The Confederate battle flag (again)

[thatcrazycajun]

James Burns, a local fellow illustrator/designer of mine here, publishes an excellent editorial cartoon strip in The Sunday Paper, an alternative weekly launched a couple of years ago to address what its founders saw as a lack of diversity in political viewpoints represented by the dominant alt-paper here, Creative Loafing, and in our major corporate-owned daily, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Would that make it an alternative-alternative weekly? Just wondering...)

Anyhoo, Jimbo published this edition of his strip, Grumbles, a couple weeks ago in SP, by way of trying once again to combat the disinformation campaign still being waged by so-called "flaggers," Georgians still livid at the past two governors' ridding the state flag of the racially inflammatory St. Andrew's Cross, better known as the battle ensign of the Confederate States of America. (As of this writing, almost all the other states that still carried this symbol of "heritage" on their flags have removed it; Mississippi remains the last holdout.) He caught hell from one of his targets, who wrote a letter of complaint printed in this week's dead-tree issue of SP (unfortunately, the paper's editors don't seem to think the letters-to-the-editor section is needed on the website, so I can't point you to the letter in question; I'll try and post some of the text later). He has my sympathy in this; last year, I got the raw end of another flagger's temper with my own LJ post on the same subject (original artwork and responses archived here).

This week's letter-writer makes the absurd claim that the North couldn't have cared less about slavery (making the usual subliterate mistake and writing "could care less") and was really at war with the South over trade issues. So defiance of the law and direct orders from Washington, race-based brutality, secession and treason didn't enter into it, eh? Even a cursory glance at Wikipedia's page on the Civil War shows amply footnoted documentation of the historic fact (long accepted by all reputable historians specializing in the period) that the war absolutely was indeed about slavery, "states' rights" (read: picking and choosing which federal edicts to obey and ignore) and the South's festering disloyalty to the Union. (Do I really need to remind y'all that the South attacked first, at Fort Sumter?)

If I, a native-born-and-raised son of the deep South with a modicum of intelligence and no lack of pride in my ancestry, can see this, why can't these people? The more they bloviate, the more they remind me of Holocaust deniers.

Comments

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

Something you may not want to consider.
The civil war, while long past still has resulted in two very distinct societies in this country.
Look at a political demographic map.
It's only incidentally red vs blue.
It is still north vs south.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Point taken; as my fellow Southerner Bill Faulkner so famously and sagely observed, "The past isn't gone; it isn't even past."

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

the North couldn't have cared less about slavery...and was really at war with the South over trade issues.

You know, this ties into something else wrong with large parts of this country: a claim that a situation as complex as a war can be boiled down to one reason.

Trade issues mattered. So did the morality of slavery. So did the issue of states' rights, which was to say, the importance of Federal versus state laws. So did a dozen other things, I imagine, though states' rights and slavery have, in my experience, been the most discussed or understood.

It's the same as "if we topple Saddam Hussein, then everything will be OK! He was the only source of unrest in Iraq!" Or "Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda were working together!"

After the Soviet Union collapsed, a US intelligence director said, "we have slain a dragon, but now we live in a forest full of poisonous snakes. And in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of."

Why is it that so many people want to make every snake they encounter the only dragon?

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

No real comment on the flag issue, which I've talked about before and pretty much agree with what your saying.

I do want to reiterate my belief, however, that I wouldn't wrap a fish in the Sunday Paper. It's an alt.weekly if your parents ran an alt.weekly. Completely waste of trees. Good grief, its dull.

(Not that I have strong opinions, mind you. :))

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Dull? I don't find it so; IMHO, any paper that runs columns by Ann Coulter (admittedly, since discontinued due to her increasing controversy) and Jesse Jackson next to each other can hardly be called dull. And it runs color comics, unlike Creative Loafing and most other alt-papers. I wouldn't consider it an adequate replacement for CL, mind you, but I find its visual design, its prose style and its choice of columnists worth reading.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Putting the likes of Coulter and Jackson on facing pages is just chumming the waters -- it doesn't provide anything useful in the way of commentary.

The writing style, and the editorial priority, is utterly lackluster. The paper may be visually appealing, but so is USA Today, and it's still not worth actually reading.

We can obviously disagree, but I find the SP slightly less interesting than the free apartment guide that is usually being given away right next to it.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

wow - i was reading along and saying 'yeah, what an idiot', when i was blindsided by the 'south attacked first' bit. did not know that at all!