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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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I get the reasoning on the insistence of the father being Thomas Jefferson.
My point is that no matter how she felt about the father of her children, she bore six children into slavery. I cannot fathom anyone being okay with that knowledge, much less how she felt about her situation.
And essentially ignorant. I’ve been listening to a book on Audiotape about the slavery—fascinating. With the basic lesson being that the more you know about an era, the more complicated it gets.
I’d be interested in Sally Hemings just because there are these anomalous relationships you hear about that just turn everything on its head. For instance, Phyllis Wheatley was a slave and brilliant: she learned to read and write English as a small child and then started on Latin. Ended up writing classical poetry and being friendly with George Washington, who called her “Miss Phyllis.”
That’s not, somehow, the picture one gets when thinking about American slavery. Or this: that there was a point reached during the American Revolution when 1 in 7 soldiers fighting in the Continental Army was black. Did you know that you could think of Washington’s troops as being “diverse?” I feel like we should know these things.
I agree—mostly—about the flag. Which is to say that I wouldn’t burn a flag in protest myself, but I am pretty much unmoved when protesters do it. They just seem like such spoiled wanna-be revolutionaries to me. Sort of like a fourteen year old rebelling by getting stoned and listening to the Grateful Dead, and thinking that the adults will be shocked! Shocked!
They’re boring.
On the plus side, it would seem that the next #BLM march is going to be about Confederate monuments. By all means, let them yell “what do we want! Dead statues!” Better that then attacking police officers.
Funny how quickly the poor Australian woman’s death disappeared from the national radar, eh? But I haven’t heard of any black people being killed by police lately. Do you suppose it’s because it hasn’t happened, or is it just that #BLM has decided that even those lives are less important than street names and statuary?
Does it seem odd to anyone else that forty thousand people showed up in Boston to protest against Free Speech?
Were they there to support or protest Free Speech?
Well, apparently the forty thou were there to protest the original protest, which was in favor of Free Speech.
Well, it was anti-Trump, really. And anti- transphobia. And anti-kill-people-with-a-car. But there were signs saying “Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech.”
Kate, you doubtless know more about this than I do, but I was intrigued, so I looked a bit further into the history of gay rights in Maine. I know that this is not the main point of your post, but I think it’s worth responding.
Before discussing it, however, I want to comment on terminology. You write that the Maine ballot initiative “would have denied gays and lesbians coverage under Maine’s civil rights law.” Similarly, a Ballotpedia article on the 1995 referendum stated: “The measure was widely viewed as being aimed at hindering homosexual people from full civil rights.”
I find this view to be inaccurate. The issue is not denying rights to homosexuals. The issue is declining to grant special rights to homosexuals, on account of their homosexuality. I think that this is an important distinction, because it is this inaccurate (even Orwellian) rhetoric that undermines the traditional rule of freedom of association. Civil rights laws inherently violate freedom of association, and this is a very serious cost.
If the sources that I’ve seen are correct, the facts are as follows:
Given this history, I don’t think that it’s accurate to claim that the religious Right was the aggressor in this culture battle. While you were technically correct that Maine did not have prohibition on discrimination against homosexuals at the time of the 1995 referendum, that was only because of a veto in 1993, and some cities (including Portland, Maine’s largest city) had such laws.
The harassment of florists (and many others) follows necessarily from any civil rights law giving special rights to homosexuals. Give people a hammer, and they’ll find a nail to hit.