Thursday 8 April 2010

Don't Drive Old Dixie Down

Flags have always been Postmodern. Their meaning has always depended on who was looking at them. The stories about them have always been true or false in ways related tangentially, if at all, to strict historical accuracy.

Is the Union Flag an expression of Protestant triumphalism, or English oppression of these islands’ other peoples, or British imperial oppression of numerous other peoples, or certain other countries’ failure to grow up and let go? To many people, it is one or more of those things. To some, it is all of them. To this mixed-race Catholic, it is none of them. It is the banner of the Christian basis of this Union, of that Union itself, and of the continuing ties among the countries and peoples historically connected to it.

What, then, of the Confederate Flag, in this controversially restored Confederate History Month in Virginia? The symbol of slavery, secession and segregation? It has been. It could be. But it need not be. Despite probably not being based either on Saint Andrew’s Saltire or on Saint Patrick’s, it is nevertheless most associated with people whose ancestral connections are both to Scotland and to Ireland. In that sense, whether or not it is itself of either Scottish or Irish origin is immaterial. When you look at it, then that is what you see. And you are right.

Perhaps the original Confederate Battle Flag really was altered, in South Carolina, from a Saint George-style Latin cross in order to include Jews. That is certainly a story expressing a very profound truth, and, as part of the lore, demanding that that flag be rescued from anti-Semites as surely as from those who would persecute the other, duskier side of their own Scots-Irish, Southern family.

For no one who is African-American in the sense that Jesse Jackson originally meant had any shortage of ancestors in Scotland, Ireland or both. The archetypal Scots-Irish flag on the North American continent may be seen as expressing the blood ties between them and whites, especially Southern whites. President Obama is one of us odd cases, but he certainly has Irish in him. First generation African immigrants may not have any Scots, Irish or Scots-Irish, although they very well might have the first, in particular. But immigrants from the West Indies have as much as Al Sharpton or Clarence Thomas, a very great deal.

The present Confederate Flag is itself a modification of the Battle Flag. So modification is possible. Turn every other star black, or something? No, that seems ludicrous and condescending. Instead, simply declare the Confederate Flag to be the symbol of all Americans of Scots, Irish or Scots-Irish descent. Of everyone with ties to the South. Of all those who benefit from measures strikingly beneficial both to blacks and to Southern whites, though by no means exclusively so, going back through LBJ to FDR and beyond, and now including universal healthcare.

And of everything on which the two sides of America’s Scots-Irish family now stand united: blue-collar job protection, immigration control, English as the national language, abortion reduction, marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman, and a strong defence capability used strictly for its proper defensive purpose.

That was the platform of Bob Conley, the Ron Paul-supporting Democrat who in 2008 challenged Lindsey Graham for the Senate in South Carolina. The word on the street seems to have gone quiet on the possibility that he might challenge Joe Wilson for the House this year. That is a pity. But there will be others, and they will be closer to the New Deal and Great Society (and therefore also Civil Rights) tradition when they stand under both Old Glory and Old Dixie because they really believe in what each can stand for, not the day before yesterday, but today, and tomorrow, and the day after that.

Not least, the wider Southern tradition includes the very considerable use of government action, federal as well as state and local, to secure public goods as economically populist as they are morally and socially conservative, and on both counts rooted in activist, anything but liberal, Christianity; truly a cause uniting black and white. And the wider Southern tradition also includes opposition to the waging of aggressive wars by the federal government, wars that harvest the black and the blue-collar white alike.

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