Wednesday, June 24, 2015

driving ol' Dixie down

My coworker at the Golden Goose asked me my opinion on the whole "Confederate-flag thing." This is with reference to whether South Carolina should take down the Confederate flag (a.k.a., The Stainless Banner, among other names) in the aftermath of the recent shooting by racist nut Dylann Storm Roof (apparently pronounced "rofe") at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina (Wiki writeup here). Before I talk about the flag, though, let's back up and deal with some prior issues.

As I told my buddy Tom regarding the fate of Mr. Roof: "I say fry him. I don't give a shit that he may have been off his meds." What do you do when a bear wanders into town and kills nine of your people? Do you negotiate with it while thinking, "After all, it's just a bear; it's only following its instincts"? Not at all: you shoot the bastard—you bring it down, and that's how you stop more killings from happening. (This is, by the way, the best and only necessary argument for the death penalty. Screw the notion that capital punishment deters other people: it deters the only person who matters, i.e., the killer himself.) As I've noted before in writing about suicide and depression, these mental conditions may constrain our human freedom, but they don't eliminate that freedom. Even the most depressed person in the world is ultimately responsible for his or her actions. Freedom is always constrained in some manner; like water, it inevitably follows certain channels as it runs its course.

I told my coworker, regarding Roof, that the good folks at Emanuel—many of whom openly forgave the killer—were much more noble than I would have been in their place. Dylann Roof would have received justice from my bare hands had he killed either or both of my little brothers. I simply don't have it in me to forgive certain things, and in Roof's case, I would gladly pull the hangman's lever, or the rifleman's trigger—or would twist his head until I heard and felt his neck bones pop—and sleep soundly that very night.

Getting back, though, to the "Confederate-flag thing": as I also told my coworker, I'm technically a Southerner, having been born and raised in Virginia. That said, I've never felt particularly Southern. Other Virginians will note, jokingly, that this is because of my long-time proximity to Washington, DC: northern Virginia has never been "real" Virginia by most Virginians' reckoning—this despite the fact that I lived in Mount Vernon, on what used to be the property of George Washington himself—and who, if not President Washington, is the ultimate Virginian? So because I've never felt all that Southern, I can't say that I feel any twinge of regret or despair, or even nostalgia, at the thought that South Carolina might, by forever lowering the Stainless Banner, finally put aside an odious part of its past and move forward into this modern century.

I recognize that others feel differently, and part of the reason for this has to do with the power of symbols. Symbols operate on agreements (see my post on the supposedly pagan symbolism of the Christmas tree), and they also accumulate history. Think about the swastika: it may rotate differently depending on whether it's a Nazi swastika or a swastika coming out of ancient Indian culture, but the symbol has a powerful resonance in both the West and the East—all thanks to agreements as to how to view the symbol, and to the accumulated history of tradition that naturally accretes around the symbol. So I, along with many Northerners and most black folks, view the Confederate flag as a symbol that still echoes with the racism and oppression of the past. Other Southerners ignore this dimension and focus solely on how the flag represents "Southern culture," a notion with which I have little sympathy.

This brings me to an article by William Cawthon that I saw via Malcolm Pollack's fine blog. Malcolm's post is brief, but the article itself is dauntingly long. I spent an hour slogging through it during my lunch break yesterday, but I still failed to finish it. Not that finishing it was necessary: the author, a Southerner himself, repeatedly utters the same self-pitying refrain—the South's defeat turned everything upside-down; the North swept in and began systematically replacing Southern cultural notions and values with Northern notions and values; the South is steadily disintegrating. Alas for the poor, dying South. In that vein, Malcolm seems to be arguing, the taking-down of the Confederate flag is part and parcel with the continued dismantling of Southern history and culture.

Two things impressed me—negatively—about Cawthon's article: (1) he complains about the steady loss of Southern culture but provides almost no examples of what elements of that culture are worth saving, and (2) his article makes only the barest mention of slavery, which makes everything he does say in the article utterly beside the point. He claims, for example, that the South was economically more robust than the North before the Civil War. I almost laughed: the South's economy was largely founded on a booming cotton industry that was driven by slave labor! (Read more here. This is telling: "By 1850, 1.8 million of the 2.5 million enslaved Africans employed in agriculture in the United States were working on cotton plantations.") Is Cawthon really that blind to the irony of what he's saying? While lamenting the demise of his culture, the author offers us no reason to believe it worth saving. And out of 5,824 words, the author uses some form of the word "slave" (enslavement, slavery, slaves, etc.) only six times. Slavery is an issue that he actively avoids.

(In the interest of fairness and full disclosure, I should note that, having lived out in the sticks and having known country folk, I can think of a list of reasons to preserve certain aspects of Southern culture—perhaps a subject for another post. Most of the folks I knew while living in Front Royal were good, kind, and hard-working. It is, perhaps, condescending to say this, but the people I knew would have been horrified by the notion of owning a chattel slave. That said, there are also, even now, rotten undercurrents to that culture which, in an ideal world, would be rooted out and eliminated. Conservative churches in Front Royal, for example, aren't all that friendly to, say, gay couples looking to become members.)

There are Southerners who still maintain that the Civil War wasn't fundamentally about slavery: it was about states' rights. That may indeed have been an issue, and I don't think Cawthon is wrong to mention that issue in his article when he complains about Northern steamrollering of Southern ideas and values. But for Cawthon to elide the role and importance of slavery is a dirty move on his part, and I refuse to accept it.

My Golden Goose coworker, during an idle moment in the office, pointed out the so-called "cornerstone speech" given by the vice-president of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, on March 21, 1861. Stephens lays out the South's convictions, and its motivating principles, with grim and appalling clarity:

The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... 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 idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone 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.

Stephens, speaking with the implied authority of Jefferson Davis, says above that slavery is indeed a central issue—if not the central issue—in the coming conflict, and that the black man is most assuredly inferior to the white man. Southerners who shy away from this are shying away from their then-leaders' own words. Stephens also makes abundantly clear that he sees slavery as right, just, and an integral part of what makes the South the South. Is it any wonder, then, that black people nowadays—and non-black Northerners, too—might see the Confederate flag as a symbol of hatred and oppression?

So I can't get all that exercised about the taking-down of the Stainless Banner. I'm happy to see it go. And it's about damn time.

As for whether the South is really withering away, Wikipedia has this to say:

In more modern times, however, the South has become the most integrated region of the country. Since the late 1960s black people have held and currently hold many high offices, such as mayor and police chief, in many cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans.

[...]

Historically, the South relied heavily on agriculture, and was highly rural until after 1945. It has since become more industrialized and urban and has attracted national and international migrants. The American South is now among the fastest-growing areas in the United States.

[...]

The arrival of millions of Northerners (especially in major metropolitan areas and coastal areas) and millions of Hispanics means the introduction of cultural values and social norms not rooted in Southern traditions. Observers conclude that collective identity and Southern distinctiveness are thus declining, particularly when defined against "an earlier South that was somehow more authentic, real, more unified and distinct". The process has worked both ways, however, with aspects of Southern culture spreading throughout a greater portion of the rest of the United States in a process termed "Southernization".

Upshot: Mr. Cawthon's piteous whingeing notwithstanding, the South's going to be around for a very long time yet. It's not going anywhere, and by some measures, it seems actually to be thriving. If anything, southern red-state economies are proving, with Texas as a prime example, to be more robust than blue-state economies like California—a state that's managing itself into the ground thanks to over-regulation and a business-unfriendly climate. Perhaps like Germany, the South will reach a point where it repudiates its ugly past and begins to share only its good, positive, constructive aspects with the larger land.*

One last note: I see that Republican Senator Mitch McConnell has come out in favor of removing a prominent statue of Confederacy President Jefferson Davis and placing it in a history museum. I think this is a good thought, and it evokes the compromise that I personally envision: the removal of hateful icons and symbols doesn't mean their total erasure: erasing the past is never a good thing. We have to remember our mistakes if we're to have any hope of not repeating them. This is why Auschwitz and Buchenwald still exist; it's why Washington, DC, hosts the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Any Jew can tell you about the vital importance of memory. Put the past aside, forgive if you must, but never forget.

And that applies to a certain flag as well.



*Some readers might scoff at the idea that Germany nowadays is sharing only its positive qualities with Europe, especially given its own problems with race relations and immigration. From the perspective of someone in Korea who shares Koreans' frustrations with Japan's repeated attempts to change or erase its past culpability for countless depredations, I'd say that Germany has been remarkably forthright in its acknowledgment of and contrition for its past deeds. Germany now stands as one of two or three economic powerhouses in western Europe and is doing what it can to keep the Eurozone afloat, with little help from indolent Mediterranean sun-belt siesta cultures like Greece, Spain, and—obliquely—Portugal, all of which probably should be jettisoned from the common currency before the entire ship sinks.


_

10 comments:

Rory said...

'indolent Mediterranean sun-belt siesta cultures' - ha! Provocative, but amusing.

Malcolm Pollack said...

Hi Kevin,

If we're quoting contemporary sources, there's this:

“The sole object of this war is to restore the Union. Should I be convinced it has any other object, or that the government designs using its soldiers to execute the wishes of the Abolitionists, I pledge to you on my honor as a man and a soldier, I would resign my commission and carry my sword to the other side.”

That was Ulysses S. Grant. Whatever contemporary moral judgments of the Confederate cause might say, there was no legal basis for the North to go to war to abolish slavery. Curtis Yarvin argues, here, that the onset of hostilities after Sumter was a case of "camouflaged predation":

Perhaps it can be summarized as: "kick the dog until he bites, then shoot him." Press your target, using blows that hurt but do not draw blood, until he finally snaps and bites back. Then it's time for the Glock.

I'm very much a Northern sort of guy myself, and as the immigrant son of British parents, I have no slave-holding ancestors. And I am certainly not here to make any brief for slavery. But what I do find worrisome is the power and suddenness with which a venerated symbol, one to which millions of good Americans feel a hereditary cultural and familial attachment, is being declared verboten; it is difficult not to see it as part of a continuing humiliation, imposed by the victors, upon the losers of a bloody civil war. To someone like me -- and again, I have no dog in this fight -- it smacks of totalitarianism. All at once you can no longer buy Confederate-flagged products on Amazon, while Mao, Stalin and Che T-shirts are still, apparently, no problem.

Despite the idea that the Confederate flag is evidence of the South's lingering and malevolent racism, there's no reason to think that black people are less happy in the South: quite the contrary, in fact. So, given that this will inevitably be seen by millions throughout the South as I've described it above, what will the effect be? Imagine yourself a member of a culture that had been defeated in a devastating (and to you, entirely unjust) war. Imagine now the victors of that war moving to suppress any display of your culture's emblem. How would you react? Would it mollify and soothe you, or would it fan the flames of resentment?

(Having said all of that, I think it's also important to distinguish between public use of this emblem, such as flying it on government buildings, and private display. I think, as you might imagine, that public use should be a matter for the states themselves to decide, and I can understand why they might wish to discontinue it. And of course Amazon has every right to sell, or not sell, whatever they want.)

What really gives me the creeping fantods is when everyone suddenly jumps in the same direction, all at once -- and those who hesitate, or happen to think that the way everybody felt about it all just a moment ago is still maybe OK with them, are suddenly heretics to be scorned and disfellowshipped. And we are seeing a LOT of this, lately.

Malcolm Pollack said...

One other point, Kevin.

You wrote:

"(1) he complains about the steady loss of Southern culture but provides almost no examples of what elements of that culture are worth saving..."

Why must he? "Worth saving" to whom? Leaving aside the many qualities of Southern culture that might appeal to modern liberal tastes, isn't it enough that he represents a distinctive European/American culture -- joined to the American Union at first by choice, and later by brutal, coercive force -- that simply wishes to survive, and to preserve its unique identity?

John from Daejeon said...

It's a shame that the U.S. is basically being run by two states that are against states' rights (Califas and Nuevo York) while not exactly doing anything remotely in the best interests of the people of my home state of Texas or of the countless slaves across the globe in this day and age in the year 2015. Even the ex-senator from New York (how that happened is beyond me as the wife of an Arkansas governor and born in the crappy state...er...city of Chicago), and future president wannabe, allowed/allows slavery to thrive in NYC and the surrounding burbs while keeping mum on the subject. She definitely needs to be called out on this issue that happened (as should the President), and is still happening, on her/their watch.

In my opinion, the reality is that flags are just rags, but being forced/born into slavery is truly abhorrent and beyond evil and desperately needs immediate action whether these slaves be 12 year-old girls stolen and forced into either b.s. religious marriages with old geezers, arraigned marriages to profit parents of unsuspecting children, or young women lured from South Korea and China to be supposed well-paid manicurists by modern day slave masters in NYC and L.A.

Kevin Kim said...

Malcolm,

"But what I do find worrisome is the power and suddenness with which a venerated symbol, one to which millions of good Americans feel a hereditary cultural and familial attachment"

To have that attachment, though, requires ignoring what the symbol means for millions of black people. Surely their opinions matter. I see that a recent survey in South Carolina finds that about 60% of black people want the Confederate flag taken down. I suspect that, were the sample size larger, the proportion would be even more skewed toward removing the flag.

How white Southerners and black Southerners view the flag is not analogous to how people in the West and people in the East respectively view the swastika. The East/West swastika gap exists because there's little to no shared history, whereas the African slaves were right there in the States, toiling among the whites and bearing witness to the same flag, the same symbol.

"To someone like me -- and again, I have no dog in this fight -- it smacks of totalitarianism."

I might be alarmed if we were talking about banishing, oh, the Pac Man logo.

There's a temptation for people to get wild-eyed and start resorting to slippery-slope arguments. My God, what'll they banish next?? Such arguments aren't valid, as Dr. Vallicella has repeatedly noted: they're built on a chain of decisions, and they're plausible only to the extent that every link of the decision-chain involves choices made only a certain way. But in reality, human freedom is a zigzaggy, unpredictable thing, so no slippery slope is an inevitability. Hence the invalidity of such arguments.

And why don't you have a dog in this fight? Isn't creeping totalitarianism worrisome? I admit I'm having trouble figuring out where you're coming from and how invested you are in this discussion.

"Despite the idea that the Confederate flag is evidence of the South's lingering and malevolent racism, there's no reason to think that black people are less happy in the South: quite the contrary, in fact."

Viz. that survey again (mentioned here). I'll also note, anecdotally (so this might not have much force behind it), that people I know who compare race relations in Washington, DC, to race relations in New York City almost unanimously say NYC is a much better, much more harmonious place to live. Echoes of Civil War bitterness live on in the DC area.

Then again, there's that text I quoted from Wikipedia, which claims the South is more integrated than the North. Whatever "more integrated" really means.

"Imagine yourself a member of a culture that had been defeated in a devastating (and to you, entirely unjust) war. Imagine now the victors of that war moving to suppress any display of your culture's emblem. How would you react?"

Like Mitch McConnell, I suspect: "Remove that statue from the Capitol grounds!"

I think it's important to suss out what Southerners themselves are thinking and saying about this situation rather than presuming to speak for them (you might not be presuming to speak for Southerners, but your thought experiment comes dangerously close to doing just that). Prominent white Southerners of all political stripes seem to be voluntarily tilting in what I'd call the morally correct direction. This is a good thing! What's not to love about concerted local action? So what if streets get renamed and icons are removed and replaced? As one news article noted, this happened all over the place in Russia when the USSR collapsed—to much communist grumbling—but there have been no massive riots related to recovering past symbols.

More in a separate comment.

Kevin Kim said...

Malcolm,

"(Having said all of that, I think it's also important to distinguish between public use of this emblem, such as flying it on government buildings, and private display. I think, as you might imagine, that public use should be a matter for the states themselves to decide, and I can understand why they might wish to discontinue it. And of course Amazon has every right to sell, or not sell, whatever they want.)"

And that seems to be what's happening. Governor Nikki Haley has taken a stand regarding displaying the Confederate flag on state-capitol grounds; I haven't heard that there's been any mass rioting in South Cackalacky to protest what she's said, so I'll tentatively assume she's got a measure of passive and maybe active support. Senator Mitch McConnell, although not a state governor, has weighed in on Kentucky. None of this is the result of a despotic command from the Obama administration (not that I think the O-Admin is incapable of despotism): these people came to their conclusions freely. Rejoice!

You say, "I can understand why they might wish to discontinue it." Then I reply: "Cool! Just be happy, then!"

"What really gives me the creeping fantods is when everyone suddenly jumps in the same direction, all at once"

Good Lord, man! You've put yourself in a position where you'll be impossible to please! Haley and McConnell are shining examples of opinions being expressed and actions being taken at the local/state level. But because they're leaping in the same direction, this is somehow creepy. What would it take to make you happy? Is a sudden eruption of harmony really that scary? These are free individuals making free decisions, not zombies.

Side note: I'm always learning new words from you. "Fantods." Sounds like fish gonads.

[One more comment after this.]

Kevin Kim said...

Malcolm,

[Last comment in reply to your two comments!]

Why must he? "Worth saving" to whom? Leaving aside the many qualities of Southern culture that might appeal to modern liberal tastes, isn't it enough that he represents a distinctive European/American culture -- joined to the American Union at first by choice, and later by brutal, coercive force -- that simply wishes to survive, and to preserve its unique identity?

Not even sure where to begin with this one. Maybe with a question in response to your question: who is Cawthon's audience? If he's preaching to the choir, writing his message for the already-convinced, then he needn't have bothered to scratch out this long, exhausting, repetitive, self-pitying screed. But if he's trying to make a case to non-believers for the worthiness of Southern culture, it's absolutely axiomatic that he should provide evidence of worth. I did finally read his article all the way to the end, and I still didn't see any Southern virtues praised, aside from a cynical remark about how Northerners might appreciate Southern food or music. This was, to my mind, a HUGE lacuna in Cawthon's article. See that? I wrote "HUGE" in all-caps. That's how huge it was.

Sure, in the abstract, William Cawthon is beholden to no one. He doesn't need to write what I want to read; he need only write what he wants to express. But if he fails to include the basic elements of rhetoric that give rhetoric its power, then I have the right not to be convinced by what he's written. Ethos, pathos, and logos all need to be there. There's plenty of pathos and maybe a dollop of logos in Cawthon's piece, but zero ethos.

As for preserving the South's "unique identity," I'm still at a loss as to what this means. It's like Cawthon's lack of talk about Southern virtues worth preserving. As I quoted from Alexander Stephens's cornerstone speech, there was a time when black racial inferiority was a divinely sanctioned metaphysical certainty (Stephens goes on at great length about this in the full speech). This belief was integral to the South's unique identity. If we charitably assume that modern Southern culture's identity no longer has anything to do with this metaphysical certainty, what are we left with that's uniquely Southern? Food? Derivative of Europe. Gentility? Can also be found in the North. Charm? Ditto. Respect for elders? Same. What, then? That damn annoying country twang? I'm being a bit facetious, I realize, but I really to want to know how people are essentializing the South. It's an absolutely crucial question: What is being preserved?

Anonymous said...

Hi Kevin, JK here:

Do you have any opinion on what Professor Hanson expresses?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420142/america-one-nation-indivisible

Malcolm Pollack said...

Kevin,

You make some good points here. Let me boil this down as much as I can: to the extent that this is a free choice made by Southerners about their own symbols and culture, then I couldn't care less about it. To the extent that it is an act of oppression, of cultural bullying by a war's victors over its losers, I object. I note that it is yet another instance of a swiftly rising trend: the suppression of speech and symbols that express any cultural or ideological motif running counter to the Left's shrinking whitelist of permissible worldviews. The arbiters of culture in politics, media and academia are doing this now with growing confidence and vehemence, and anyone who loves liberty more than seductive visions of a flattened, numbed, and ovine social 'harmony' should find it very worrisome indeed. (You can still buy Nazi flags on Amazon, but the CSA must go!)

But there is no evidence that this is any sort of a free choice by the people of the South; that 40% of even blacks in the South have no objection to this symbol should suggest that a great majority of the general population feel the same way. As for Mitch McConnell, what he says or does means nothing; he is a dead soul who looks out for nothing beyond his own interests, and his hold on power.

DiploMad wrote this:

BOLD PREDICTION: THE NEXT STEP WILL BE TO DEMAND THAT CONFEDERATE SYMBOLS BE DECLARED HATE SPEECH. We will see kids sent home from school for having Confederate flags on their shirts; cars with Confederate decals will be banned from certain areas; and we might see the expunging of CSA symbols from movies and books and prohibiting Confederate flags at re-enactment events, etc. History must conform to the Progressive dictate of the day.

Does this seem implausible to you? You dismiss the idea of "slippery slopes", but all that your argument presents is a case against their always being slippery; history shows it is nevertheless the case that many a slope is indeed a buttered slide to perdition. Aggressions unresisted embolden aggressors; erosions of liberty create new baselines and dangerous precedents; and sovereign rights, when not defended, tend to vanish.

So you are right, and I stand corrected: if this is creeping totalitarianism, then yes, I should have a dog in this fight, and I do. "Is a sudden eruption of harmony really that scary?" Yes. Yes it is.

You are right to ask: who is Cawthon's audience? I do not think his piece was written to sell Southern culture to Northern and West-Coast liberals, who will scorn and despise it anyway; to attempt that would be, if I may use the term in its original context, a Lost Cause. It is a eulogy, a lament, not a pitch. Whether or not you think Mr. Cawthon "needed" to "scratch it out", clearly he thought it worth the effort. I found it resonant and sad.

Kevin Kim said...

Malcolm,

"resonant and sad"

Well, I'll buy that it was sad.

I also noticed that The Diplomad agrees with 1861-era Vice President Alexander Stephens that the Civil War was fundamentally about slavery, pace that drunkard US Grant and his wily, calculating commander-in-chief, the pre-Emancipation Proclamation Abraham Lincoln.