Col Pladoh

In the last years of his life Gary Gygax went by the internet handle "Col Pladoh." Gygax was a punster and this handle operators on several levels which Gygax explains:

Gary Gygax wrote:I use Col Pladoh to poke a bit of fun at myself. The Colonel part comes from my always playing Colonel Mustard in Clue games because I liked the starting position, and the fact I am a Kentucky Colonel [...] the Pladoh part is a spoof on the wisdom of Plato and the silliness of Playdoh.

I considered it Gygax re-branded himself as the 'Colonel Sanders of RPGs' using bits from a popular board game, child's toy and ancient philosophy. Self-deprecating and silly intellectual wordplay - except for that weird part about being "a Kentucky Colonel"...

Gygax wrote:I am a member of the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels. It is a honor bestowed on selected individuals by that state. I suppose someone there in Frankfurt appreciated my gaming efforts, eh? Anyone interested in the order can find details online, of course.

Researching the 'Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels' shows that the resemblance between "Colonel Sanders" and  "Col Pladoh" is no accident - both Harland Sanders and Gary Gygax received their quasi-military from that same Order.  It is the most popular honorific given by a US state with over 85,000 "colonels" created since the 1930s, including Wayne Gretzky, Donald Trump, Johnny Depp and Whoopi Goldberg. It is hard to read to much into such a broadly given award but the impact it made on Sanders and Gygax is notable, I doubt few other people incorporated the title into their lives. In Sanders cause it went pretty deep.

Wikipedia wrote:After being recommissioned as a Kentucky colonel in 1950, Sanders began to dress the part, growing a goatee and wearing a black frock coat (later switching to a white suit), a string tie, and referring to himself as "Colonel." His associates went along with the title change, "jokingly at first and then in earnest," according to biographer. He never wore anything else in public during the last 20 years of his life, using a heavy wool suit in the winter and a light cotton suit in the summer.He bleached his mustache and goatee to match his white hair.

Despite his Wisconsin heritage I suspect Gygax would not have been adverse to role-playing a Kentucky colonel for the last years of his life either.

The Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels seems like a charity organization akin to Kiwanis or Lions or Knights of Columbus. I say 'seems like' because it is always hard to tell, the Knights of Columbus are a charity group but they are also a political branch of the Roman Catholic, similarly the Kentucky Colonels are a branch of the “Lost Cause” of the Southern slaving empire.

Here is a strange look into them courtesy of the Western Kentucky University history department

Colonels, Hillbillies and Fightin’: Twentieth-century Kentucky in the National Imagination wrote:Explicit associations between the Kentucky Derby, the state, and the “Lost Cause” South persisted well into the 1950s, a time of the “golden age” of race horsing, when it surpassed even baseball as the premier spectator sport in the nation. Newspaper and magazine coverage of the Derby, as well as of related events such as the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels’ annual pre-race dinner that featured photographs of black waiters serving mint juleps while singing Stephen Foster melodies, did much to shape public perceptions of the state as a whole.

So during the 1950s the 'Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels' like to create lavish LARP scenarios set in the pre-Civil War southern plantations. One in five people in Kentucky was a slave until that war, 250,000 slaves in total. The idea at the heart of such LARPing is the “Lost Cause” - thepopular idea that the South was full of chivalrous knights and happy slaves until the federal bullies to the North trampled on their 'states' right' (i.e the right to run a gigantic slave economy)

Wikipedia wrote:
The 'Lost Cause', is a set of beliefs, common in the white American South, that describes the Confederate cause as a heroic one against great odds despite its defeat. The beliefs endorse the virtues of the antebellum South, viewing the American Civil War as an honorable struggle for the Southern way of life, while minimizing or denying the central role of slavery. While it was not taught in the North, aspects of it did win acceptance there.

The Legend of the Lost Cause began as mostly a literary expression of the despair of a bitter, defeated people over a lost identity. It was a landscape dotted with figures drawn mainly out of the past: the chivalric planter; the magnolia-scented Southern belle; the good, gray Confederate veteran, once a knight of the field and saddle; and obliging old Uncle Remus. All these, while quickly enveloped in a golden haze.

Supporters typically portray the Confederacy's cause as noble and its leadership as exemplars of old-fashioned chivalry and honor, defeated by the Union armies through numerical and industrial force that overwhelmed the South's superior military skill and courage.  The Lost Cause theme has been a major element in defining gender roles in the white South, in terms of honor, tradition, and family roles.

It is hard to summarize this complex web of ideas but the core element is a Romantic myth of an idyllic pastoral life where Confederate knights, magnolia-scented princess and magical sub-races lived in the harmony of honor, tradition, and family. Then the the dirty, mass-produced machines and men of the North destroyed it and then spiteful salted the ground so the South could never rise again.

The craziest lines in Wikipedia's summary are "while it was not taught in the North, aspects of it did win acceptance there." Not only did the "Lost Cause" myth give an excuse for the South's lost war (akin to Germany's 'stab in the back' myth after WWI), it also appealed to Northern elites & white supremacists who enjoyed having this Romantic manly past right in their own country. In less than 40 years after the apocalyptic war between states, broad swathes of Americans had adopted this strange mythology and it seems to re-surge with every right-wing era: the early 1900s when Northern elites worried about their loss of manhood due to increased civilization, the 1930s when the whole Western world flirted with fascism, the 1950s post-war ultra-patriotism, 1970s loss in Vietnam worries about manhood, 1980s 'capitalism strikes back', early 2000s War of Terrors,  

It is little surprize that the Trump Era is seeing a resurgence of this. HBO recently announced a prospective series called "Confederate" that will ask the question, according to co-creator David Benioff,  “What would the world have looked like … if the [white] South had won?” This show has caused concern among some but liberals are always quick scream 'censorship' to point out that Philip K Dick's 'The Man in the High Castle' TV series explores what happens if the Nazi had won. Ta-Nehisi Coates in not a guy I always agree with but his rebuttal is worth considering.

The Lost Cause Rides Again wrote:Comparisons between Confederate and The Man in the High Castle are fatuous. Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.

The symbols point to something Confederate’s creators don’t seem to understand—the war is over for them, not for us. At this very hour, black people all across the South are still fighting the battle which they joined during Reconstruction—securing equal access to the ballot—and resisting a president whose resemblance to Andrew Johnson is uncanny. Confederate is the kind of provocative thought experiment that can be engaged in when someone else’s lived reality really is fantasy to you.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/no-confederate/535512/

I suspect 'Confederate' is planned as a companion to HBO's flagship show The Game of Throne - a D&D-inspired show about slavery, cruelty and warriors.

[Sidenote: Gygax's very first publication (outside of a few sappy poems) was 'Victorious German Arms' (1973), a book sporting swastikas on both sides that tackles the question "What if the Axis adopted a coherent grand strategy, resulting in a quick victory at Stalingrad?" and provides a "detailed account of German victory in World War II, ending with domination of Europe and Africa."]

Gygax's internet handle was not a fluke appearance of the 'Lost Cause' in fantasy and science fiction. Edgar Rice Burrough's foundational Mars/Barsoom books (which were adapted and published by Gygax into a miniature battle game) star John Carter, a Confederate Virgian soldier freed to become a true knight on Mars. Gygax's beloved Jack Vance wrote the Grey Prince. Here is a summary:

Vance's Grey Prince wrote:Vance always seems to be making some kind of tangential political point but in this novel it was front and center and the usual tropes got turned on their head. The (human) land barons conquerors who stole the land by force (from long-term settlers who had gone nativist) are the morally superior good guys with their vast plantation-style ranches. The aboriginal, serf-like (human) natives who were conquered by the more technologically advanced barons are third-class citizens and portrayed variously as violent and duplicitous or faithful and subservient vassals. It's basically making a positive argument for apartheid.

The parallels to US and the Indian history and US slavery were a bit too close to ignore with "'might makes right' is reality so suck it liberals" taking center stage. Not a very subtle context from an author I was growing to admire.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=781372

This is not an outlier in Vance's bibliography. Vance turned increasing right-wing after 1968 and even his popular Dying Earth novels are filled with casual rape and 'might makes right' scenarios (but kept humorous by many P. G. Wodehouse-type dialogue). The magic system in D&D is refereed to as 'Vancian magic' because of it's roots in Dying Earth.

The threads are there if you want to see them: the right-wing tilt of 1910s and 1970s mainstream SF and fantasy, visions of victorious Nazis and Confederates, old men role-playing Kentucky colonels half-jesting and half-serious, Game of Throne and Confederate, Romantic longing for the days of knights and manly men, a complete unwillingness to emphatically imagining those who suffered in slavery. Whiteness and toxic masculinity. Scorn for liberal values.  Might makes Right.

Here is a group of males ready to play a white supremacist 'Lost Cause' LARP in Charlottesville, Virginia.
 



Liberals love their 'fantasy nerd media', just like they love their South Park comedy.

I don't think they understand just how much 'nerd media' hates their basic values.

[But the corporation peddling it will happily take their money.]