There is a beautifully written and wonderfully relevant post by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic: The Ghost of Bobby Lee. He's talking about most recently the ill-conceived and ill-implemented Confederate History Month boondoggle in Virginia. Every defense of this idiocy has involved the "pro" side of celebrating the confederacy saying that the Civil War -- indeed, the Confederacy itself -- was not about slavery. In fact, the fools who defend and promote the Confederate flag have managed to boil the whole thing down to a bumper sticker: "Heritage, not hate."
Coates uses history itself to put the lie to the worn it's-not-about-slavery bit. Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi, Virginia -- you read those excerpts and you decide. Not about race? Not about slavery?
Read the words of the President of the Confederacy on Coates' page, then read it here again:
The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew." Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth...
So let's get past this idea that Southern heritage is somehow free and clear. To celebrate Confederate history is to celebrate the idea that "the negro is not equal to the white man," and that slavery is indeed a "natural and normal condition."
With that as an introduction, let's consider for a minute not just the ridiculous idea of celebrating hatred and racism as "heritage," but why there is this need to embrace a past that is so clearly and so plainly evil at its core. And let's talk about the other ways this "celebration" manifests itself.
For example, the Tea Party and Militias.
In Oklahoma, they're going to combine the two, apparently. From Hunter's post on DailyKos:
I'd have a lot more respect (well, not really, since I have none to begin with) for these teabaggers and their constant edging towards secession or civil war or whatnot if even a single damn one of them could clearly elucidate whatthis Big Scary New Anti-States'-Rights Thing is, exactly, that is supposedly so threatening to the stability of the republic that may require armed conflict to prevent. At the very beginning it was an armed defense of slavery. Fifty years ago or so it required calling out the troops because the Feds were proposing that you had to treat black people like people. Now we've got a black president and Oh Mah Gawd, it's once again time for some gun-toting state militia types to protect us from the big, mean possibly-Muslim-possibly-Kenyan-possibly-Hitlerian-socialist-marxist-communist-vegetarian-too-well-dressed black guy.
Every damn militia in existence for the last century and a half seems to base itself around an abject terror that if they don't have really big guns, and lots of them, black people might hurt them by eating at their restaurants or marrying their lily-white daughters or providing them comprehensive health insurance or something. If there's anything else that "state sovereignty" means to these people, you'd be hard pressed to squeeze it out of them -- and it certainly hasn't been for lack of trying, over these many months.
I actually thing we do know what "state sovereignty" means to "these people" -- people, by the way, whom I spent my entire life growing up with.
A lot has happened in America since Appomattox in 1865. But there are large populations throughout the South that have suffered by the generation. Coates nails it in one of my favorite lines I've ever read on a blog:
This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present.
NPR's Dina Temple-Raston just did a piece the other day on "kinder, gentler" militias. And yes, I'll concede that the militia she profiled didn't sound nearly as bad as, say, the Hutaree bunch that got arrested for plotting to kill police and incite revolution. But the segment in her story which struck me was this:
People like Jim Gulliksen of Adrian, Mich., about an hour-and-a-half southeast of Detroit — "a nice little small town that used to be off the map, that now is very much in the spotlight" because of the Hutaree, he said, chuckling a bit.
It is hard not to like Gulliksen. He's soft-spoken and gentle. He hands over a card that reads "Lenawee Volunteer Michigan Militia: The Original Homeland Security." A former Navy corpsman now in charge of the paint and hardware section of a nearby Walmart, he's the CEO of the local militia in Adrian.
Wait a minute. ...now in charge of the paint and hardware section... at Walmart. Contrast that with being the CEO of the Lenawee Volunteer Michigan Militia. Which one do you suppose is more empowering? Which one allows people like Gulliksen -- ostensibly benign as he and his fellow militiamen may be -- to be more in control of things? In control of his family? His life? A guy carrying an FRS radio, four 30-round rifle magazines, a compass, a military-style knife, a 9 mm sidearm, and two magazines sounds more impressive than a guy who's mixing up two gallons of cornflower blue for your kitchen.
I swear to you I don't mean to degrade anyone that works a job at Walmart -- that's hard enough. But that's the point. In a historical context, Southern white men were prosperous land and slave owners. Now they work at Walmart. It may not make any sense to you, especially if you grew up in the North, but I promise that this is a very real sentiment across a large swath of the South.
And, in a number of ways, it is the fault of no one but Southern Confederacy-worshipers themselves, as, again, Coates nails:
Lost Causers worship their ancestors, in the manner of the abandoned child who brags that his dead-beat father is actually an astronaut, away on a mission of cosmic importance.
I know how this goes. For us, it's coping with the fact that people who looked like you sold you into slavery. It's understanding that you come from a place that was on the wrong side of the Gatling gun. It's feeling not simply like one of history's losers, but that you had no right to win. The work of the mature intellect is to reconcile oneself to the past without a retreat into fantasy--in either direction.
Hunter, in his post on DailyKos, is over the top in calling folks who form militias "idiots" -- or he's unhelpful at best. I don't think these folks have anywhere else to go. Yes, choice is some part of this. You can choose to be educated, you can choose to educate your children, you can choose to get help for the things you need help for. But there are too many other factors in play to simply say those who form militias are idiots, or that all tea party people are insane. They're not idiots and they're not insane: they're scared.
Their fear, of course, is not based in anything real. As Hunter says in the quote above, what are you afraid of? Getting comprehensive health care? A tax cut? Really? Even if Obama serves only one term, he'll do more to help the poor, the less educated, and those in need certainly in the South, but everywhere else in America, too. Of that I have every confidence.
But that's the problem, and I don't have an answer: if all we have to fear is fear itself, then why are so many of our fellow Americans afraid?
