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The Urge to Purge
As I’ve said before, the primitive desire to purge our society of anything that makes us feel bad, particularly things that relate to history (no matter how far removed we are from the events in question) will continue, unabated, until people stand up and say “enough.”
Consider this opinion piece in the Washington Post, headlined “Remove the Southern belle from her inglorious perch.” The author, Elizabeth Boyd, makes the case for banning the hoop skirt. Yes, you read that correctly: The hoop skirt must be banned. But that’s not all.
Boyd, a “research associate in American Studies at the University of Maryland,” predictably trots out Dylan Roof’s murderous rampage as the rhetorical foot-in-the-door before urging the elimination of not only the Confederate flag, but a whole laundry list of cultural artifacts she connects to evil.
She points out that the University of Georgia, of all places, has already banned the hoop skirt, but laments that it took so long. “Long after many universities had officially done away with a variety of Old South symbols,” she continues, “the feminine figure most clearly identified with Dixie — the Southern belle — continued to enjoy free rein.”
How dare the Southern belle enjoy free rein! We simply cannot have that! To use the favored parlance of progressives, “That’s NOT OK!!!”
Boyd adds, “While donning a hoop skirt on occasion may not constitute a hate crime (whether it is a crime of fashion is another matter), make no mistake: The Southern belle performances routinely staged on campuses across the South constitute choreography of exclusion.” Wearing a hoop skirt may not constitute a hate crime? How generous of her to allow for that interpretation. She elaborates: “Discounted but powerful, these belle performances may not stem from conscious ill intent, but they are surely racial symbols as much as any noose or flag. And they can be plenty intimidating.”
A noose is the same as a flag is the same as a skirt. Adjacent to refuse is refuse, I suppose. All of it must go, because everything intimidates someone! And, as always, intent is absolutely irrelevant. Purge it! Oh, and, never mind the fact that women outside the antebellum South wore hoop skirts! She’s on a roll!
Boyd reveals the endgame before she’s through:
The hoop skirt ban is a great start … [but] if UGA and other Southern schools really want to lead, they will not only ban the hoop; they will also go after the belle. This will be tougher to do. It will mean discontinuing support for still-prevalent campus productions that promote imaginative connection with the Old South. And it will mean instituting new campus productions in their place. [Sororities] will develop new yardsticks for evaluating potential members that are less about looks and more about leadership. In short, they will confront the central role their choreography plays in reiterating race and class privilege. They will just say to hell with the belle.
There, dear readers, is the crux of it.
The unsophisticated and primal urge to destroy every bit of society with which we disagree — or might remind us of something with which we disagree — never goes far enough. To those who indulge in this thought process, once measure X is agreed-upon by hand-wringing college administrators or elite journalists or left-leaning politicians, that merely leads to the next essay by a social-justice advocate: “X is nice, but … “
It doesn’t end. Because a push toward totalitarianism never ends. It’s total, after all. It’s right there in the name.
The author doesn’t just want to substitute her own value system for the one used by various Southern schools and sororities. She goes much further. She dismisses those values as inherently superficial and hate-based and wants those values banned as a matter of policy.
To be replaced, of course, by her own values.
Enough.
Published in Culture, General, History
Definitely.
Agree!
The critics can get back to me when they complain that a hip hop video contains too many black people.
I just hate lesbian porn.
At this point I think it’d be easier to ask them what they don’t want to ban.
I suspect the list consists entirely of gay sex and abortion.
We need a post from Doc Jay: “The Hoop Skirt must be Removed!”
This is pointing toward a strange phenomenon—it seems as though liberals have become more aggrieved and hyper-critical during the Obama administration. This is not what I would have expected, though that may simply be my ignorance of political psychology. We’ve got a two-term black president…and hear far more about how racist America is than we did during the Bush years. We’ve got SSM, and suddenly everyone is getting wound up about florists? And the Confederate flag was taken off the statehouse grounds in South Carolina (which I thought was a nice gesture, myself) but now we’ve got bans on Dukes of Hazard re-runs and hoop skirts? Is this a human universal, or is it peculiar to our day and time (and maybe the French Revolution?).
It’s the way they’ve always been, and it’s why they lost me years ago. They’re never satisfied because they don’t WANT to be. That’s why no matter what anyone says or does, it will always be wrong. That’s why, when one of their stated goals is reached, like the end of the Vietnam war, do they smile and say yay, we did it and go home? No. They immediately start casting about for something ELSE to be irate over, some other reason to chain themselves to a fence singing We Are the World.
Their stated goal is never their real one. When a stated goal is reached, they feel disappointed and bereft until they can manufacture some new indignity or social injustice so they can protest against it and feel relevant. Look at the racial tensions they’ve resurrected. Ever wonder why they’re called “Progressives” when they never want to progress, but prefer us to pretend it’s Mississippi in 1957 again?
Right angles. Some time ago, on the cusp of my own self changing from lefty to grownup, I figured out that Lefties want always to be the Peter Pan in the room: they never want to grow up.
Of course, for parents, that is a “so bad, it is terrible” way to raise your own children. The world is not “Walt Disney.”
You put it exactly right: it’s about growing up. I was a flaming Liberal in college, which is age-appropriate. I feel it’s something you’re supposed to grow out of. These people can’t wrap their heads around being an adult, because adults are The Man. So they confuse growing up with “selling out.”
I agree with both of you, Dorothea and Right A. I’d add two thoughts: one is that whether you’re on the right or on the left, “fighting for” gun rights, women’s rights, civil rights, SSM is fun. You have the marvelous sense of adrenalized comradeship that only shared struggle can provide. So people cling to the forms of protest even after the aims have been accomplished—especially the young.
If you add in the chance to safely imitate real heroes,and take on some of the glow of martyrdom without having to actually inconvenience yourself (let alone suffer) better still!
Then there’s the problem that arises whenever a movement has, perforce, endured over years. The National Organization for Women, for example, founded in a hotel room in 1966 now has a national headquarters in DC, regional and state chapters, by-laws, a 42-member board of directors, and employees from the president down to the communications assistants and janitors. They get paid, promoted, provided with health insurance: whole careers depend on not having solved the problem of sexism in American life. The same can probably be said of the NAACP, the NRA, National RTL Committee and so on. Presumably, the problem they exist to solve will be solved—else why would we all be invited to contribute, join the struggle, win the war against women/anti-gun-people/racism/abortion? But what will Terry O’Neill or her equivalents do once they’ve won?
I’m late to this thread. To whitewash any part of history should be a crime. One of the greatest sayings is “If you don’t learn from history, you are doomed to repeat.” How can you learn what you don’t know? I am not Southern, but married a Southerner and have lived in the South for a long time. I love its history, good and bad. I have seen slave cottages carved from logs preserved as history adjacent to a fine property. I used to frequent a tiny restaurant where it was take out only, and you wrote down what you wanted rather than speak the choices – it was part of the era preserved when blacks and uneducated whites could not read a menu. The food was home-cooked sweet potatoes, barbecue, corn bread, peach cobbler, iced tea with lime – they made no apologies.
My sister combs used book sales and thrift shops and found a plethora of amazing vintage books early 1900’s and forward, pictures of USA in 1950’s, old war books, mystery crime novels, garden and medical books with old remedies, cookbooks with homestyle cooking, and school books that taught proper English and how to determine a moral outcome from a story (not kidding) – all priceless.
Old post cards and love letters from soldiers tell a story, the Depression, Dust Bowl – in all its ugliness, there is the beauty of strength and perseverence that overcame great odds. We need to know all of it.