The "rebel-yelling" of some denizens of these parts these days is strictly tongue-in-cheek, all in good fun ... 'til a Shannon Harwell comes along to remind us the "fun" rests on a bedrock of often very unfunny truth.

I've never met the lady, and she comes across in print as through a glass darkly. She may not have quite called my forebears "vile murderers, lawless thieves," but the implication's there, and my "fun" flirts with rage. Natter away irresponsibly of murder, and you just may be summoning it, invoking the devil. But no Bushwhacker of record ever harmed a lady. I say to my fellow rebs, "Forgive her, folks, for (clearly) she knows not what she says." She suffers, I can only conclude, from her "education," or what passes therefor in schools these days. Where the history texts seem to take their cue from Webster's Worthless Third International: A Bushwhacker? "One who fires from ambush; a deserter or draft dodger who became an outlaw." The Oxford English Dictionary manages only: "A Confederate guerrilla." Which is the objective definition, which the "politically-correct" value-judgment? And which suggests the theme likeliest to have run through a younger person's "education?" The younger person in question isn't going to heed anything I may say here, judging from how she heeded none of the points raised by prior respondents. She was invited to visit the Bushwhacker Museum, fons et origo of the name that so offends her.

It's been called an educational experience; but of course one who already knows everything stands in no need of that. She might have met some of us, and even if not understood us, at least noted our lack of horns and pitchfork tails. But she was busy with a new letter, or rather the old one over again.

Her "education" taught her about pitchfork tails, it seems (i.e. that the politically-incorrect are devils), but not such mundane stuff as that the possessive "its" takes no apostrophe; and that a "capital" is not a "capitol;" that a living thing has a "sex" but only a word has a "gender;" that the "Native Americans" "came from somewhere else" (Siberia) just like the rest of us native ("born") Americans. Yes, she's got lots of company. That's my very point.

To "educators" words are defined by usage: I.e. when enough fools pool their ignorance, wisdom appears! And to quote the spoutings of a "history professor" as proving anything is deserving only of horse-laughter. Just as a Federal judge can be found to hand down any legalistic outrage, or a psychiatrist to swear to any idiocy, some prof or other can be found to "profess" any fashionable nonsense. Most of them nowadays busy themselves proving it's impossible to know a blooming thing about the past. Yet we're invited to take them as authorities on it?

Historical certainty, it seems, must fall back on common sense, intuition, and reason. The Civil War is a tortuously complicated subject. What can be said of it in a letter-to-the-editor is no more than a few pitifully simpleminded oversimplifications.

In my day the answer to the schoolbook multiple-choice question, "What caused the war?" was: "A complex of controversies over the nature of the Union." The world has grown no simpler, that I've noticed, but the texts sure as heck have, and those who perpetrate and believe them. They answer in a word! Slavery. Ah yes. My dirt-poor forebears, who had as little use for slaveowners as slaves, volunteered, joyously, to lay down lives, fortunes, and/or sacred honor, all for the old bogeyman! Either my ancestor's were all raving nuts, or you badmouthers of them are.

Those complex issues over which the war was fought are with us still. They're timeless, changeless, because human nature is. Haven't you heard of the "culture war?" The new wrangle over the old war is but a skirmish in it. Black tour groups visit the Bushwhacker Museum. They come to Bushwhacker Days.

One has yet to swoon at the name, to my knowledge, or even have his fun spoiled.

You wouldn't deny anybody his culture, you assure us. But your arguments add up to just that.

Scrap the name "Bushwhacker" because there were bad apples among them, as among any batch of humans? A soulmate of yours made the motion at our 1964 organizational meeting. He, at least, had an alternative: "The Vernon County Museum of History, Education and Friendship." (Pardon the would-be visitor while he falls asleep at the wheel.)

The proposal died for lack of a second.

"Bushwhacker" was the inspiration of a cultured, accomplished, savvy native son who remembered his local history.

Bushwhacker Days took off in the Bushwhacker Capital redivivus, good time was had by all, nobody whined of hurt feelings, and the community gained, spiritually and economically. The latter was called to your attention, to no avail.

Will your substitute name do half as well? People drive in off the four-lane just to ask, "What on earth's a Bushwhacker?" Will they do so to kick up their heels at Nevada's new "Soporific Days" or whatever bland bit of noncontroversial political correctness you and yours cook up?

I'm convinced Bushwhacker Days is a success because it means something, even if it's something you don't like. Any something's better than a nothing, which describes all-too-many a community festival.

I've done my best to decipher your two letters, but come away defeated. "Seeking unity." But clearly not unity with "the other side," the "losing side," as you fancy, in the war that all the same rages right on. "When are we going to stop fighting the Civil War?" the NAACP wonders (KCStar, June 4) after having bitterly waged it for a few paragraphs. You wouldn't "impose your ideals on anyone." No, you'd just make him give his ideals up, embodied as they happen to be in a name and a flag. You "don't want to be hypersensitive." So why are you being hypersensitive? You seek "change and improvement" as if they were the same thing.

Some on my side shy from "controversy" as badly as "the other side" seems to. I find no harm in it.

There're no sticks and stones, and words will break no bones, neither yours nor mine. Newspaper writings don't wield that kind of clout.

The world, and Bushwhacker Days, will go on year after year for all our verbal sound-and-fury. We'll never change each other's minds, certainly not this way. So why not come out of the epistolary woodwork, in which you've built your imaginary world of good guys and bad?

As a scribbler (even of books on the Civil War), I have great respect for words; but I don't take them for reality, or always even a true measure of reality. Reality's "out there" (e.g. in Bushwhacker Days) where things are happening.