Posted on 01/16/2011 12:18:30 AM PST by WilliamHouston
The only thing less exciting than the Ole Miss Rebels this year was their performance on the football field.
Ole Miss is recovering from one of its worst seasons in memory. The "Rebel Black Bears" under Houston Nutt have finished another losing season, 4-8. The only title the "Rebel Black Bear" can lay claim to is being the mascot for the worst team in the SEC West.
Where to start?
Ole Miss lost a humiliating season opener to Jacksonville State at home. The Rebels lost to Vanderbilt and were crushed by the greenest Tennessee team in years. The "Rebel Black Bears" also lost to every other team in their division: Arkansas, LSU, Alabama, Auburn, and State at home in the Egg Bowl.
Quite honestly, it was painful to watch at times.
I watched Ole Miss get manhandled by Auburn in Oxford on Halloween weekend. The Rebels took the field in Confederate Grey that night. QB Jeremiah Masoli led one Pickett's Charge after another into the Auburn defensive line.
I found myself thinking: it could always be worse.
If the Ole Miss Rebels had been led into battle by Admiral Ackbar last season, which seemed a real possibility in the pre-season, they may have run the gauntlet and lost to every team on their schedule. In 2007, Ole Miss managed to lose to every team in the SEC.
Surveying the wreckage of Ole Miss Athletics from neighboring Alabama, where the Auburn Tigers and Alabama Crimson Tide have now won the BCS national championship two years in row, I am forced to conclude that the Ole Miss experiment in mixing political correctness with football has produced catastrophic results.
I'm not the only SEC football fan who fondly remembers the days when Eli Manning was the QB of Ole Miss and Colonel Reb was a familiar presence on the sidelines.
Progressives are always telling us that the times are changing. In the case of Ole Miss football, the consensus around the SEC is that it definitely hasn't been for the better.
Colonel Reb is only the latest casulty in the emasculation of a once great university.
Over the years, the Confederate flag has been banned at Ole Miss football games. The school flag has been changed. The Ole Miss band can no longer play Dixie. Students are no longer allowed to chant "The South Will Rise Again." Now there is a "Rebel Black Bear" jumping around on the sidelines to remind Ole Miss students of their lost Southern heritage.
Last February, Ole Miss students voted to replace Colonel Reb, who was kept off the ballot and off the field for six years, with a new mascot. In the months that followed, there was a vigorous internet campaign to adopt Admiral Ackbar (the space alien Jedi from Star Wars who looks like a squid) and rebrand the football team as the "Rebel Alliance."
In October, Ole Miss students selected the Black Bear as the most palatable new mascot, which at least has some connection with Mississippi through a short story by William Faulkner. Now the Ole Miss Rebels are the "Rebel Black Bears."
The Colonel Reb Foundation and a number of groups on Facebook have protested the banishment of Colonel Reb and the undemocratic way that Ole Miss students and alumni are being systematically stripped of their traditions. They are not giving up and have vowed to continue to fight back against political correctness running wild on campus.
When I first wrote about this story, I predicted that the selection of a new mascot would not settle matters at Ole Miss, and would lead to a slippery slope of further demands and concessions.
Appeasement didn't work with the NAACP in South Carolina and the moving of the Confederate flag to the monument in front of the state huse. It hasn't work in Mississippi either where the taste of victory has only emboldened cultural Marxists to press on with further demands.
I said at the time:
"A few years from now, the same agitators (although they deny this) will be demanding that Ole Miss rename the football team, as the term "Rebels" can be construed as another politically incorrect reminder of the Confederacy."
In hindsight, I wasn't far off the mark.
The New York Times made a point in their coverage of this story to note:
"School administrators say they want to balance tolerance with tradition at Ole Miss (itself a nickname for a slave owner’s wife)."
It won't be long now until we hear the new battle cry that the very term "Ole Miss Rebels" is offensive to minorities, a reminder of the Confederacy which was based on slavery, and that the school must "celebrate diversity" and be rebranded as the "University of Mississippi Black Bears" for Ole Miss can "join the twenty-first century."
In the inverted world of political correctness, leftwing agitators insist that students and elderly people be forbidden from singing Dixie and that a harmless mascot must be banished from the field, but don't seem to care that Ole Miss QB Jeremiah Masoli has been convicted of second-degree burglary and marijuana possession.
They would rather have a drug addict and a thief representing their school to the outside world than a Southern gentleman.
The fight that Ole Miss traditionalists are waging to preserve their heritage is your fight. We know how leftists operate. We know these fanatics won't stop there.
We have long heard these calls from people who neither watch or enjoy college and professional football to rename the Florida State Seminoles. The College of William and Mary was forced to remove two tribal feathers from their logo in 2006 for being "offensive to Native Americans." These agitators have long been going after the Washington Redskins.
The colleges with animal mascots in the SEC like the Georgia Bulldogs and the Auburn Tigers will one day be harassed with ridiculous charges of animal cruelty. Isn't the "War Eagle" that swoops down onto the Plains a prisoner being exploited by mindless sports fans?
Youth for Western Civilization is the preeminent student organization in America leading the fight against political correctness and multiculturalist insanity on college campuses. The mascot wars in college football are only a symptom of a much larger problem.
The young men and women of the West are losing touch with their own unique culture, heritage, and sense of identity. We have become unmoored from our traditions. If our generation doesn't start fighting back today, we will soon be mourning the loss of things of much greater importance than lost football games and old college mascots.
Bring Col. Reb back.
It’s William Faulkner’s great-grandfather for gosh-sakes. The man practically developed Northern Mississippi himself and wrote a best selling book to boot. Someone dressed in a bear costume should burn down Rowan Oak - then Ole Miss would have NO history worth talking about and Yoknapatawpha can disappear into nothingness.
Thank you for your diligence on behalf of the forum.
But...I leave that stuff up to the most awesome mods in the world.
I can guarantee that my post would have been pulled within seconds. It’s happened before. ;o)
Pathetic doesn’t even begin to describe it!
“Fight back Mississippi!”
Yessir!
“Colonel Reb is now a big black bear?”
I don’t “get” it, either.
You know...they are behind the trend. If they had held out only a little bit longer I believe they would have prevailed.
“Can you play Dixie with Cowbells? :>)”
LOL!
I’d love to see that at Reser Stadium...home of Oregon State, another Ag school.
I’d personally pay good money for that, and it might start a trend there. ;o)
Georgia can’t play Dixie either...I was there when it was forbidden.
Welp...you know the contemporary Ole Miss wimmen better than I do, so I won’t argue with that.
Hey, mstar! It’s good to “see” you!
Masoli was a very young man, driven by the thought that he was the be all and end all of UofO football. I’ve been impressed with Ole Miss, and their willingness to give him another chance, and with some of his interviews I’ve seen lately. He seems to have grown up quite a bit since his most recent unpleasantness in Oregon.
I may be proven wrong, but I think Ole Miss may have been his redeemer.
BTW, it’s thought in Oregon that he was the fall guy for someone else.
I live in north MS about half way between Ole Miss and MSU. I am a huge MSU fan but I hate what the PC police have done to Ole Miss.
No apologies needed. You didn’t know, is all.
He’s a good guy, now...and I think he’s on the right track. Prayers for him from me, too.
I’m afraid the ole PC has infiltrated Ole Miss, and I hate more than anything to see that.
Love you, too, girl. ;o)
“there old times are not forgotten...”
Dixie Land!
Over the years, the Confederate flag has been banned at Ole Miss football games. The school flag has been changed. The Ole Miss band can no longer play Dixie. Students are no longer allowed to chant “The South Will Rise Again.”
The author didn’t mention that pom-poms on sticks are banned. They are mounted on hand paddles. My Ole Miss buddy tells me there were fears that someone would use one of the sticks to wave a Confederate battle flag. I kid you not...
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