Remember last week’s combox throwdown in these parts about the Confederate flag, the South, race, class, culture, and semiotics? I took this photo in line yesterday afternoon at a Louisiana convenience store, buying lottery tickets:
Dreher Blog Bait
42 Responses to Dreher Blog Bait
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JustMe says:
Do southerners get upset about “desecration of the confederate flag” by doing stuff like wearing hats like this? Or, perhaps even more offensive to many, wearing a hat indoors and backwards?
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just the fax says:
HATE CRIME IN PROGRESS! ALERT THE $PLC!!
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Christopher says:
I am reminded of the flack over the battle flag on top of the S.Carolina State House a few years back. Here in eastern Tennessee a group of locals started selling confederate flags to support our Southern heritage, whatever that means. Funny thing is that this region of the south was pro-union. Here in this part of the south we had few slaves and very few plantations. IN 1860 our county government voted a resolution that we wanted to stay in the union. The confederate government actually had to garrison the railroads here between Knoxville and Chattanooga to prevent sabotage from the locals. The ancestors of the locals selling the confederate flag would have been aghast to see their descendants selling that battle flag. The “South” is not a monolith and is in fact a very very diverse place. My South is not the South of Faulkner or Eudora Welty though Flannery O’Conner comes close.
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Will Barrett says:
Most Southerners of my generation (born early 80s) likely went to high school with guys who wore Rebel Flag t-shirts, drove pickups covered in mud and Rebel Flags and listened to rap music and had sisters who occasionally dated black dudes.
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Mike says:
The Southern version of thug life and cruising rest stops.
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Is the Confederate Battle Flag separable from values of the nation which it symbolized, a nation which fought the bloodiest war ever fought on this continent to preserve slavery? Why or why not?
Is the hammer and sickle separable from the values of the Soviet Union, which it symbolized, and which gave us purges, the gulag, the Cold War, etc? Why or why not?
Is the swastika separable from–well, you know (Why wait to invoke Godwin’s Law?). Why or why not?
Discuss amongst yourselves.
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Fran Macadam says:
How about Walker Percy’s South?
Y’know, that cap is worse than a hoodie – guy must be Knothead.
Lottery tickets, beer, convenience store… yep that’s American culture in a nutshell. Love in the Ruins.
Unfortunately, the only thing we have that’s even close to Tom More’s Lapsometer is L. Ron Hubbard’s E-meter…
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Mike: The Southern version of thug life and cruising rest stops.
Yes, because a white male welder in a Confederate flag cap stopping off at a convenience store to buy a Mountain Dew after work is obviously no different than a black guy dressed like a street criminal, or a gay man cruising rest stops for sex.
Mike, nobody beats you for consistency.
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IanH says:
“Discuss amongst yourselves.”
You really, really need to find better talking points. Rod posted this specifically for guys like you. You’re proving him right.
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Mark Hutchins says:
I live in north-east Texas and yes, I have seen black people wearing confederate flag do-rag, among other things and on multiple occasions. At first it I was surprised by it, but it makes sense now considering that “racism” is far more political than social or actual in my small southern town. I’ve asked many democrats and blacks (I love election season because I work a small precinct which means I literally spend a whole day chatting life, religion and politics with the other regular workers who are all middle-aged black females – we always have a blast). The most common reasons I know of for wearing confederate flags and such (don’t forget the Bonnie Blue Flag!) are pride in southern heritage and a stubborn refusal to let our hearts, minds and ancestors be defined for us by outsiders. I’m sure that’s way too simplistic and primal for liberals and southern apologists, but they don’t change the reality of life down here and it’s not like we try to define other regions and cultures for them. We in East-Texas (pretty literally cousins to Louisiana) are pretty secure in who we believe we are and have been.
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I appreciate you recognize my consistency, Rod. You don’t know what it means to me.
But amidst your concerns about thug life and park cruising, you miss the point that while people outside the culture may find it deviant, some within the culture don’t. People outside the Southern culture who are unmoved by a confederate-flag wearing Southerrn white guy buying lottery tickets may find this man’s behavior quite deviant, but you don’t. So how exactly is that different from your concern about thug culture and those who don’t think it’s a concern?
Is a kid with droopy drawers in the inner city any different from this guy, in terms of emulating a culture that is considered deviant and violent by some while “authentic” by others?
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Sands says:
WTH, Copenhagen is only $2.09 in La? I can’t be reading that right.
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a black guy dressed like a street criminal,
You mean wearing a white tshirt and baggy jeans, and possibly some gold jewelry?
“Street criminal” is your term for blacks who dress with certain markers. No different than the way this guy is dressing, just with a different set of markers, the one’s associated with loud, possibly dangerous “rednecks.”
If he were going for “refined southern gentlemen” stereotypes, he would dress in a seersucker suit, panama hat, bow tie, and carry a mahogany cane.
Or more likely, he just likes the confederate flag and western-style buttoned shirts, in the same way that some black kids like wearing hoodies and loose jeans.
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Mike W says:
He is a welder. Welder wear those odd hate on backwards to protect their heads from the rim of the mask. See them all of the time on pipelines.
I have never seen a confederate flag version though. The man is clearly a thought criminal and should be arrested.
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JT says:
a white male welder in a Confederate flag cap stopping off at a convenience store to buy a Mountain Dew after work is obviously no different than a black guy dressed like a street criminal
He actually isn’t different than “a black guy dressed like a street criminal.” All you’re looking at is clothing. It’s genuinely astonishing that you can’t see this. You intentionally offer obvious parallels–clothing with symbolic meaning–and then deny that they’re parallel. It’s bizarre. It’s so bizarre that it’s hard to imagine some further analogy that would make the weirdness plain on its face, because the weirdness is right on top.
Either you can infer something from something that is at most symbolic or you can’t (as opposed to an action like cruising). If I see a guy with a swastika (or 88 or whatever) tattoo, I make assumptions. I do the same with the Confederate flag. It’s a little harder with “street criminal,” because that sort of dress is so common. (If we’re talking about wearing a hoodie with jeans, I think you said that you sometimes dress like a street criminal.) But I still do it, and I’m sure there are examples of African-American expressive behavior that offer better examples of when I read into things yet still.
There’s not, for African Americans, a really good parallel to a hateful political ideology embodied by a symbol like the swastika or the Confederate flag. The best I can come up with is some sort of black separatist movement, like (more or less a total guess) the Nation of Islam. Maybe there are better ones; I just don’t know about them.
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Christopher, my family too — my great-great-grandfather from Morgan and Roane County, 11th Tennessee Cavalry, UNITED STATES ARMY. Commission received from military governor Andrew Johnson. Captured and on his way to Andersonville, but escaped. D— the rebel flag!
For those who are more respectful, JustMe has a good point about flag desecration.
But the future, whether we like it or not, is more or less what Will Barrett outlines.
Mike is part right… southern white equivalents of black ghetto thugs do tend to identify with confederate flags… but not all who identify with confederate flags are thugs.
Turmarion… the hammer and sickle pre-dates the Soviet Union. They were working tools, you know? Symbols of the average Joe. And while it is harder to deal with, the swastika was a good-luck charm before Hitler adopted it. I think there are backward swastikas on Gandhi’s grave.
OK, IanH… nuanced enough for ya’?
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steve m says:
I grew up in suburban Charlotte in the 60s and 70s. I can’t speak for the gentleman in the picture but the people I grew up with wore hats like that to offer up a middle finger of sorts to condescending Northerners whose primary Southern experience was a brief stop at South of the Border on I-95 on the way to Florida. Insulting our African American neighbors was not the primary intent. It got more complicated later.
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He actually isn’t different than “a black guy dressed like a street criminal.” All you’re looking at is clothing. It’s genuinely astonishing that you can’t see this.
It’s genuinely astonishing to me that you cannot see the difference here. A young black male dressed like a street criminal may not, in fact, be a street criminal. But he chooses to present himself in the dress of a criminal class, in a time and place where there is a significant amount of violent crime committed by young black men who dress this way (crime, I must always emphasize, is committed 90 percent of the time against other black people, according to FBI stats I quoted the other day).
Are white Southern male welders committing violent crimes in any measurable numbers against other people, black and white? Does this white guy dress to emulate street thugs? Does he choose to signal by his manner of dress that he wishes to be associated with the look and demeanor of a subgroup that is vastly disproportionately represented in violent crime statistics, and in prison?
If this were 50 years ago or longer, when the Klan was going around terrorizing black people under that banner, I would feel differently about it.
Anyway, when I saw this yesterday, I thought about the commenter in these threads, can’t remember who, who imagined black people at the Whole Foods parking lot in Baton Rouge, sitting in their cars paralyzed by fear, waiting until the guy driving the pickup with the Confederate flag sticker departed before they dared to get out of their car and go shop. It was a completely absurd idea. Completely. There, in front of me in the line at the convenience store, was a black woman who, whatever she thought about the Confederate flag on the guy’s head, showed no outward sign of fear and distress. And by the way, to the left of this shot a young black guy, a kid about Trayvon Martin’s age, was hanging out dressed like a hoodlum. But anybody with any sense could tell that this particular kid was utterly harmless.
Of course, you might imagine that the Confederate guy had a gun hidden under his welder’s cap, and was just lying in wait for his chance to shoot the black kid.
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“Are white Southern male welders committing violent crimes in any measurable numbers against other people, black and white?”
The confederate flag and those who venerate it represent a group of people who did horrendously violent crimes and supported horrific laws. Not last week, but within the lifetime of many Americans and historically. So, yes, they aren’t that different from venerating the thug life.
I’m sure he’s harmless, just as the kid in droopy drawers and a hoodie is harmless. But they do are reflecting a particular culture that is violent, or in the past has been violent. So handwringing over kids venerating the thug life is not really different from handwringing over the Confederate flag and those who wear it.
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(crime, I must always emphasize, is committed 90 percent of the time against other black people,
Who may well be dressed the exact same way. So perhaps they’re dressed as “street victims.”
, I thought about the commenter in these threads, can’t remember who, who imagined black people at the Whole Foods parking lot in Baton Rouge, sitting in their cars paralyzed by fear, waiting until the guy driving the pickup with the Confederate flag sticker departed before they dared to get out of their car and go shop. It was a completely absurd idea.
As it would be an absurd idea to stay in your car fearing a beatdown from a whole foods shopper dressed in a hoodie and jeans (black or white).
It was pretty liberating to realize that my problem with sagging jeans is simply that I’m getting old and have normal “kids these days” reactions.
People who act threatening are threatening. People dressed in a hoodie and jeans are dressed like either young teens, college studies (I still have my college hoddie!), or annoying hipsters. (see the “neighborhoodies” website)
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Floridan says:
I find it odd all these Southerners protesting that the Confederate battle flag is merely a symbol of pride in their Southern heritage, when that emblem officially occupied such as small part of the South’s history. European settlement in the South was already over 250 years old before the first Confederate flag was stitched together; it was used by the breakaway states in their fight to preserve slavery only for about four years, and was subsquently a symbol of white supremacy.
A more appropriate symbol — one that would represent the sweep of Southern heritage — might be the cotton ball or the plow.
(Lest you attribute this to a lack of understanding about the South on my part, I have lived in the South all my life and my father’s family has lived in various Southern states (and colonies) continuously since the 1700s. My great-great-grandfather was a Confederate soldier.)
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The confederate flag and those who venerate it represent a group of people who did horrendously violent crimes and supported horrific laws. Not last week, but within the lifetime of many Americans and historically. So, yes, they aren’t that different from venerating the thug life.
There’s no substantive difference at all between things that happened 50 years ago, but do not happen now, and things that are happening right now, 30 miles down the road, every day?
Next time I see some guy walking down the street in a Yankee military uniform, when they’re doing a historical re-enactment in the cemetery across the street from my house, I’ll have to run bury the silver in the backyard, because that man will have the symbolic accouterments of a group of people who were literally shooting at the people of this area only 150 years ago!
The idea that there’s no substantive difference, in terms of evaluating the threat to one’s person, between a guy who wears an emblem that is associated with criminals who terrorized black people 50+ years ago, but who have, thank God, almost entirely vanished from criminological landscape as a threat, and people who dress like and fit the demographic profile of a group who terrorizes and murders white and black people — but mostly black people — today, in the city 30 miles down the road — boy, you have to be some kind of ideologue to believe that. Baton Rouge is one of the five worst cities in the country for violent crime. Here’s a hint: the ones robbing, beating up, killing, and terrorizing the people of Baton Rouge aren’t wearing Confederate flags.
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IanH: It’s actually a serious question. Functionally there’s a big difference. Where I live I probably wouldn’t even notice a guy wearing Confederate paraphernalia, it’s so ubiquitous (though my state actually didn’t secede), and if I did, the worst I’d think is “Redneck”. Hell, I have family members who wear it. If I saw someone in a hammer and sickle, I’d be surprised, and if I saw someone wearing a swastika I’d clear out fast and maybe call the police. It’s not the same.
However, in the abstract, just what’s different about it? There are a lot of Russians today who have “pride in their heritage and a stubborn refusal to let their hearts, minds and ancestors be defined for them by outsiders”. Not a few yearn for the “good old days” of the Soviet Union. Those who suffered from the Soviet government of those days might see it differently.
Or put it this way. The heritage and ancestors of Southerners (and I include myself–I had ancestors who were slaveowners and who fought for the South; and others who fought for the North) were inextricably tied up with slavery. Yes, there were many good, decent, and noble things about that culture; but the fact is that that culture wouldn’t have existed to begin with without slave labor. When the Civil Rights movement began, many Southern states added the Battle Flag to their state flags or began flying it by itself, and the specific reason was to thumb the nose at those who dared fight for equality for blacks. There’s no question about what the flag meant to them at that time.
Given this, how does one extricate the good associations (“heritage”) from the bad (“hatred”) with the Confederate flag? I mean, I really want to know–it’s an honest question.
There are lots of websites where you can buy hammer and sickle shirts. I think it’s mostly ironic ultra-hipster wear, but isn’t that a (perhaps unintended) slap in the face to all the prisoners of the Gulag, to those who served in the military during the Cold War fearing that the Big One might start up any day, to the citizens of Communist countries themselves who were victimized?
And in terms of “heritage, not hatred”, is it possible that in a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years that German kids can wear swastika shirts with no more ill-will intended than the wearing of a Confederate flag? I doubt, it, but in the abstract, why couldn’t some future German say, “It’s about pride in German nationality and discipline, not about racism and killing people” ?
My point is not to say that those who wear Confederate stuff are the moral equivalent of Communists, Nazis, or skinheads; they’re certainly not My point is that it’s just as glib and facile to write it off as insignificant as it is to demonize it, and no one has really given a good account of just why it should be OK. I’m inclined to go along with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s take, that it’s part of the post bellum attempt in the South to re-write history from “defending slavery” to the “Glorious Lost Cause”, and that therefore it’s not OK; but I’m sure others may see it differently.
BTW, when I was about 18 I had a necklace with a Confederate Battle Flag pendant that I wore at times. I very much admired Robert E. Lee and I had a very romanticized view of the Old South in which slavery didn’t play much part. It was genteel culture and military prowess and standing up for what you believed in and, oh, yeah, they had slaves, too, but that wasn’t the main thing…. As I grew older and read more and met people of different backgrounds (my home county was and is less than 1% non-white) I realized that such a view was at best naive and fatuous, and I saw that the gentility and nobility was intrinsically based on horrible injustice to an entire race. In short, slavery was the main thing. I would not be caught dead in anything Confederate since.
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Anyway, I’m bored with this argument. I thought it was an interesting photo, capturing a lot of the themes we have recently argued about. I’m checking out of this thread, because we’re not getting anywhere.
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The idea that there’s no substantive difference, in terms of evaluating the threat to one’s person….
But is “physical threat to one’s person the main thing it’s about? What if I lived in a Jewish neighborhood and wore a swastika regularly and said “It’s heritage, not hatred,” and indeed was uninvolved in any racist, anti-Semitic, or neo-Nazi groups, had a perfectly clean record, and heck, maybe donate to Jewish causes? WW II was 70 years ago, after all. What if I wore a hammer and sickle in a community of emigrés that had fled the old Soviet Union?
Once more, I’m not saying there are no differences or equating Confederate flag aficionados with Nazis; I’m just saying that I don’t think literal physical threat is exactly the only or even main issue, and that I’m not sure exactly how one gives an account of just what the differences are.
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Are white Southern male welders committing violent crimes in any measurable numbers against other people, black and white?
By recollection, Southern Scotch-Irish have a distinctly more violent pattern of behavior than other White Americans. (That’s pure recollection, and I mention Scotch-Irish because I believe that’s the context in which I read it in passing. Out of curiosity, if this it is true that Southern whites commit violent crimes at higher rates than other White Americans, would you change your mind about expressions of regional ethnic pride? Again, I should say that I’m not sure that it’s true.)
imagined black people at the Whole Foods parking lot in Baton Rouge, sitting in their cars paralyzed by fear
Absurd. I agree. Because it’s Whole Foods. If I saw a black guy in a hoodie at Whole Foods, I wouldn’t be afraid. If I were Jewish and saw a truck with a swastika symbol on it, I wouldn’t be afraid. Because it’s Whole Foods. I’d be angry, but I wouldn’t be afraid. (And I’d assume that the guy’s truck was going to be vandalized.)
OTOH, if I went to a bar where I ran into a lot of people with swastikas or 88s, I’d be pretty uncomfortable and more so if I were Jewish. And, if I went to a bar where everyone had Confederate symbols on, I would be pretty uncomfortable and more so if I were black.
he chooses to present himself in the dress of a criminal class
What he actually does is choose not to distinguish himself from a class that commits criminal acts at higher rates than is the norm. Young people dress like rock stars and entertainers all the time, because of their illegal behavior. The issue, I think, is that we’re talking about behavior that (a) is wildly bad, and (b) isn’t restricted to the entertainers. But it’s less a positive choice than just dressing like everyone else around you, most of whom, I assume, are not criminals.
It’s also worth noting that just what’s paralleled is the ability to infer negative things from dress, not the ability to infer the same negative things from dress. You look at African-Americans in street criminal garb and infer (I assume) either a propensity for or a comfort with the existence of street crime that differs from the norm. I look at a guy with a Confederate flag and infer an attitude toward African-Americans that differs from the norm.
Assuming we had the tools to do it in a way that you’d find compelling, do you really think that if we split people into two groups that differed only by display of Confederate symbols, we’d find the same racial attitudes? Southern white males who do display the Confederate flag and Southern white males who don’t display the Confederate flag?
Also, what’s the deal with welding? Is there something about his garb that indicates welding. Is welding a field with peculiarly good attitudes on race, or peculiarly little overlap with criminal behavior?
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Dan says:
Rod: I think you are being intentionally provocative, as you know darn well that the “hoodlum” get up you describe is probably being worn by more white kids at this second than anyone else. It is simply a part of youth culture, like skinny jeans, American Apparel hoodies (there’s that word!), “skater” shoes, etc… By this same logic, people in suits could be accused of knowingly wearing the uniform of some of the most destructive criminals in the world today: politicians and Wall Street leeches. At the end of the day, these are by and large just aesthetic choices.
The guy in the Confederate flag cap, on the other hand, at least looks like he is making a more calculated political choice, even if he isn’t. Whether you like it or not, baggy jeans are more mainstream than Confederate battle flag hats, and given the fact that NO ONE can be unaware of the connotations on the CBF, I don’t think it is crazy to think that this guy is trying to make a statement that many find creepy. Kids in baggy jeans, on the other hand, just look like most other mindless kids who mimic what they see on MTV, Pitchfork, etc….
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Zathras says:
On lotto winners, here is more Dreher bait: http://news.yahoo.com/terribly-sad-true-stories-lotto-winners-164423531.html
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I can’t believe I missed out on the last “combox throwdown.” I know I’m joining this party late so these thought are going to be more general and less specific to any statements made above or in the past thread. Those just serve as exhibit A and B of what I am about to say below.
I find it is best to deal with the Anti-Confederate Battle Flag hysterics by calling them out for what they mostly are, grandstanding PC prisses who might as well tattoo “I’m a PC thought slave” on their forehead. It would have the same effect. Some will make political and historic arguments about the War of Federal Aggression to Prevent Southern Independence, but it is mostly rote. What they really want to do with their arguments is not make political points but distinguish themselves from all the grubby wrongthinkers out there who still have sympathetic feelings for the flag. They are attempting to inoculate themselves from the charge of wrongthink. Southerners who do this are especially pathetic. They are distinguishing themselves alright. Distinguishing themselves as self-loathing thought slaves.
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Red Philips sort of nails the dynamic here: affection for the battle flag is a way of claiming that you’re not just some random grubby dude, but someone with “pride” who’s “not afraid to say what those prissie pansies can’t!”. And oh, also, too, states rights against those interfering northern busybodies poking around in the 1960s.
Also: Check out the scary hoodlums.
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Mitchell Young says:
Tumarion:
In my high school physcis class, we had to build boats out of paper. One of my classmates, Vern Yamamoto (no his real name, but you get the drift as to his ethnicity), adorned his with the Japanese Naval ensign — you know, the sun and rays flag, the one under which Pearl Harbor was attacked, the Bataan Death March, rape of Nanking, etc carried out..
Vern certainly isn’t alone in admiring that flat
http://tinyurl.com/7byuyvpNone of his primarily white classmates got offended. You choose to take offense.
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“affection for the battle flag is a way of claiming that you’re not just some random grubby dude”
JustMe, I’ll put my not grubby dude credentials up against yours any day of the week. If you don’t believe me Rod can check them out on Facebook because he is my Facebook friend.
Rod is right that for most Confederate Battle Flag wearers it is a cultural statement, not a political one. As he said, and this is unfortunate, most are nationalists. For me it is both a political and cultural statement. Secession was and remains a legal, legitimate and responsible remendy to address Federal usurptation. And attempting to prevent secession by force was and remains tyranny. It was the South that was attempting to preserve the federated republic left to them by the Founders. It was Lincoln who was attempting to morph the Old Republic into something new and “preserve” a type of Union that existed only in his mind.
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Peterk says:
“who imagined black people at the Whole Foods parking lot in Baton Rouge, sitting in their cars paralyzed by fear, waiting until the guy driving the pickup with the Confederate flag sticker departed before they dared to get out of their car and go shop.”
people who make comments like the above apparently have never been in the South where a pickup with a shotgun in the rack and rebel flags on the tailgate is parked next to a Chevy with 26 inch rims and Black power symbols on the windows. both are parked at Wallymart and the two drivers nod respectfully at each other as they get in their respective chariots.
seriously would non-Southerners please STFU about life in the South? the trouble comes when folks like Sharpton/Jackson/Lee et al come south and open their yaps.I see more mixed couples in the South then I do anywhere else
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PDGM says:
Sands, at 1:16 pm wrote:
WTH, Copenhagen is only $2.09 in La? I can’t be reading that right.
To which I reply: when I quit using Copenhagen, it was about $6 to $7 in Los Angeles; this must have been about 7 to 9 years ago. When I started, some 24 or so years before in college–Catholic, Great Books, go figure–it was about a buck in the ag—oil town in So Cal. There, you could buy it just a few days old; in Los Angeles, you were lucky to get it under a month or so old. Yuck!
We used to pool our pennies to go buy it. then sit around the spitoon in a friend’s room having what we considered deep philosophical discussions while expectorating.
PDGM
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Let’s acknowledge that there are multiple reasons why one might wear a Confederate flag. These range from regional pride of a pretty innocuous sort–we all love our homes–to downright racist nastiness. I, who am half southerner, would not wear one, though I understand some of the appeal to regional pride. Then of course there’s the romantic silliness of the south, the whitewashed Sir Walter Scott knighthood stuff; but most people who are educated (or genteel might be the better word) enough to register that nowadays are probably not the types to wear the flag.
People will object that the flag was a symbol of an explicitly racist government and society that fought to protect slavery; to which I reply I’m really not sure that all who wear it would think that far or deeply. Do people who wear corporate logos on clothing they buy espouse the full history of the corporations that they choose to pay to wear the logos of? Do Apple lovers espouse subpar labor practices in China?
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Hector_St_Clare says:
Re: the trouble comes when folks like Sharpton/Jackson/Lee et al come south and open their yaps.
Jesse Jackson is a southerner born and bred, dude. He was raised in South Carolina and stayed in the south through college. I don’t know who ‘Lee’ is, but if you mean Sheila Jackson Lee, she was raised in the North but lives in the south (Houston) now. Neither of them is some kind of airheaded Park Slope liberal.
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As Ta-Nehisi Coates is fond of saying, left-leaning Black people are as much an element of southern culture as conservative white people.
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Re: I see more mixed couples in the South then I do anywhere else
I’ve never spent much time in the South other than Houston, so I can’t address that, but for the record almost half of Mississipi Republicans (or maybe it was Alabama) voted a couple years ago to keep the ‘no interracial marriage’ law on the books. You wouldn’t see that result in Massachusetts or Michigan, though we have a ton of racial problems of our own.
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Mitchell: I wouldn’t have been bothered by it, either; but if I’d had a parent or grandparent who actually had been on the Bataan Death March, or if I’d been of Chinese ethnicity, I might have felt different. One does “choose to take offense”, in a sense–but wouldn’t that apply to someone wearing a swastika, as well? What I’m asking is, how do we differentiate? To say that people do not take offense (which Peterk points out quite well) is one thing; to argue why they should or should not take offense is another. How do you decide?
Red Phillips: Secession was and remains a legal, legitimate and responsible remendy to address Federal usurptation.
There was a four-year long interpretation of the Constitution back in the 1860′s that ended in determining that in fact this is not the case.
And attempting to prevent secession by force was and remains tyranny.
See above.
It was the South that was attempting to preserve the federated republic left to them by the Founders.
The only federal power reserved to states that the South wanted to preserve was slavery. Lincoln did not try to end slavery in the South before the war, and said that if he could preserve the Union by not freeing any slaves, he’d do so. There is nothing the North did do infringe the South’s “states rights”–the main issue was whether slavery should be extended to new territories as they became states. The South wanted to preserve or extend the number of states admitted that allowed slavery. This is not an issue of federal republican power. Finally, the South fired the first shot. The whole “preserving the federated republic left to them by the Founders” is total b.s.
PDGM: Then of course there’s the romantic silliness of the south, the whitewashed Sir Walter Scott knighthood stuff; but most people who are educated (or genteel might be the better word) enough to register that nowadays are probably not the types to wear the flag.
Perfectly stated. I also agree with you that most people who wear the flag probably don’t think too deeply about it. I think that’s true about Americans and symbols in general.
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JonF says:
Red Phillips,
There is a natural (but not legal) right to revolution. That much is true. However that right is only to be exercized in extreme circumstances when all othe remedy has failed. Jefferson went to great pains in the Declaration of Independence to establish that such a situation existed for the colonists. That the secessionists of 1861 were in that situation is risible. The South had dictated federal policy for generations, and what it wanted it almost alawys got, albeit sometimes with compromise. The only inconvenience the South suffered in 1861 was seeing a president it did not like take office. My cats might as well call me a tyrant because fresh tuna is not served nightly.
No. This is what will get Dreher under a four figure trap.
http://www.biggreeneggsperience.com/Brisket.html