Last week, Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, in the wake
of the massacre at the church in Charleston, decided to remove the Confederate
battle flag from where it had waved near the State Capitol ever since civil
rights progress in the 1950’s inspired southerners to raise it as a symbol of
their perpetual dedication to racism and oppression. Subsequently, a lot of other states and
corporations decided that it was no longer expedient to fly the flag as
emblematic of their state or to sell as merchandise to the sort of people who
embraced that emblem. Dylann Roof, the demented monster who murdered nine
decent people in the practice of their religious devotions, loved that flag and
identified strongly with it. So did
James Earl Ray. So did the Duke
boys. But for now, that flag seems to be
laden with historical burdens no one wants to deal with, and so, at long,
embarrassing last, it’s being got rid of.
I grew up in Texas and attended Robert E. Lee High
School. So did a whole lot of other
people in the south, where Robert E. Lee is the most popular school name
throughout the region. There was a life
size copy of a famous portrait of Lee on prominent display just inside the
entry to the school. I always thought it
somewhat odd that such honor should be paid to a man who, for all his undoubted
personal appeal, was by any standard a traitor to the United States of America who fought our bloodiest war in an attempt to disassemble what Washington,
Jefferson, Adams and Franklin (and, of course, many others) had fought so nobly
to create. I similarly thought it
slightly bizarre that the school’s girls’ drill team wore confederate army grey
uniforms (with little short, grey skirts, grey kepis, and boots). But I can’t say I gave it much thought. Until my senior year, my school was
segregated, drinking fountains about town were labelled “white” and
“colored”. My mother used to enjoy
telling a story of my disappointment when, as a small (but literate) child, I
discovered that the water labelled “colored” was not colored at all, but
ordinary, clear drinking water. I never
had a personal relationship with a black person until I went to college. The college was the University of Texas at
Austin, a football school whose football team did not integrate until 1967 –
the year after Michigan State University tied Notre Dame for the national
championship with a team boasting a number of black All-Americans from
Texas. Many Texans are racists, but for
most, that’s just a hobby. Football, by
contrast, is a religion.
The other day on a Slate podcast called “Political Gabfest”
a group of intelligent, well-spoken, knowledgeable commentators were discussing
the phenomenon of the sudden downfall of the stars and bars, as well as the
seemingly inexplicable fact of its longstanding popularity in the south. It was suggested that the flag had been
cherished as an expression of freedom, of defiance of the Federal government’s
imposition of integration and minority rights.
Odd that It was thought that the flag was a symbol of freedom when its
original significance was in leading the fight for slavery. It was also
suggested that the flag’s popularity might be less about the Civil War and
slavery than an instinctive need to identify with one’s cultural history. I thought about this for a time and realized
that there was some truth – some really horrible, tragic truth in this
notion.
There remain a few vocal lunatics in the south who voice the
view that slavery was a good thing – good for the agricultural south, good even
for the slaves, who were spared a miserable existence in the war-ravaged wilds
of tribal Africa. But I doubt that very
many people, even in the lowest depths of the deepest south, regard slavery as
a just and moral institution, whatever its practical uses may have been. However, the idea of having lost is a hard
pill to swallow, and I believe that many southerners, in the erroneous belief
that the south had ever been a very grand thing, liked to think that they
hadn’t really been whipped, that the glory to which they were entitled had been
criminally stripped from them by envious Yankees, and that “the South shall
rise again”. Part and parcel of this
fantasy is the idea that the old south had been a preserve of cultured
gentility that the Yankees of the industrial north could not appreciate and
were determined to destroy. And thus
there arose in the post-war south, a shared mythology of that golden epoch in
which the south (happily assisted by choirs of grateful Negroes) had flourished,
a bastion of everything good and worthwhile.
And it has been with this glowing picture of the prewar south that
southerners have long identified and which has enabled them to nurse their
lingering resentment of the Federal Republic and of the unworthy and disloyal
blacks for whose sake the damned Yankees had uprooted their imagined Eden.
Whatever one may think of the south and its “peculiar
institution”, there is no doubt that losing a war they believed their innate
superiority destined them to win, as well as the lifestyle they fought to sustain,
constituted for the south what (for an individual) a psychologist (myself)
would call a serious narcissistic injury – a blow to their own self-identity. Such blows are by nature extremely painful,
and narcissistic individuals (and, apparently, societies) will do just about
anything to salve the hurt. Denial is a
popular anodyne; so are drugs; so is anger; and so is victimizing someone else
as a means of sustaining one’s faith in one’s superiority. Most bullies have suffered what they
experienced as bullying. The southern
response to their particular “owie” has bundled all of these into an unsavory
broth they found comforting.
Unfortunately, like a patient who starts on oxycodone due to a serious
injury but gets hooked because they become unable to give up the drug, the
south has clung to its special home brew long after the initial healing should
have been completed. And the label for
this drug has been the confederate battle flag.
Like any organism addicted to an unwholesome drug, the
result has been that the south as a whole has failed to live up to its apparent
potential. It has frittered away much of
its positive energy in villainous but doomed opposition to social progress. It has remained heavily invested in small
agriculture, and in consequence has become dependent on Federal subsidies. It has failed to take a constructive approach
to eliminating poverty, and thus receives a disproportionate amount of Federal
welfare funds. It is as though, having
failed to defeat its great Enemy, it has become a parasite on it, pretending
each gulp of Federal blood is a step on the road to winning the war they
couldn’t win in the 1860’s. Of the
confederate states, only Texas has truly thrived. And it is tempting to suggest that part of
the reason for this is that Texas, unlike the rest of the confederacy, has its
own more or less proud and more or less independent history to celebrate. Texas fought its own war of independence,
defeated the alien state that had held it subject, and voluntarily joined the Union
on terms decidedly favorable to itself.
Moreover, Texas had not been dependent upon the plantation economics the
rest of the south counted on, and hence the abolition of slavery was more a
theoretical than a real issue.
Certainly, Texans have been racist and done terrible things in
oppression of its black citizens. But
this has lacked the bitter animus familiar to the rest of the south. Instead, Texas has gotten on with developing
its resources, and dedicated to state higher education an endowment larger than
any university except Harvard (which has been at it longer).
In sum, the south has spent the last 150 or so years
fighting a war of attrition against a “foe” whose resources are vastly greater,
and whom the south would be vastly better off embracing, working with
a progressive Federal establishment which has long since gotten over its
initial inclination to punish the south.
As it is, the south is like an orthodox Jew or observant Muslim who
chooses to starve to death in the midst of plenty rather than eat pork.
By an interesting confluence of events, I watched Judgment at Nuremberg the same day I
heard the podcast, and in that podcast the thing that resonated most was Emily
Bazelon observing that the postwar Germans acknowledged that they had brutally
wronged millions of people, and promptly got on with the business of making a
positive and prosperous society. They
are now the economic and political leaders of Europe. The states of the former confederacy would do
well to profit by their example.
The south’s counterproductive attachment to the fantasy of a
Golden Age in which they were a great and noble people has actually served to
keep them mired in petty grievances which directly interfere with the real task
of accepting that the heinous institution whose defense brought the south a
well-earned disaster was a mistake. If
the south is to ever “rise again”, it will not be by serving the absurd
prejudices of “white supremacists” (virtually all of whom have nothing superior
about them, but rather tend to be the dregs of an abased society). It will be by rejoining the nation which the
civilized world generally acknowledges as its leader and being a positive part
of what is truly great. This will mean
abandoning the Stars and Bars, and all the regressive, hateful, inhumane,
passive-aggressive posturing that flag represents, and getting on with the real
business of any human society, growing up to maturity to function and thrive in
an evolving world.
