As a child of the 70’s I have to admit that I’m a little surprised at how quickly and completely the rebel flag seems to be falling into the same untouchable category as the swastika. I didn’t think we’d see the demise of the stars and bars in my lifetime. It has always been venerated by particularly showy and repugnant southern racists, but it has also been something else.
During my childhood the was a short-hand for a bygone southern goofiness rooted in intractability and a willful rejection of modernity. It was the prop for a stock character that, even in the 70’s seemed, not so much like a dying breed, but a dead breed. Nobody in modern America cleaved to the blatantly racist meaning of the flag, nobody with any power or influence anyway. Therefor, it must have seemed okay to play the flag for laughs.
The vicious racial hatred that seemed to be becoming part of our past in the 80’s when the Duke brothers raced through Hazard County in the General Lee, came storming back thanks to the GOP, Fox News and the boundless racial hatred that they feel free to express on a daily basis. Hatred of black people, hatred of the poor. Hatred of the President of the United States – all of this hate undermined the playful ridiculousness that the flag had come to stand for.
With white domestic terrorist attacks in South Carolina, the end has come. Everyone in American with eyes to see simultaneously arrived same conclusion that the University of Mississippi came to ten years ago. There is no longer a place for that symbol. It gives too much comfort and support to the worst among us. It normalizes hate. And the United States of America has too many guns and too many people willing to trade on hatred to continue to pretend that the symbols of hate are anything other than despicable relics.