Posted on 01/15/2003 9:14:10 AM PST by billbears
Yes, we were, that was my exit off of I-24. Just think, we probably passed each other in traffic many times, or waited in line together on the on/off ramp to the interstate. It's a small world.
Nashville is a great town.
It's a good city, with lots to offer to different people. I'm a country boy at heart, so I keep moving to try and stay ahead of the developers, but still be close to Nashville at the same time.
Thudd. Crush. Smash. Hole-in-floor bump.
I think we've just seen a rare phenomenon: Too Much Truth per square inch.
No moreso than to associate the New England patriots of yore with the Betsy Ross flag and the flag of the First Continental Congress that John Paul Jones fought under.
Both sets of flags are iconic for the issues that were joined on those battlefields. And the Southern cause, however much it may irritate you, is still the cause of Jefferson and Madison and their theory of government, the one that Hamilton tried to hustle out from under them, and Lincoln attempted to impose on them by open conflict and red war.
And an even greater mistake to turn the CBF into an icon of conservatism or Christendom.
I agree that it isn't particularly a "Christian" icon, and I suspect the presence of a codeword for racial identity politics in the particular use of the word "Christian" in this essay. That said, the battleflag is truly and properly the reliable icon of the idea that just because the federal government says or claims something doesn't make it so, and that people are neither servants of their government, nor its creatures.
Rockwell & Company have had to falsify a lot of history to reach that conclusion, but one shouldn't be deceived by them.
Leave the dross, but this essayist has put his finger on something that is very true, and true in an enduring sense that can't be invalidated by pointing to his idiosyncrasies. Which, by the way, is argument ad hominem, as is most criticism of the South.
IMO, the biggest enemy of the southern heritage are young southerners who haven't got a clue what that heritage is. Liberals see these people and immediately assume they learned it from their parents and their "heritage of hate" is suddenly alive and well.
When just as likely they learned it from the liberals.
I don't disagree with your observation of effects, but I disagree that it was intentional.
The liberal idea of direct payment of subsidies to bereft families grew out of the old Jewish social-welfare practices that were common in 19th-century urban Jewish society. The idea was to keep what was left of the family together, if the father died, by direct payments to the mother so the family wouldn't have to move or split up. (The Protestant model was the poorhouse, built on Elizabethan poor laws -- compare Hull House. I forget what the Catholic model was.) What the urban reformers of the early 1900's couldn't appreciate was that this welfare plan was operated in a community that was bound together with strong bonds of identity and a strong community of religious observance and religiously-based morals that were stronger than garlic.
Nobody, I think, could have forseen the effect that direct payments to mothers (not fathers) and the assumption that the father had been impaired or was absent had on poor people who applied for assistance. They responded to these rules in a manner not predicted by liberal experience with culturally- or religiously-bound Jews.
The tragedy is that urban liberals never went back and examined their assumptions for 60 years, not even when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who knew what he was talking about, suggested strongly that they should, in the 1960's.
Taking out the old Betsy Ross flag, the "Don't Tread on Me" standard, or the Pine Tree banner has some logic, because those flags haven't been used since the days of the American Revolution, a laudable event, and haven't acquired other meanings since.
Once symbols take on multiple meanings, you can't restrict their meaning by your own decision. Whatever the CBF meant on the battlefields of the 1860s, it certainly meant something specific on the civil rights battlelines of the 1960s. That flag may be a symbol of freedom, but it certainly did take on overtones of racial supremacy and segregation.
And the freedom represented by the CBF is "freedom" in the sense of group self-determination and local assertion against federal authority, not of individual or human rights. And ideas about just which groups and what kind of self-assertion and self-determination to what end cling to the flag as well. What's preferable about the US flag is that it does represent both group autonomy and individual freedom in a federal system, and speaks to all citizens, not to one group among them.
i'm REALLY glad they are not carrying the sacred banner of our dixie hero-martyrs.
FRee dixie,sw
That used to be my view, too, that it was an accidental by-product. The "progressive" nature of the programs was what really did it, as the liberals continuously sped up the destruction with increased subsidies for illegitimacy once it had started to occur. My understanding of the deliberate nature of it comes from blacks who had opposed it and spoken out against it at the time. There are more than a few who still say it today. Looking back at it, I don't understand how the liberals could not see what would happen. The most basic understanding of social engineering would reveal the end results of their progressive programs. The liberals pride themselves on social engineering concepts. Deliberate or not, the liberals 'did it' is the key thing, and we agree on that. IMO, liberalism is a mental illness, like schizophrenia, except liberalism won't respond to medication. :)
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