the main part of town, which requires crossing two narrow bridges to access. I posted my forces up near each bridge and watched all the little guys exchange brutal fire, trying to keep them all in ammo with my painfully slow-moving supply wagons. Eventually I got sick of all this and just rushed the town, sending all my guys over the bridges to their dooms. I restarted the level, determined to do better, but did not do better at all, getting chaotically jammed up at the bridges again and burning through soldiers and ammo while all the little guys yelled and ran around.
It’s a hell of a way to introduce a video game rather than some kind of hand-holding “click this, move here” tutorial, but it did, probably unintentionally, help me better visualize the chaos and violence the Ken Burns documentary talks about and the terrain that gave rise to it. I tried to watch some more YouTube videos about the game, which means my YouTube recommendations are now full of war gaming playthroughs. Alongside the performances of traditional music that fill my feed because I’m learning mandolin, my YouTube recommendations are painting a very particular picture of who YouTube thinks I am these days that feels far, far removed from who I actually am, a New York City-dwelling punk anarchist who doesn’t own any clothes that aren’t black.
So now I am a middle-aged man with a pile of history books to read in between playing a historical war RTS, all because of a YouTube video about video games. This is not at all how I expected my Fourth of July weekend to go, and not at all how old I expected to feel coming out of it, but here we are. How long will it be until I develop a Tony Soprano style interest in The History Channel? Am I going to have to learn to grill? Am I going to have to stop wearing skinny jeans, or are they themselves a marker of middle-age? Is this how age comes for me, alongside worrying about my cholesterol and a recent conversation with my dad about my long-dormant 401ks? What’s happening to me? Who am I?
While I regret the student loan debt that has followed me into middle age, one thing I miss about academia is the way one question or source can lead to another and another. It’s a reminder that there are so many things going on in the world that I don’t know about yet, but which other people do and can teach me about. As a middle-aged man who lives alone and is single, I often worry about getting too dug into my habits and opinions. So at least finding myself going from learning about video games to learning about the entire project of America’s revisionist historical memory feels like a relieving sign that I’m not too far gone.
