Confederate Flaggery

People so want the Civil War not to be about slavery. They so want that old plantation way of life to be some kind of jolly role playing, instead of the brutal ownership of human beings of color by human beings of no color. It says something that people are still asking stupid questions like “Didn’t the slaves actually have it pretty good back then?” Uh…no.

This story from VOX tells about the stupid questions the tour guides get at Mount Vernon.

As FoxNews sees it, removing the flag of the traitors who fought a bloody war against the United States to preserve slavery… is a kind of fascism.

There’s such pervasive certainty about this across the South people get confused.

From Salon: This Confederate-flag-wearing woman of color thinks slavery was a choice. Like on a menu. Uh huh.

It’s what they are taught.

This article from Salon describes some of the ways school districts try to pretty up the old South and slavery.

And it doesn’t only happen in the South. Here's an instance from a grade school in suburban Boston.

100 years ago you could be considered progressive and still be a deep dyed racist. Woodrow Wilson, a progressive by most standards, purged black workers from the federal government. Hell, 75 years ago The New Deal was created by FDR––but only with the help of similar racists from the South. Which is why the New Deal didn’t help people of color.

Republicans might not know this: 40 years ago President Nixon had the idea of inviting all the white supremacists and racists and segregationists to come and join his party. Which is why now the Party of Lincoln is the one most associated with the Confederate Flag. Nixon’s Southern Strategy is (to borrow an old line from Edmund Wilson) “...the worst thing that has happened to Lincoln since Booth shot him.” (Wilson was referring to Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln biography.)

The New Yorker's John Cassidy on the racist strain in the Republican Party today.

This is how our best satirists have commented on the Confederate flag issue.

From the Daily Show this past week.

Bloomberg has an article about Stephen Colbert's war on the Confederate flag.

The best piece of patriotic performance art was this woman’s heroic climb. From Mother Jones.

By the way, the first casualty in the Civil War was a Union officer who was shot dead while trying to remove a Confederate flag from the roof of a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. I remember this story from my grade school book of the Civil War. I remember the story well. It was illustrated with the same painting Smithsonian includes in their story here. Hard to believe we still see people proudly flying the flag of a treasonous army the U.S. defeated 150 years ago this year.

On a more self-aggrandizing note, media critic Jim Romenesko ran my short piece about the group that kidnapped the New York Times url (or a very convincing counterfeit of it) to prank people. It is getting harder to tell news from satire these days, especially when the stories are about Republicans. But it doesn’t help us when the joke makes people cynical.

Differing Takes On The Shooting In Charleston

"I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. And I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah. That’s us.

And that’s the part that blows my mind. I don’t want to get into the political argument of the guns and things. But what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people that are foreign are going to kill us, and us killing ourselves.

If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would fit into our — we invaded two countries and spent trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives and now fly unmanned death machines over five or six different countries, all to keep Americans safe. We got to do whatever we can. We’ll torture people. We gotta do whatever we can to keep Americans safe.

Nine people shot in a church. What about that? “Hey, what are you gonna do? Crazy is as crazy is, right?” That’s the part that I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around, and you know it. You know that it’s going to go down the same path. “This is a terrible tragedy.” They’re already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this. This is a terrorist attack. This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina, which is a symbol for the black community. It has stood in that part of Charleston for 100 and some years and has been attacked viciously many times, as many black churches have.

I heard someone on the news say “Tragedy has visited this church.” This wasn’t a tornado. This was a racist. This was a guy with a Rhodesia badge on his sweater. You know, so the idea that — you know, I hate to even use this pun, but this one is black and white. There’s no nuance here.

And we’re going to keep pretending like, “I don’t get it. What happened? This one guy lost his mind.” But we are steeped in that culture in this country and we refuse to recognize it, and I cannot believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on that road. That’s insanity. That’s racial wallpaper. That’s — that’s — you can’t allow that, you know.

Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them, who wanted to start some kind of civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals, and the white guy’s the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him. We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing. Al-Qaeda, all those guys, ISIS, they’re not s— compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis."


~Jon Stewart, The Daily Show


“I find it extraordinary that people would call this a hate crime.”

~Steve Doocy, Fox-N-Friends

“Wait for the facts, don’t jump to conclusions ... most people jump to conclusions about race… There does seem to be a rising hostily towards Christians across this country because of our biblical views… [The shooter] didn’t choose a bar, he didn’t choose a basketball court [i.e. places where “black people” are usually found]… He chose a church. I would urge pastors and men in these churches to prepare to defend ourselves. We’ve got to arm ourselves... when women and children are attacked.”

~E.W. Jackson, a pastor and the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 2013, speaking Thursday morning on Fox-N-Friends