So, I pull into the parking lot at work coming back from lunch, and a familiar symbol catches my attention from the corner of my eye. For some reason, those things always draw my attention. Mostly because they piss me off. But also, partially because I feel they say a whole lot about the person displaying or, even worse, wearing them. But that's not my point. Anyway, I look up, and there's this stupid truck with literally a dozen little retarded bumper stickers on the back window, all with some stupid saying and the confederate flag. So I read some of them. The first one says, "HERITAGE NOT HATE". Yeah, OK. And then, about a foot and a half away is a sticker that says "THE SOUTH WAS RIGHT". Um, whatever dickhead. The south was a whole lotta wrong about a whole lotta shit for an awfully long time. What exactly do you think we were right about? Slavery? Secession? Jim Crow? Lynching? Segregation? White supremacy? You're a real shining example of our intellectual superiority, what with your "BUBBA UNIVERSITY" sticker proudly emblazoned across your oversized pickup truck. (I'm not making that up). If the south WAS right about all of that, then how is this flag NOT hateful? To top it all off, was a GOD BLESS THE USA ribbon. So, which is it exactly? You like the confederacy or the USA? Because the two are pretty much mutually exclusive. You know, I have no problem with heritage. The past should be remembered and lessons should be learned. But heritage should be something to be proud of - something to celebrate - and nothing about the confederacy qualifies, except maybe its defeat. Let it go. No one likes a sore loser. Open your tiny little mind and join us here in the real world. Your flags are offensive and they make you look every bit as ignorant, bigoted, disrespectful, and insensitive to your fellow Americans as you no doubt are. (And that's another thing you might not want to advertise to the world.) Dummy.
Incidentally, if you are reading this, and you wear that flag, EVER, you should really think about all of the people - ALL of the people - you come into contact with every day, and the message that you're sending them. Because if you really think it's a pride thing, you're seriously deluded. That's not at all the message you're putting out there. Some things, you just shouldn't be proud of. And some of us, more of us than you know, already know that.
Racism is so passe.
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Excellent point about the CSA and USA being mutually exclusive. It's always amazed me how seamlessly the Southern boys' pride in the old Confederacy has been fused into their pride in the USA. It's not an intellectually consistent position, as you point out, but it is a very visceral one, nonetheless. The armed forces in America have always been "mostly Southern in tone" as one historian phrased it, something which was true before the Civil War and kept right on being true afterwards. Are Southern boys inherently more militant? Or are they just more susceptible to the romance of war (and "honor" and "courage" and "glory" other such abstractions)? An old professor of mine was convinced that the thing that really killed the Old South was Sir Walter Scott. Or rather, the 19th Century Southern male's infatuation with the romantic warrior mystique. Why was this so?
ReplyDeleteIt was those damn Southern women. A man (especially a whole culture of men) doesn't do anything that isn't inspired by their women. And I honestly believe that those genteel old matrons and fair young belles just dug it the most--at least until the casualty lists started to fill up.
So I am very glad to see such a fierce conviction about this in a pureblood Tallahasse lassie like yourself. You are, of course, right about the Confederacy being wrong (except maybe the legal justification for Secession--but you deftly neutralized that argument by saying "how can you say it was not about hate?" Nice point). TBC...
(Tom Maples, MySpace, 2005)
(Continued)But what do tell someone whose self-identity evolved within a family who was always fiercely proud of their ancestors' exploits during the Civil War? My father's great-grandfather, Elias Wood, was a musician who enlisted with the 28th Alabama. He is named in the regiment's honor roll for capturing a Union cannon battery at the battle of Murfreesboro. He fought at Chickamauga, the only major battle the Army of Tennessee actually won. He was in the picket line up front at the battle of Lookout Mountain, where he was captured when the Union forces stormed Missionary Ridge. He spent 3 years in a prison camp high up on the Mississippi River where many of the prisoners died. He came home after the war, married, had 9 children. Then his wife died, he married her sister, and had 2 more. My father has a framed daguerreotype of Elias and his wife. They are both gaunt, severe, and unsmiling, but with a palpable inner strength. Whenever my own strength has been severely tested, I look to that picture for inspiration.
ReplyDeleteMy mother's family is a bit more colorful, with two CSA Brigadier Generals. One of them, John Hunt Morgan, is moderately famous among historian-types as a daring calvary raider.
I remember when I first started to pay attention to this whole Civil-War-Hero-in-the-family thing and started researching "John Hunt Morgan, Brigadier General, C.S.A." that it struck me for the first time that "C.S.A" stood for "Confederate States of America," a separate country that used to be at war with the United States.
The interesting thing is that this point is still stunning to me when I think about it.
But what do you do with this if you are me? While I have avoided the question of slavery up to now--I will not duck it. My father's family (Elias's line) never owned slaves (they were too poor for that), but I'm pretty sure that the Morgans did. And while I neither of the Morgan Brigadiers are direct ancestors of mine (John H. is a second cousin and John Tyler Morgan is a great-uncle), the whole argument that "my family never owned slaves, we were just defending our homeland" is bullshit. Every white man who fought for the South was implicitly fighting to preserve the status quo--and what they got out of it was the comforting idea that, no matter how poor they were, they were at least better than a nigger.
So what does a modern liberal Southern boy do with all of this? I sometimes dream of being with Elias at Chickamauga or riding with John Hunt raising hell behind Union lines. I am proud of these guys--or at least I am proud that I am related to such brave and valiant warriors. Does the fact that their cause was wrong invalidate this pride? Again, it is visceral, not intellectual. While I have never flown the Stars and Bars and never will (to me it was corrupted in 1952 when Southern segretationist politicians hijacked it as a symbol), I have something in common with the alumnus of Bubba University that you hate so much. It's probably the only thing that I do have in common with him, but I share it nonetheless.
To this day, I have never been able to figue out the contradictions in all of this. Now I just accept that life is a paradox.
Tom
(Tom Maples, MySpace, 2005