The battlefield guide you just can’t rely on

VIOLEnCE in Charlottesville, Virginia, has seen pundits reach for the big book of clichés to explain the American Civil War and its legacy.

Latest is Kenny MacAskill, former justice secretary, who lauds Abraham Lincoln’s ‘moral vision’.

Appropriating historical figures for modern purposes rarely works and, inconveniently for Mr MacAskill, President Lincoln was a complex man.

He favoured freed slaves leaving the uS for offshore colonies and his emancipation proclamation was tardy too, coming almost three bloody years after the first shots were fired at fort Sumter, South Carolina.

Today, Lincoln would face a war crimes tribunal over the March to the Sea in which General William T Sherman unleashed total war on the civilians of Georgia and let many freed slaves starve.

Still, we shouldn’t expect much from Mr MacAskill. He talks of: ‘Driving through Virginia to arrive at Gettysburg in neighbouring Pennsylvania…’

Virginia has no border with Pennsylvania – Maryland is between.

A man who can overlook an entire state is not one who should lecture on the nuances of the conflict of 1861-65. WOODSTOCK, the legendary music festival in upstate New York, took place in front of 400,000 hippies 48 years ago this week. A relative of mine, Miller Anderson, played the event with the Keef Hartley Band. The memories of this clean-living boy from Houston, Renfrewshire? ‘Too much mud. Too few toilets.’ The Swinging Sixties, eh? Not all they’re cracked up to be. WHAt do you call a fly with no wings? A walk… the removal of walnuts from Walnut Whips so they become Whips reminded me of that joke about something elemental being excised. the vanishing of the walnut is supposedly to make the sweets more attractive to people who don’t like nuts and is ‘not a cost-cutting measure’. Uh-huh. But everyone knows that to a child’s tastebuds, a bitter walnut is horrible. so we just picked off the walnut and gave it to dad… just like with the black ones from the sports mixture and Wine Gums.