Brad Paisley is one of the few country singers the Phantom actually likes listening to; His "Mud on the Tires" album has some pretty solid tracks, although, like most country music, there is a strong streak of sentimentality.
Now he has a song, "Accidental Racist" which puts forth the proposition that just because a white guy wears a T shirt emblazoned with the Rebel flag, that doesn't make him a racist. Of course, what he is really addressing is the idea that a Southern white male who looks to the rest of the country like a Joe Sixpack racist does not necessarily harbor racist attitudes.
To the extent that Paisley is saying he does not endorse racism, this is fine. But to propose that a flag, which is after all a design meant to signify something, to be a symbol, does not signify something, this is pretty weak.
21st century Southerners like to say flying the Rebel flag over the South Carolina state house, or running with it across a football field ahead of the Ol' Miss football squad is not an endorsement of Confederate racism, but simply an expression of pride in a past which had more to it than slavery.
The Southern male who says this is saying, often pugnaciously: "So I'm supposed to reject my great grandfather who fought to defend South Carolina? Was Robert E. Lee a villain?"
Well, yes, actually. Lee and Jackson and Jefferson Davis may have been men who thought themselves moral and upright citizens, but they were in fact, by definition, indisputably, traitors. They took up arms against the United States of America and the war they fought took more American lives than the sum of all the other wars fought by Americans since.
And what were they fighting for? States Rights? The sovereignty of Virginia? The Southern Way of life? Defending Southern womanhood and virtue from rapacious Yankee invaders? Yes, all of those things, but mostly, primarily, above all: Slavery. The idea that one man could and, in fact should, own another man and all his children, his wife and that slave's nubile daughters, and that master of the plantation could use any of these slaves as he saw fit, is actually what the Confederate soldier fought for, ultimately.
Oddly, most of the men who took up arms for the Confederacy were not rich enough to own slaves, but they fought to the death to defend the aristocrats right to do it. Johnny Reb may have had as many reasons to join the Confederate army as there were Johnny Rebs, but, in the end, they fought to keep men, women and children enslaved. Lincoln would not admit it, for political reasons--he began his tenure by denying it, by saying the war was about Union, but by the time he gave his second inaugural address, he owned up to it.
These may have been gallant, courageous, self righteous men, but they served a truly horrific, despicable cause, the Southern Cause. The Cause of, "If I'm rich enough, and powerful enough to enslave people on my own plantation and in my own state, ain't nobody powerful enough to stop me."
And the Rebel flag, for better or for worse, is the symbol of all that, for most people.
If you walked around wearing swastikas, and claiming you were only showing pride in your German heritage, in the brave lads who fought for their country, we would say, well, but you could have chosen any part of that heritage and that history, but you chose the symbol of one specific part, the Nazi part which called for "purification" of all lands occupied by German speaking people through mass murder.
It does not matter whether or not Mussolini made the trains run on time, or whether Hitler built the Autobahn and the Volkswagen, and was nice to his dog; the big thing we are reminded about when we see his red flag with the black twisted cross is genocide. And it doesn't matter if Robert E. Lee loved his horse (who is buried next to him on the campus of Washington & Lee University) or if Stonewall Jackson was a Bible quoting man of great piety: They fought for keeping other people in chains, for lashings and legalized rape (of slaves on plantations) for a system of aristocracy which turned out to be thoroughly un American and un democratic and utterly despicable.
When McNulty runs across a typical Southern small time cop in southern Virginia, he assumes the cop is a racist, because the cop looks the part, sounds the part, when in fact the cop is married to a black woman and is offended by the racist line McNulty tries on him, in an effort to establish rapport. That is the sort of anti stereotype Paisley was hoping to present, but Paisley is not The Wire and the difference in the level of art is painfully apparent.
The Rebel flag stands beside the Nazi flag as a symbol to most people of hate, racism and a Cause which we are fortunate was tossed on the trash heap of history. Whenever that symbol is waved, someone should stand up and say so.
Qui Tacet Consentit.
No comments:
Post a Comment