Because The King of Soup keeps mischaracterizing what Sampiro has said?
I get that part. I don’t get why he jumped into the discussion in the first place. He wanted to defend the South, but it didn’t need defending at the time (although the OP has since returned and made some generally anti-Southern comments).
I wasn’t arguing anything other than the statement made previous that the flag was virtually not seen until the Civil Rights era, which is demonstrably wrong. I pointed out it came into increasingly frequent use after Birth of a Nation in 1915 and was a recognized symbol of the U of AL football fans after 1926- I made no value judgment as to whether or not it had racist contexts as I thought that the fact the movie used the KKK as the good guys and the U of AL was famously segregated that kind of went without saying. Spoke added that the ‘rebel flag’ has been part of the Mississippi flag since 1893- again, LONG before the Civil Rights era, and with no statement as to its racist content one way or the other. I also agreed with Zoe that I haven’t seen the flag displayed at “cultural events”- which is true (unless you count a rodeo 30+ years ago as a cultural event).
Somehow, KoS takes that as my saying that the flag has no racist associations and that I’m a “fucking empty headed” (his words) bigot, as is Zoe (which is one of the most ridiculous accusations ever on these boards- read her posts and you’ll know she’s about as much a member of the KKK as MLK was) and, btw, invites us for some odd reason to guess his race. Sweeping generalizations are of course wrong, unless they’re against southerners who say that the rebel flag has been ubiquitous for a century in various contexts but isn’t used at formal or cultural gatherings, in which case it’s somehow okay to categorize them as bigots.
I just remembered another example of “innocuous” use of the flag in the 60s-80s, again from the comic books.
The DC comic book G.I. Combat featured the World War II series “The Haunted Tank”. The ghost that haunted the tank was that of Confederate cavalryman J.E.B. Stewart, and the tank regularly sported a Confederate flag. Can’t find an online image from the period, but here’s a more modern take which shows how the flag was displayed in the comic book.
Now, unless you are ready to argue that the good folks at DC comics were promoting racism (and good luck making that argument), you might have to concede that the flag was not generally seen as a symbol of racism, but was accepted by most Americans as an innocuous symbol of the South. And, given the plotline of the comic book, and its popularity, you might also have to concede that the Confederacy itself was not widely viewed as innately evil.
You might also have to concede that (as I posted earlier) our society has become more sensitized to the flag from the late 80s onward. Certainly the editors of DC Comics were not inundated with protests from parents upset that their children were being exposed to hate symbols (!!).
(And again, I do not say that the flag ever should have been viewed as an innocuous symbol, only that it was viewed that way.)
Speaking of re-writing history, Lynyrd Skynyrd used to play its shows in the 70s with a big Confederate flag as a backdrop. (And no, it wasn’t a racist thing. You need only listen to “The Ballad of Curtis Loew” to know that the guys from Skynyrd weren’t racists.)
In recent airings of old Skynyrd shows, and in apparent deference to our increased sensitivity, the Confederate flag backdrop has been digitally removed. For example, see their landmark show at Knebworth Festival in England. The flag backdrop has been digitally removed from the video. (But you still see a few being waved in the crowd. In England.)
The perceptions of the flag have changed in the past three decades. (That is, they’ve changed for most people. I would imagine black Americans have always had a negative perception of the flag, but just weren’t as vocal about it back then.)
Does that count as a cultural event?
Heh. Yeah, I suppose it does. But probably not of the type The King of Soup, Sampiro and Zoe have in mind.
Yes, it does. Scholars of culture are not quite as snooty about what deserves that label.
I think it’s funny that people go to Ireland to hear the music and see the dance because it’s the culture of Ireland. But sometimes those same people scoff at the Appalachian and country music that are its off-spring and the clogging that come down from Ireland’s immigrants and been modified.
To The King of Soup: I acknowledge your apology, but I wish to finish answering your questions to me.
They are very relevant to the discussion of Southern cultural heritage. And as for what the flag “means,” you might have found an earlier discussion in this thread helpful. But you came in on Post 267 of a six page thread that has been going for over two months. And then you whine about what is and isn’t relevant to the discussion “out of politeness to the OP.”
Maybe that is my “default race.” Or it might have been that you mentioned your race in a post about what race Dopers are. I also assumed at first that you are Southern, but since you can’t come up with any examples of the things you are talking about, I now assume that you are not really familiar with cultural events in the South.
It doesn’t discredit what I have to say at all. I’ve lived almost 65 years in the South. I’ve posted here for many years. Dopers know how I feel about integrity. I’m sure they have formed their opinions one way or another. Nothing that you have said in this thread is going to change that.
Those of you who have come into the tail end of the discussion and not understood what was being said make yourselves look silly. At least read back a couple of pages.
spoke-, thank you for the voice of reason. And thanks, Sampiro. This kind of racial and cultural bigotry against contemporary Southern whites is tiring.
And I’m sure that you will agree that the film Gone With the Wind was not about the war. About two-thirds of it was set during the time of the war, but it didn’t dwell on the issues and didn’t show a battle. It also portrayed a very negative slave master. This isn’t to say that the film was in any way accurate about slavery. It just wasn’t about that subject much.
Not quite as snooty as what?
By the way, if you’ll notice the black concert-goers in the crowd (I spotted at least a couple), it’s clear they didn’t take the flag, in 1976, as a “blacks-not-welcome” sign.
Also note singer Ronnie Van Zant’s favorable reference to then-candidate Jimmy Carter. Noted integrationist Jimmy Carter.
I’m really just trying to establish a very minor point here, which is that said flag has appeared at cultural events, but to carve it finely, the appearance of black concert goers in the crowd only establishes that they were unwilling to leave after paying for access and then getting into the concert, unless you can show that they knew about the flag beforehand.
As to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s politics, I suppose you can prove about anything with rock lyrics. They sure didn’t like it when Neil Young sang out against slavery.
I behaved badly earlier, and I’m still sorry about it. I overreacted, admitted it, tried to explain what was said that set me off, and apologized. I apologize once more for being rude. It’s a hot issue, one I have trouble being polite about, but I’d like to try again.
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I believe the flag was conceived for and dedicated to the evil proposition that all men are not created equal. I think that meaning has survived intact to the present day and that when you see one it’s a good bet that it’s there to appeal to those who believe in that evil. I think that examples of it being used benignly in art are sometimes valid but almost always irrelevant.
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The prevalence of the flag, 1870 - 1950. I said that this wasn’t important, but I suppose I should have said it shouldn’t be. After all, it has nothing to do with what the flag means today and whether “heritage” is any kind of justification for it. Which is what we’re talking about. But although it’s irrelevant, it is important because the argument that it was common gets trotted out so often by cbf lovers, either as a useless distraction or as a prelude to arguing that in that eighty years’ interval the flag became somehow denatured, transforming into a generic, neutral symbol for all things southern, which means that people can be flying it today in all innocence with no implication of racism at all, just an honest appreciation of their history and culture. In this thread I got angry before it evolved from useless distraction to smarmy dishonesty, and it was wrong of me to assume that it would develop the way I had seen happen in the past.
I should have either ignored it or merely pointed out (a) that the pathetic examples adduced (the 1926 Rose Bowl and a defunct motor-oil logo) are better evidence that the image was rare than that it was common, (b) that the movies GWTW and Birth of a Nation prove the flag was common in the South in exactly the same way that the movie Back to the Future proved that the DeLorean was a popular car, © that those movies, though they don’t even qualify as poor evidence that the flag was common in that era, do rather neatly sink the argument that people of that era could have been ignorant of its meaning, (d) that the flag’s political use during the civil rights era did that again anyway for anyone who missed it the first time, and (e) that you can’t hide the truth by piling up irrelevencies all around it. Not that I’m suggesting anyone was trying to do that, but it shouldn’t be done even unintentionally.
- A couple of posters haven’t seen the thing at what they call “cultural events.” Something else that is irrelevant and probably should have just been laughed off, but is important because of the niche the claim usually inhabits, which is to downplay the significance of the issue by suggesting that it can’t be very important if it’s not visible to certain people in certain venues. Again I was guilty of anticipating the racist argument instead of assuming that it was just a stupid waste of time, and again I’m sorry for that.
I should have simply asked what percentage of all “cultural” events in their state they had attended over the last forty years, or if they thought that all those states which incorporate or make room for the damned old rag into or next to the state flag had never once sponsored a cultural event on state or municipal property where it flew, or what they thought “culture” was, or better yet, why they thought “culture” was the key word to begin with, since I only mentioned it along with “history” in the context of the frequent-yet-nauseating claim of every Yahoo displaying the thing that they do it not as a social/political statement but out of pride in their heritage, history and culture. Of course nobody ever claimed it was used as the backdrop for the Nashville production of Lohengrin, but it’s annoying to have someone assert that it wasn’t as if that fact were somehow important to the debate. It isn’t, and I just should have trusted everyone to know it instead of attributing ill motives to what was merely a silly distraction.
- Just to clean up as we go along, I never invited anyone to guess my race, I just asked Zoe to explain the reasoning behind the guess she had already made. I guess that’s a lesson for us all. If we can’t keep events only a couple of days old straight in our minds, maybe we should all exercise humility when discussing historical matters.
You have missed the point of “Sweet Home Alabama.” As discussed in this old thread.
Not having a DeLorean time machine, I’m not sure what else we can do to prove it to you. You seem determined to dismiss any evidence that doesn’t fit your thesis, and you are deliberately understating the evidence presented.
In other words, you are doing the debate equivalent of putting your hands over your ears and shouting “LA! LA! LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOUUUUU!”
The symbology of the flag is not as limited and clear-cut as you and the OP believe. The truth (as we say 'round here) is more complicated than that.
King of Soup being more interested it would seem in monologue than conversation I’ll table my own participation other than to say I just ordered this book. While there are some roll eyes on various review sites over the author’s job as curator at the Museum of the Confederacy, it’s published (or was originally published) by Harvard U. Press and gets excellent reviews for scholarship and objectivity. This thread and others make me want to learn more about the subject.
Shalom y’all.
Sorry. I didn’t think how that would read. I was thinking of the comments that a certain moderator made about the South not having as much culture. So the answer to your question is “a certain moderator.” That’s the best you’ll get out of me!
I answered your question. It was not a guess. If I remembered your previous post about your race incorrectly, that would be one thing. But I don’t believe that I was mistaken about that post.
I’m not certain what era you are referring to when you speak of the film Gone With the Wind. It depicts the 1860s. The movie was released in 1939, I believe. I’m uncertain of the accuracy of the Confederate Battle Flag for the scenes that it is used in. I don’t know which flag represented the Confederacy as a nation to the people. The flag itself has no intrinsic meaning. That’s why it’s interpretation has changed over time when the Battle Flag itself probably didn’t change much.
I don’t know what the people of any of the races thought of this flag in 1939.
No one here has been trying to hide the truth. The truth of what we have been talking about does not fit in with your preconceived notions of reality here. If Sampiro and I are being truthful, *and I think you know that we are,*then you have a little less reason to resent most people who live in the South today. But I don’t sense that you want to hear that or feel better about the situation.
Reserve your disdain for the Southerners who are mean and hateful about race. But when the rest of us are talking about Southern pride and cultural heritage, we are not wanting to refight the war.
I’m not sure whether you are saying that it is important or unimportant. I think that it is a good thing that that flag doesn’t show up in public much (except on a car now and then or on someone’s clothes.) For the first time since the Civil War, it is not common to see one.
There is that one group of Sons of the Confederecy (I can’t even spell it anymore) in Tampa that wants to put up that giant Battle Flag over the highway near a memorial. Everyone else in the South knows how tacky that is. Don’t blame the rest of us.
Hi, Zoe. My take is, first you guessed, then I asked, and I don’t remember an answer, but is that ever the least important thing in sight. Since you’re back, I’d like to refer first to my earlier apology, and second to the fact that I try always to be careful not to attribute any characteristic, good or bad, to southerners or any other group as a whole. I’m trying to make clear that my frown (how’s that for a euphemism?) is for the hypocrites who display the cbf and claim that it’s simply out of historical and cultual interest. I’ve been around enough to know that both the flag and the bankrupt excuses for flying it are both embraced and despised in the south and at any other point of the compass, and you can be sure that it’s the sentiment rather than the geography that attracts my attention.
You say that you have nothing to add about the use of the flag in GWTW. Okay, I don’t think there’s anything to add, either. In the film it was the symbol of Dixie heroism and southern resistance to northern domination, but appearing on movie screens certainly didn’t make it a commonly-encountered emblem in the south or anywhere else. Your statement that the flag had no intrinsic meaning and that its interpretation has changed over time is, to me, flatly contradicted by the facts, as I’ve said before. But even that is not quite an insurmountable obstacle for us, as we are not, as I understand you, in any disagreement over the symbology inherent in current cbf displays by the Sons of the Confederacy and other similar outfits. At the least, you seem to agree that the flag is a universally-understood “blacks keep out” sign. Which makes it a problem regardless of its history.
Sampiro (wonderful guy, I’m sure, though he sometimes comes across as having, when he was young, been told by his mother how special he was maybe once too often), thinks I want monologue rather than dialogue. Nope: I like my own words, but I used a lot of them to try to make clear to him my profound desire to listen to him (or spoke-, for that matter) explain the purpose behind long posts detailing post-bellum, pre-civil rights displays of the cbf attempting to prove it was commonplace (and, to put it kindly, falling enough short to actually demonstrate the opposite), if it were intended neither as a pointless distraction nor as an attempt to portray the image as a ubiquitous and innocuous symbol, which it wasn’t. Let’s face it: if the 1926 Rose Bowl and a dead motor-oil logo are the fruits of the research, it was not, repeat not, common: its presence in two popular movies serve only to prove that the meaning of the flag was clear and universal even while it’s physical presence was not. But Sampiro seems, more or less, to be on the right side of the controversy, which is why I was so concerned about the posts and why I was maybe too aggressive about them. But the people on the right side of the controversy really have to quit feeding those who are wrong.
I’m all for southern pride and heritage. I’m not southern by birth, but I’m not proud of whichever of my ancestors may have contributed to and profited by treason and slavery – I’m proud of other parts of my personal history. Everybody else, no matter where they are from, also gets to pick the parts of their past they celebrate and which they deplore. Nobody’s responsible for their parentage, but they are responsible for that choice.
The one that preceded repeating the exact same insulting comments in slightly different wording?
But some do display it for those reasons. I’m not saying it’s not insensitive, but I am saying not everybody has racist reasons.
In GWTW it was less about Dixie heroic imagery than a flag that represented the fact Georgia was in the Confederacy. The movie was not particularly political- it was about a woman who happened to live in the south in terrible times. As for it not being commonly-encountered, I’ll table til the book I mentioned above comes in, though I will ask for a cite to your argument that it was not commonly encountered or that there was any serious widespread offensiveness expressed about the flag before the last 30 years.
Oh don’t bring that bullshit over here, even I’m bored with it. (The usual “PM me if you need explanation rather than addressing it here” disclaimer.)
I’m not sure how to respond to that because I don’t know what the hell it means. It is interesting how me, Zoe, Spoke, and probably others seem to keep misinterpreting you in the same way- must be that southern school systems are at least standardized in their failings.
I had relatives who really did fight for that flag, or one almost exactly like it (this one to be precise) and I’ve researched their regimental histories and lives in infinite detail as I have ancestors from 16th century Switzerland, 17th century Ulster and 18th century New Jersey. I have great interest in them, but no great pride and no great shame either one, just a sense of connection. (IIRC, Zoe’s grandfather fought in the war- i.e. only one degree of removal from her to him; my great-grandfather, whose children I knew well, was too young to fight but remembered the war very well [he was 13 when it ended] and there are tales passed down in the family on all sides about it- so the sense of connection- not pride, not apologetics, not the need to justify- but the curiosity to examine the matter since it affected the lives of people who affected our own lives both within and outside of our families- is acute in some of us.
Anything above the most casual perusal of the history of those times will tell you that as with most history in general and as with the history of Southern race relations or American sociology on the regional or state or national level or even the history and ethics of slavery itself, there is nothing even r-e-m-o-t-e-l-y simple or uniform or one-sided or all good or all evil or all anything else about them. Slavery was an extraordinarily complex and constantly varied and ever changing system.
The Confederacy was formed by the acts of the plutocratic planter class and the politicians they supplied or supported wishing to keep slavery (for, incidentally, very valid reasons- divorcing the ethics of the practice, they believed that the southern economy would collapse without slavery- which it did- and to paraphrase the [Upton Sinclair?] quote, it’s pretty hard to convince somebody of the evils of a system when their financial well being depends on them not being convinced of it). The Confederate armed forces were comprised by a million troops who fought for thousands of different reasons and with slavery ranging from most important among those reasons for some to not-important-in-the-least for others (think Cleburne’s regiment of Irish immigrants or Confederate troops from the poorest regions of Tennessee or men like most of my own ancestors who had small farms and large families and had borne the arrogance of the planter class gave much of a damn whether the slave owners kept their Greek Revival mansions and hoop skirts when they were in a field being shot at after having not eaten in days and not having slept a full night in months and all for 33 cents per day in worthless script while their families were comprised of unarmed women and old people who were starving to death? Not likely. Even General Wade Hampton, the owner, with his brothers, of more than 3,000 slaves and more than 80,000 acres and thus with more to lose than almost anybody in the south, was probably not that terribly committed to the cause when he was having horses shot from under him and seeing battle every day for weeks on end. Most southerners, regardless of their opinions on the ethics of slavery, did not feel the preservation of the system was worth dying for anymore than most white northerners felt its abolition was worth dying for but fought for more immediate reasons, usually tied to geography, and not least among their motivations were “Whatever the cause or justification there’s an army in our state that’s attacking and killing our people- let’s get them out and think about social restructuring later” and “Oh, btw, if you’re between the ages of 18-35 [later 17-50] your service is required and if you refuse your farm and livestock and all movable property can be confiscated”.
The point is that the war was about FAAAAARRRR more than slavery for most southerners and that the acoustic shadows of those cannon were heard in southern culture and society and economics (from whom all culture and society flow) for well over a century. They’ve really only dimmed, ironically, in the last generation, when the offense over the flag has risen steadily, and I don’t think that’s coincidence. Most white southerners are the descendants of these people and not of the Scarlett O’Haras and Wade Hamptons, and they do have a connection to their ancestry for reasons ranging from the superficial to the need to really understand to the need for simple answers, and thus their views of the symbols and relics and iconography of that time vary widely, and they’re not always for base motives (though the need for simple answers is the father of most base ideology.
Anyway, I’m tired of the subject. At least for tonight. G’night.
After seven pages of this, my takeaway is that discussions about what the flag “means” are pointless. Obviously, it means different things to different people or this thread would have died out long ago. I don’t see how anyone can come up with enough “evidence” on either side of the argument to establish any kind of objective truth.
I know I said I was finished with this thread but I have to break my promise long enough to say that this post by muttrox just might be the most objective and reasonable post in the entire damn thread. It should be enough to close the damn thing and declare him/her the winner.
Well, that should have been obvious. There is no “objective truth” to what a symbol means.
The OP’s point wass that flying a Confederate flag marks you as either a racist or someone who doesn’t care if they’re seen as a racist. For some reason, after that the thread turned into a giant discussion of whether or not Southerners are racist.