You know, as an unreconstructed Unionist descended (on the maternal side) from a sternly Abolitionist Pennsylvania Quaker who (family legend has it) maintained his house as an alternate safe station on the Underground Railway and was thrown out of the local Quaker meeting for his unseemly enthusiasm for Mr. Lincoln’s war – my affection for the Confederate battle flag, AKA the Stars and Bars – is right down there between fried liver and onions and anaesthetized root canal work. Or at least it was until this morning, when the news broke upon us. It seems that our betters, in the shape of the so-called intellectual, media, political and business elite have decided that no, we ought not to fly any version of the Confederate flag, buy any version of it embossed on various souvenir tat – or even a model of the General Lee car from a dimwitted 1980s television series, The Dukes of Hazzard – a show I don’t think I ever watched, since a merciful deity in the shape of the Air Force Personnel Center saw that I was stationed overseas for most of the years that it was on the air. And no, I don’t think I ever watched an episode of it on AFRTS. My toleration for idiot plots is low.
But my toleration for those who would deface or memory-hole history is even lower. A large portion of flyover country feels a certain amount of affection for that flag, and honors the memory of honorable men who fought courageously under it. Slavery? Slavery was over in this country with the end of that war. There is no one alive today in the United States who owned a slave (bar a small number of perverts and social deviants) and statistically speaking, darned few did even before 1865. So yes, you racial social justice warriors, keep on flogging the dried bones of that very dead horse, and to what end? Yes, the Stars and Bars was taken up as a symbol by Southern racists – who, I should point out, were Democrats in good standing with their party – in fighting desegregation, which is a cause that has been a back number since I was a wee bairn and my mother darned near washed out my mouth with soap for having repeated a slang term for ‘black’ that I had picked up at my (admittedly lily-white save for all the Asian kids and a smattering of Hispanic thereof) elementary school, sometime in about the first grade. Without actually knowing what the term meant, I might hasten to add.
No, I fear that this matter is not actually to do with the offense against all things 21st century and tolerant and political correct; it is a squirrel, a test balloon, a distraction. The offense of declaring the Confederate battle flag and all of its iterations is deep and calculated; an experiment, I might venture to wonder, on behalf of the Inner Party and intended to otherize and demoralize a segment of the body politic not noted for slavish devotion to the establishment party as defined by Angelo Codevilla. Let’s see what else might be removed from the public sphere and memory – now it’s one particular flag, but tomorrow will it be another, adjudicated by the Inner Party as being racist and divisive and all that. Say, the Gadsden flag … or some other? Suddenly gone because it is bad-think … and beyond that – movies and CDs – really anything with the bad-think logo on it. Is this the internet version of a bonfire in the public square? Ordered up at the command of the Inner Party and carried out by obedient sycophants?
Now, I think I want a Confederate battle flag. I want to have it hanging out in front of my house, along with the American flag, the Texas lone star flag, the Gadsden flag, and a USMC banner for my daughter.
I think that I want to get them before they are pulled from internet sales.
Discuss – and keep it civil, of course.
(Crossposted at Chicagoboyz.net)