If you want to get pedantic (and apparently you do), to say that the flag is on private property implies that it doesn't fly directly above the roadway. Nevertheless, in common usage, if the flag is big enough, high enough, and close enough to be seen as a large object by drivers, we can say that it flies "over" the highway. .......x
It would be pedantic except for the fact that you used the phrase in an extremely concrete manner in order to give Noachian the following lecture in Post 175:
Nobody can stop you from flying the flag on your own property, but there's no compelling or generally accepted reason for flying a giant Confederate flag over I-65......x
When it is pointed out to you that the flag IS on private property and does not “fly over” public Interstate 65, you now complain that pointing out those facts to you is being pedantic.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you are going to be concrete in the way you use language, then you should expect to have your concrete reasoning pointed out to you.
The current problem is that Southerners are now the only group in America that is being told that they must only have a generic national heritage and should put aside all notions of regional heritage. .....Polybius
Nonsense. Nobody is stopping you from commemorating or celebrating Jamestown or Williamsburg, Washington or Jefferson, Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, Blues or Zydeco, William Faulkner or Truman Capote, Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, NASCAR or Faith Hill. Nor does anybody say you can't feel deeply about Gettysburg or Antietam. But it is bizarre and unsettling for many that some people want to make the four years that Americans fought each other the centerpiece of their regional identity. ......x
Actually, it has nothing to do with “me” as I do not have a single Southern ancestor in my family tree.
What I am hearing, however, is that you have determined that Americans of Souther heritage have the right to commemorate only those aspects of their history that you find Politically Correct but they do not have the right to commemorate those aspects of their history that you deem Politically Incorrect.
How is that any different from an African American telling you that you can commemorate Benjamin Franklin but not George Washington or Thomas Jefferson because Washington and Jefferson were both racist slave-owners?
Oooops. Wait a minute. I’m sorry. I made a mistake. It seems you can’t honor Benjamin Franklin either as he once owned two slaves.
The Mexican example is a good one, though you misuse it. No one objects to Cinco de Mayo if it's like St. Patrick's Day or Steuben or Pulaski Day. Plenty of people would join in any celebration of a victory over the French. But if May 5, becomes a holiday of anti-American feeling or a celebration of Mexicanness over Americanness, people will object. That explains what many of us found so disturbing about the recent neoconfederate phenomenon.
During my Navy years in the 1980’s, I lived for two years in Charleston, South Carolina, a city steeped in both Colonial and Civil War history.
I seriously doubt that you can find a more “Pro-American” region in all of North America than the South.
If you want to see “Anti-American”, come out to the Pacific Norwest Left Coast where I live now.
While in Charleston in the 1980’s, being a surrounded by Civil War memorials was no different than going to the West and having Native Americans talk with pride about how their ancestors fought bravely at Little Big Horn.
Now, however, in the year 2005, as far as Southerners are being treated by race-baiters, any memorial or battle flag of the Confederate Civil War era is treated as if Southerners had erected a monument to the Verfügungstruppe SS.
The only “anti-Americanism” I see, as a non-Southerner, is the fact that it has now become Politically Correct to demonize the historical heritage of Americans of Southern heritage.
The New Englanders just about wiped out the Native Americans in New England?…..No problem.
The New England maritime industry made a fortune on the slave trade?..….No problem.
Africans in Africa enslaved each other in Africa for centuries and sold tribal war prisoners to white slave traders…….No problem.
The Native Americans and the whites massacred each other out West on a regular basis throughout most of the 19th Century?…….No problem.
Southerners owned slaves in the 19th Century? ………AAARRRRGGGHH!!!! What were they? Nazis?!?!
If you pick out any regional or ethnic group in American History, I can come up with a laundry list of extremely unsavory actions by that group. In fact, you can do that with any society on Earth.
However, in Politically Correct America, Southerners now have that dubious privilege of having their History constantly demonized while everybody else’s historical dirty laundry is discretely swept under the rug in the name of tolerance.
AMEN! You have absolutely hit the nail on the head!
Good Post!
It looks to me like you misread my sentence: Nobody can stop you from flying the flag on your own property, but there's no compelling or generally accepted reason for flying a giant Confederate flag over I-65.Translation: People can prevent you from literally flying that flag over the highway. They can't prevent you from flying your giant flag where it can be seen from I-65. But what's the compelling reason for flying such a giant flag in such a place? Why there?
I haven't seen a picture of the flag flying by the roadway, but what I meant looks pretty clear to me. I took it for granted that the flag was on private property, but questioned the reason for putting it in a place with no specific historical connection. The "but" refered to the questionable location of the flag where it had no special relevance or significance, not to the notion that it was literally over the roadway and apt to cause accidents. If I was unclear, then I was wrong, but that someone thought it was worth a whole separate post on semantics is unexpected and original.
Political correctness is a canard. We all have our own notions of what political behavior is to be approved of and what actions or attitudes are to be deplored. There will always be people in history who you or I object to celebrating, and it's deceptive to argue that it's "political correctness" rather than beliefs or values that dictate our judgment. If I don't honor American Communists or Nazis, something more than "political correctness" is involved, and if others have trouble celebrating the Confederacy I don't reduce their qualms to some trivializing label. If someone wants to apply flagrantly 21st century beliefs to condemn figures from the past who had no notion of our ideas, I'd object, but if people made bad decisions in their time, I don't think we should refrain from pointing that out because someone would label us "politically correct."
It looks like you've swallowed the neo-confederate line, and the whole lachrymose school of Southern history. The notion is that Southerners and only Southerners are encouraged to feel ashamed of their ethnic heritage. It's silly to make such claims when so much of our culture -- from Elvis and country music to NASCAR, line dancing, and good old boys, to Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Shelby Foote, and today's conservative evangelicals -- comes from the South or has found a home there.
What you're referring to has more to do with the exaggerated claims some Southerners make. If a New England Yankee insisted that we bow down before some special virtue in his 17th century ancestors, and pay homage to witch trials, Indian massacres and the beginnings of slavery, other Americans would rightly reject that If he offered up the haughtiest and most condescending New England Federalists of the late 18th century, or the most censorious, abstemious, and unctuous 19th century Whigs as models of emulation people would collapse from laughter. Most Americans wouldn't by impressed by a Middle Westerner who wanted us to find all virtue in his early 19th century ancestors and their policy of expansionism and racial exclusion, either.
And people react in a similar fashion to similarly exaggerated claims made on behalf of the Confederacy. You can't bring all your ethnic myths and mystiques whole into 21st century America and expect people to bow down before them. In daily life, whatever we do on Columbus Day or St. Patrick's Day, we are for the most part, just generic Americans, of the sort that your Southern nationalist friends object to being.
If the people who talk about the repression of the true Southern identity and heritage showed signs of being timid and easily cowed by bullying "Yankees" I might feel differently. If there's a little old lady in Atlanta or Montgomery who's afraid to go out because of what people might say about Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, I'd try to reassure her. But the Confederate sympathizers here give it as well as they get it, and if anything they're more aggressive than their opponents. There are plenty of people in the South who are proud of their heritage and confident enough about their identity not to feel that their worth stands or falls on what people think about a long passed rebellion, but they aren't the ones on line claiming that people have it in for them.
To use your own language it looks as though, what you'd really like is for others to say, "White Southerners held hundreds of thousands of people in bondage and went to war to keep them enslaved .... No Problem" or "Everybody else gets away with it, why not the South?" But abusing other parts of the country isn't going to convince many people of the justice of your case. It may advance the "political correctness" you object to, or it may just turn more people against militant Southernism. Probably both. The degree to which we're ashamed of the slave trade or land grabs, or massacres of Indians doesn't make people think better of the Confederacy or want to give them a pass, and needling Northerners won't change that.
Colonial Indian wars led to savage atrocities on both sides. Probably they should be taught more, but it's not as though all the wars were in New England or all the violence was committed by settlers. So by all means, teach about the Pequod War and King Philip's War and the Black Hawk War. Also teach the Yamassee and Tuscarora and Seminole Wars, and the Trail of Tears. But it's not the case that the later Indian Wars and atrocities have been ignored, either in schools or in popular culture. Indians haven't been in the news lately, but it's not as though anyone is covering anything up.
I do hear an incredible amount about the New England slave trade from League of the South types, and I learned much about that in school as well. Indeed, I've heard far more about that maritime slave trade than about the internal slave trade in the US or how slaves got inland from the coast. That's justifiable given the horrors of the slave ships, but it's not like students don't learn about such things.
And many learn little about what happened in Charleston or New Orleans once Africans arrived here. Not many of us knew the important role of slaves in building Southern railroads, until recently. New discoveries relating to slavery in the North are in the papers every year. People didn't have much knowledge of this in the past, but it's not like they're ignoring it now.
Over the past few years, the Confederate Battle Flag has become a serious issue with some people, as have the claims that the Confederacy was in the right. Confederate flags have been featured in the news for the first time in thirty or forty years, but I don't see any evidence for yanking this matter out of context and arguing that Southerners get a raw deal in American history or in American memory.
Some people have a Southern obsession one way or the other, that leads them to see the South as especially evil or as an innocent sacrificial victim. In an older generation of Northerners there was a feeling that the South was worse, and some groups play on that, but most people take a more balanced view of things. Most Northerners learned a long time ago that their own region has no special monopoly on virtue, and that racism was prevalent in the North as well as the South.
Right now though, a lot of us here simply react to the exaggerated claims of militant pro-Confederates directed at the rest of the country. If they said, "These were our ancestors. The cause they fought in may have been mistaken, but they showed great courage and deserve some respect for that, regardless of whether they were right or wrong. We want to honor them for the sacrifices they made," I think they'd get more respect and agreement. But that would involve taking objections seriously and thinking about them, and what neo-confederates want is a blanket endorsement of what their ancestors did, and an opportunity for combat. So they throw up endless justifications for the rebellion and attacks on unionists who also felt that they were doing the right thing.
Those who object to abuse of the South might be more careful about abusing other parts of the country and the contributions they've made. Some people have a victim mentality that gets rather repellent after a while. It starts out with quite legitimate sorrows and grievances, but then mounts to a feeling that their own group is persecuted by outside forces. When you think "they" are all against you, you come to see your side as justified in all things and decide all manner of abuse of "them" is justified.
If you're a friend to the South, you might think twice about encouraging that mindset. Even if you think the South has gotten a raw deal, you'll do it a favor not indulging the "poor us, everybody hates us" mentality, or the notion that the Confederacy was more or less like the South of today.
In the past generation or two the South has become one of the fastest growing parts of the country and one of the most powerful politically. They don't need tears and pity, but to figure out what they want to do with what they have in the present. Today, as in 1860, cultivation of grievances and victimology just obscures where we are now and where we want to go in the future.
If this comes across as lecturing or preaching or wordy, I really can't help that, for I'm quite a pedant myself. I try to keep it under control, but can't always resist.