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Flags, Statues, and Squirrels
Kevin Williams has answered one question, at least, about the sudden, bizarre fixation with pigeon-spatttered statuary: “national panics over Confederate revanchism, like New York Times crusades against homelessness, tend to coincide with Republican presidencies. That is not coincidence.” He goes on to say that “the Left’s vandalism is intended mainly to get a rise out of the Right, in the hopes of getting some Republican to wrong-foot himself over a racial question.”
By attacking statues of confederate soldiers and their less savory defenders, Williams points out, the left forces Republicans not just to defend free speech for Nazis, but also to re-hash a painful war that ended a century and a half ago. Clever.
Given that the MSM is joyfully outraged when it spots a mere little piggy across that moveable line, and given that DJT was pretty much born with two wrong feet in his mouth, I suppose this could have been predicted and maybe should have been prepared for?
But our annoyance with the manipulations of the left could be tempered with a smidge of humility, couldn’t it? Or am I the only one who remembers the Great Flag Burning Kerfuffles of the ’80s and ’90s; those strange paroxysms in which Orrin Hatch or John Murtha would rise in a passion and propose to amend the Constitution to make burning the stars and stripes illegal and punishable by flogging or maybe the noose?
For you young ‘uns let me just say that no, there were not hordes of pyromaniacal leftists creating pyres of Old Glories on every street corner—that is, things were different then—-but never mind: here was an opportunity for patriots to bloviate and for a righteous guy to wear a t-shirt stretched across his protuberant tummy bearing a flaking, iron-on flag and a message inviting the other patrons at Howard Johnson’s or True Value to “Burn This Flag, [expletive]” a time in which a thousand trees were made to fall into a million gallons of ink and angst and sober dialectic before at last we fetched up, exhausted, where we’d begun (First Amendment) merely pretending to know it for the first time.
Given that not a single flag was likely to be saved from charring, surely the point of the exercise was to force Democrats into defending freedom of speech for anarchists and other anti-Americans?
Milo Yiannapoulous (I know: not exactly Man of the Hour) has said that the country is divided into those who want to tell everyone else what to do and think and say … and those who pretty much want to be left alone. After lo these past few years at Ricochet, I am persuaded that most of us are now firmly in the latter camp. Well and good, but was there not a time when conservatives were the ones who wanted to tell other people what to do, using the government where necessary? E.G. mandating prayer in schools, banning pornography and suppressing talk of gay and lesbian civil rights?
Here in Maine, the first big legal battle around gay rights took place back in the early ’90s not because LGBTQRST activists were pushing for marriage (let alone harassing florists). Instead, a conservative group put forth a ballot initiative which, had it passed, would have denied gays and lesbians coverage under Maine’s civil rights law. They weren’t so-covered, by the way: groups opposed to the measure were forced to expend considerable time and energy persuading voters to vote the preemptive measure down and merely maintain the status quo.
This was seen as a brilliant maneuver by the So-Cons in those days, so maybe siccing the SJWs on some bronze Lee is brilliant too, in its way. Human beings get violently, even idiotically excited about the wholly symbolic. Waving a symbol before our eyes is — Look! A squirrel! — a great way to distract us from, say, the stand-down in North Korea, as well as to inveigle us into wasting time and energy even if we learn to be a little smarter about shoving a fat foot over one mercurial line or another.
Still, in the long run, such maneuvers may be too brilliant by half.
For example, I think it possible that while the anti-flag-burning hoopla of the fin de siecle did nothing whatever for the safety of the grand-olds and high-flyin’s, it may have served to prepare the country and the courts for a more robust and principled defense of free speech. Is any Conservative calling for a law against flag burning today … when the wackos are actually burning flags?
And if the anti-pro-gay-rights ballot initiative sapped the energy and resources of Maine’s pro-gay-rights folk back in the day, it prompted, nonetheless, a statewide conversation about gay rights and gay people, and ordinary Mainers were compelled to give some thought to an issue they otherwise might have ignored or avoided. I don’t think it’s an accident that, not only did Maine pass civil rights protections by referendum within a few years, but (ante-Obergefeld) passed Same Sex Marriage by referendum as well. Once you open up the discussion, in other words … you’ve opened up the discussion. And the discussion will lead where it will lead.
In the long run, provocateurs cannot wholly control the provoked. However unpleasant (not to mention lethal) this historical moment might be, the “frank discussion of race” that Obama claimed to want so earnestly is happening as it, evidently, needed to. “Black Lives Matter” has met “White Lives Matter” and the American people are being more or less compelled to compare/contrast and think about whether we are or are not ready to let that whole thing go yet?
Meanwhile, remnants of what ought to be long-discredited ideologies have slithered out into the light of day, and what the sunlight reveals is plain ugly. The hammer-and-sickle is born aloft by people who smash windows and human heads — sometimes, but not always, Nazi heads. As in days of yore, Nazis and Klansmen are revealed to be nothing more than over-stimulated leftist bullies and losers, chubby thugs dressed like suburban soccer dads with bad haircuts and toy shields stomping around in angry circles with their selfie-sticks and cheap patio torches.
Creepy leftist middle-school teachers are revealing themselves as pro-violent anarchists on national television; social justice baby-brains are tagging the Jefferson Memorial and trashing Ben Carson’s lawn. The usual, overfed Jean d’Arc wanna-bes are pitching shrill martyr-fits in front of the handsomest of the cops outside the Trump Tower.
Might it be that freedom of speech is working as it is meant to work, at last? Praise be to God and Thomas Jefferson.
And — Heather — I’m sorry human life has to be quite so terrible and absurd. You deserved better. R.I.P.
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Wow. Just Wow! Kate. I’m so glad you’re on our side. These few paragraphs were better than anything I’ve encountered or hope to regarding this turbulent time. Brilliant. Period.
The Northern memorials to the Confederate dead were acts of reconciliation. One could argue that their removal would also be an act of reconciliation. But repentance is hollow if it’s not genuine. It’s even worse if it’s carried out by an act of force.
I said it once before and I’ll repeat it here: We have to stop treating life as a zero-sum game. Liberty is not gained by taking it away from others, you don’t create opportunities for others by denying opportunity to someone else, you don’t elevate your culture by trashing someone else’s values. What we’re currently doing is perpetuating a cycle of revenge politics along the lines of Arabs and Jews.
Tolerance can be found at the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and the Jefferson Davis Highway.
It’s so interesting—the more I am learning (from fellow Ricochetti) about the war and its aftermath, the more complicated it seems to be. The people on the ground at the time expressed about as many opinions about memorializing the Confederates as we do today. It’s not easy or simple and it never has been.
At some point, this becomes —as @derryckgreen rightly points out in another thread—really about forgiveness. About letting go and being glad, no matter who (what?) we are that we don’t have to live in the 1860s.
He was a white man, slave holder, and fathered a child with one (I guess that is correct?) The mob will banish him from public spaces soon enough….and don’t get them started on God.
I defend statues of Confederate soldiers, and I don’t consider myself unsavory in the least. I admit I’m biased.
I wonder. Relatively normal Democrats might be okay with ditching Lee (whether they should be or not—different question) but draw the line at Jefferson. Or maybe just begin to see the futility of the whole “tear down all the tainted stuff” project. That’s the hope, anyway.
Sally Hemming’s descendants are apparently DNA-proven to be related to TJ’s descendants. Which, to me, is not a bad thing. That is, yes, it’s a terrible thing to own human beings, a terrible thing to have a sexual relationship with a woman who cannot actually refuse your advances.
On the other hand, the division of the world into oppressor/oppressed dehumanizes everyone involved. Leaving Sally Hemmings aside for the moment, the last time I visited
Montpelier, Monticello (Thanks, Randy!) the docent told us about Jefferson’s chef, whom the docent was careful to describe as “enslaved.” Well, he was enslaved. He was also a really good cook, and Jefferson sent him to Paris to learn French cookery.Do we have to picture the chef miserable and sniveling, shuffling along with bowed head? Or can we picture him doing what human beings do: working within the parameters life imposed upon him to create a meaningful and interesting life? Couldn’t he have been thrilled to go to Europe, proud of his expertise; might he have felt friendly toward the man who recognized and supported his interest and achievements? None of this excuses the slavery—we get that. But why reduce all these people, who lived intimately together for decades, to caricatures of brutal owner and cowed victim, especially since the slaves, once freed, went on to accomplish astonishing things in spite of the obstacles racists continued to place before them? If they had intelligence, courage, imagination, creativity and agency after emancipation, they also had it before emancipation. They used it. They created lives for themselves, with families and friends, projects and ambitions and they understood the meaning of American freedom more fully, and embraced it more bravely than anyone would have reason to expect. If they—newly freed slaves—did not despair of (let alone want to destroy) America, how dare these cosseted SJWs do it?
Oh yes—I meant the unsavories marching around with the Tiki Torches. As opposed to the savories, like you.
@randywebster I changed it to “less savory,” hoping that folks will take that to mean that there are less and more savory ones.
Of course, now the word “savory” looks so weird to me that I’m half convinced it isn’t actually a word at all.
Savory….savoy…save me….
I understand that the Democrats no longer hold Jefferson-Jackson dinners.
I don’t know Kate…..the special interest SJW’s are driving the democrat bus right now I’m afraid. What have the “normal” dems drawn the line at so far? Crossdressers in bathrooms? Banishment of religious symbols during Christmas? Occupy Wall Street protests? Destroying Berkley? Banning jews from gay pride marches? Hands up don’t shoot? Nah, they will be happy to get rid of our white racist founding fathers as long as they are told they are “on the right side of history!”
Okay, but isn’t this why they lost the election?
I’m more hopeful because the Democrats I live with are definitely uncomfortable with all this crapola. Some are beginning to think maybe they aren’t all that progressive themselves any more. This makes me happy, of course.
What the Democrats had going for them before was a suave president who somehow made lefty progressivism seem civilized. Obama was “like us” —arugula and whatnot. We could imagine running into him at Whole Foods and exchanging stories about our kids over the $8 mangoes, and feeling good about ourselves because even though of course we have white privilege, which we totally get, Obama is our assurance that we aren’t the racists that the #BLMers are on about.
Well, the Dems don’t have their Obama-Beard any longer. They have their white geriatrics (Warren, Bernie, the New York guy) and they have all those terrifying nutcases—shrieking harpies exposing their breasts, angry black youths who have started wrecking not just Southern stuff (who cares?) but our stuff. And without Barack’s imprimatur, we’re no longer sure if, y’know, should we happen to meet in a dark alley, they would hold off on beating us to death long enough to find out that we’re the good white people!
There is no limiting principle on the SJW’s rage.
And social disorder always inclines people to seek law-and-order. Which is to say…to vote Republican.
Well you can hate a man for the color of his skin, or you can hate him for his religion, and the best thing of all it can be done without ever having to meet him.
Here is my contribution for religious tolerance, you see my dad and uncle were both converts to the Auld Religion, as were the girls they met at an ice rink. Identical twins married sisters. My paternal grandfather had been an Orangeman, but he never resented their decision to enter the Catholic Church.
This song should bring a smile, if not you may have some things to think about.
I just saw an antifa LGBTQWERTY supremacist burning a Confederate flag in a multi-gender restroom because a pizzeria bakery refused to cater xyr sologamist wedding.
Remember when the ACLU supported the First Amendment rights of Nazis? I hear that they lost a lot of supporters over that. Having recently moved away from the Chicago area, I had a pretty good idea how repulsive it would be for Nazis to march through Skokie. Nasty as the prospect was, it was clear to this callow youth that the ACLU were right to defend the Bill of Rights even though the vehicle for that defense was odious. The incident was likely the inspiration for this scene out of The Blues Brothers (language warning):
What a difference 40 years can make. Note some key differences between the Skokie case, along with its fictional representation, and today. Forty years ago
And now the Left wants to exploit this stuff. Seriously, guys?
Yep. Thank you for eloquently expressing what has been inchoately rattling round my mind for some time: the nagging awareness that, yes, there are lots of things I would rather people did not do, a prohibition I would cheerfully enforce with force of law. At least, I think I would. Does legislation succeed where civil society has failed? That’s a much bigger debate than my post.
Thanks for this. Years ago I read of an experiment where canvassers asked people to sign a petition. Most refused. The petition? The Bill of Rights.
“Hard cases make bad law.” I was in the ACLU then, and I opposed the position they took. Skokie was home to many holocaust survivors. The idea that these old folks would have to see Nazis march by their windows once again was and is repulsive to me. The route was chosen to intimidate. To me, that had the feel of an assault and not the mere exercise of the right of speech, er, expression. I would have made them go elsewhere and I would do the same today. But it was not an easy call. As the truism has it, there was room for good people to disagree.
Yes, and to about two and fifty candidates other than old Tom, as I understand. Besides, you would really have to think he was in love with a child as the result of his bereavement for his wife to be the received story. Meantime, his half brother Earle was a drinker and dancer who liked to tap his toe to the fine fiddling down at the slave quarters of an evening.
So it was his brother. Which isn’t….a whole lot better?
Yeah, I believe I alluded to that in my comment. As a Chicago-area resident, I was well aware of these facts. And yes, the route was chosen to be provocative. Free speech often means uncomfortable speech. It’s no great trick to approve of speech that’s not provocative. I even used the word repulsive in my comment. But, hey, you didn’t see fit to quote that part.
It turns out that the original plan was for them to march in Chicago. The city denied them permission. So you see, the authorities brought the problem upon themselves. Had the Nazis been permitted to march in Marquette Park as planned, the whole Skokie issue would never have come up. By attempting to prevent exercise of First Amendment rights, the government provoked a more extreme reaction. I’m sure the lesson was lost on most people.
Sometimes, and sometimes hard cases make good law. Don’t rely on an aphorism as a substitute for facts and reason.
Or one of the many other candidates. It’s irksome to me that this rather dodgy conjecture is now taken as received wisdom, lack of definitive evidence notwithstanding.
It was absolutely no better for Sally Hemmings. That’s what I don’t get. We focus so closely on which Jefferson brother fathered the children, we totally miss that this poor woman had six children, born into slavery, as she was. Nothing changes that.
Yes. Exactly.
People do unbelievably stupid things when they are in pain. That doesn’t make the story less believable, but it doesn’t make it particularly more believable either. As AUMom points out, it doesn’t really matter. Either way, Sally Hemings had a raw deal, and TJ dwelled in a world where this sort of thing went on. When the modern day anti-racists talk about Systematic Oppression, this is a fine example.
The present day, of course, is not. The Oppressor/Oppressed model ultimately dehumanizes everyone and flattens all the nuances necessary for genuine moral judgement. When an Evergreen student shrieks that she’s “oppressed,” she is claiming to be in the same company as enslaved women. And when my friend told me I was a “white supremacist” she is tossing me into the basket with ol’ Earle.
For those who really want a cheery start to the day, I present this (from my e-mail inbox):
As a response to the violent clashes between white supremacists and counter demonstrators in Charlottesville, Va., that left a woman dead and 19 injured, the national leadership of the United Church of Christ issued this Pastoral Letter:
Dear Members, Friends, Clergy, and Leaders of and within the United Church of Christ,
Last weekend, a group of white supremacists came to Charlottesville, Virginia, and incited violence to protest the removal of a Confederate monument. Although protest is the bedrock of our nation’s democracy, coming in riot gear proves that they intended to do more than simply protest.
We, the Council of Conference Ministers and Officers of the United Church of Christ, strongly condemn the acts of violent hatred expressed by these white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and Ku Klux Klan members. Their white robes and burning crosses were replaced with polo shirts, khakis, and tiki torches, while their lynching was replaced with a speeding car barreling through a group of peaceful protesters with the intention of harming and killing others, which it did. Their vitriolic hatred is the same.
We confess that the events of Charlottesville are systemic and communal expressions of white privilege and racism that continues to pervade our nation’s spiritual ethos. And if we only condemn the acts of August 12, 2017, without condemning the roots of racism, which perpetuate discrimination in our American schools, justice system, business, and healthcare systems, then we have sinned as well. We must work toward the Kin-dom of Heaven here on earth now for the sake of a just world for all.
We do this by committing to follow the ways of Jesus, who stood with the oppressed, spoke out against political and religious powers, and courageously embodied a just world for all as he sought to create it. Today, we must follow the ways of Jesus in addressing the hatred of white supremacists and racists among us.
Our local UCC churches must be true solidarity partners with those who march in the streets. Our UCC churches are encouraged to move from the sanctuary and walk alongside other clergy and community leaders who seek to resist, agitate, inform, and comfort. We must resist hatred and violence. We must also agitate ourselves, and our neighbors to acknowledge any racism within or among us. We must inform ourselves, and our neighbors what our sacred stories reveal to us of a just world for all. We must lament and grieve with those who are injured or murdered during violent confrontations with those who mean us harm. And we must comfort those who have been discriminated against with the transformative love of God.
As we go forward, let us model the legacy of activism through our sacred call given to us by our UCC ancestors: May we be prophetic truth-tellers like our Congregational Christian forebears, who marched in public squares demanding equality for all. May we serve others, and remain faithful witnesses like our Evangelical and Reformed forebears, who tended to the needs of the forgotten. And may we be courageous like our non-UCC forebears, who left their spiritual home and joined the UCC in order to fully live out who God created them to be.
In the days to come, may God’s truth, mission, and courage be our guide to embodying the Kin-dom of Heaven here on earth.
@katebraestrup, you erroneously misattributed this quote to me. It properly belongs to someone else. Kindly exercise more care when clicking on the Quote link: be sure to use the link that belongs to the original comment you intend to quote, not someone else’s.
I’m sorry. I’ll pay more attention!
I must have missed something. Was there a petition signed, or a vote taken to tear down these statues? If not who’s calling the shots. BTW – are books that aren’t approved of going to be burned next?
Right. Exactly.
I’m not in the mood for humility. And the present day Left is no loyal opposition.
And BTW Hillary Clinton had floated anti-flag burning legislation too. The flag is a symbol. Only the graphic makes it a “flag” .In the dark, you wouldn’t know the flag from your bedspread. I’d rather see it burned and stomped than see the Stars and Stripes graphic worn as a hijab..
And who cares where Tom Jefferson put his johnson? He was just a guy, like every guy we know. Like the flag: it doesn’t matter what you do with it in the dark; it’s the ideas he brandished publicly, that he brought to display, that are important to us– and to,the world, though most of its current population is too bigoted to know it.
I guess we disagree about how repulsive it would be. Again, I distinguish between speech and assault and to me that was an assault. Just as not all compliments are sexual harassment, but some surely are. The Nazis wanted to harass the holocaust survivors. And yes, if the City denied a permit in the first place, they were foolish.
I think the KKK, if it still exists, should get a permit for a rally in a park, but not for marching through the “inner city” for the purpose of provocation. It is a tough call, and allowing it to be made might well be on the slippery slope to tyranny.
I hope I am not being provocative when I wonder how we know. Unless by “it” you mean the condition of slavery itself. But it is the fathering of children with/on Hemmings that is charged, not the mere fact that she was a slave (though, I believe, related to Jefferson’s deceased wife). So in that sense, it does matter which Jefferson did the deed. It’s Tom they want to bring down, after all. And if it was Tom, it would also matter some to know the manner. Of course, a slave cannot give informed consent, so it is always like statutory rape even if the actual woman involved might conceivably beg to differ. As we say nowadays, the power imbalance is too great for consent, let alone love.