Via Bazz
Mon, 23 Jan 2012
Dear Editor:
It was my privilege September 1, to march into Lexington with H.K.
Edgerton, former President of the Asheville, North Carolina NAACP, as
he proudly carried his Confederate flag with Tarheel re-enactors into
the city where Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson await the
Resurrection. My latest Black friend was the invited guest of the
local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a number of whom
also marched.
With a welcome and send-off from the Mayor of Buena Vista at Glen
Maury Park around 7 a.m. the long day ended after 11 p.m. with a vote
by Lexington City Council to ban display of the flags on city poles.
The intervening march took about three and a half hours and was
followed by a 6:00 Save Our Flags rally on Hopkins Green.
An overcautious police presence was never needed to protect those of
us who honor the flags of our Southern ancestors and was certainly
unnecessary to protect our neighbors from us. Another wasted taxpayer
expense springing from the out-of-touch paranoia of resident alien
City Council members forgetting they are no longer in the Northern and
Western states whither they transplanted.
Reporters from a number of local television stations and newspapers
stopped the entourage for interview, each immediately clamoring to
speak with Mr. Edgerton, almost exclusively. After all, White guys
a-marchin’ with “Rebel” flags ain’t news; they’re “all racists”
anyhow, as “everybody” knows. The man-bites-dog spectacle (to the
sheltered hothouse bumpkins in modern monotone media) was a Black man
singing Dixie and carrying a “symbol of racism”. This benighted
narrow-mindedness, of course, only reveals their own provincial
prejudice, bias, and bigotry.
Could anything be more racist than a blanket presumption that all
Black Americans must think alike about a given matter, in this
instance the Confederate flag? Is it reasonable for backwoods media
or sophisticated of hillbilly academia to assume that the entire Black
race must hold lockstep identical views on history as though incapable
of independent or critical thought? How broad-minded!
The ignorant underlying implication is that if one Black man in
America has his own mind about an issue that the Propaganda Ministry
was sure it already had nailed down, scramble the news trucks from
Roanoke—Quick!--to analyze the unfortunate aberration: “How dare a
Black man reach an independent conclusion not scripted for him? Why
doesn’t he get back in line and mind his place? Fetch him on back to
Consensus Plantation!”
The supreme irony is that this insulated plastic-bubble hypocrisy is
allowed to pass for liberality and enlightenment. Big Academia
(indoctrination) and Big Media (propaganda) have each other’s backs
and will choose which Americans of color are “right-thinking”
according to whether they “all look alike”. No runaways shall be
tolerated. My, my.
Swarming Mr. Edgerton as though he had just landed in a sleek
kryptonite saucer from beyond their solar system, every question the
press put to him was loaded with a stock social preconception and
brittle racial stereotype. Without exception each reporter-bot began
with the untenable flawed presumption that the Confederate flag equals
racism and, therefore, its inexplicable presence in his non-White
hands was somehow a contradiction of the laws of physics, a rip in the
time-space continuum.
In every instance where Edgerton explained his views in ways that did
not arm the media’s talking-points gun against him, the reporter
looked away disinterested or stopped scribbling notes. Camera down.
Quite obviously no “journalist” was there to understand a variant
point of view. They had come only to mine the man for sound bites they
could manipulate to bolster their own trite prejudice; to neatly
classify and tag a “new” and alien species; not to listen, never to
learn.
I saw the interviews firsthand as they occurred and saw what little
was left of them on television. Edited were Edgerton’s comments about
the honor of Black Confederate soldiers buried in Lexington’s
Evergreen Cemetery. On the cutting room floor went his outrage over
the bungled misplacement of the body of Jim Lewis, Stonewall Jackson’s
personal body servant, whose grave is unknown. Of no interest to the
press were his observations on the Christian interactions and
interventions with 19th century American Blacks to elevate their
station and teach them to read---even against the law. That didn’t fit
the narrative of postmodern revisionism, so you didn’t get to hear
those comments; unreported, unworthy your consideration. Media masters
back at the Manor will decide what Black Americans may care about and
which viewpoints they are allowed to hold. Thought-fugitives shall be
dealt with.
Natural Bridge was once tended by a man named Patrick who lived in a
cabin, sold tickets and guided visitors around the attraction. In
1815, Patrick (whose last name was Henry) rode into Lexington and
bought himself a slave girl named Louisa at auction. The following
year he married her. Mr. Henry was himself the property of Thomas
Jefferson who had the cabin built for this Black gatekeeper. But
Black slave masters in Rockbridge County also don’t fit the tidy,
simplistic worldviews that childlike professors, naïve reporters and
other dumbed-down contemporary hacks frantically wish were so, so why
trouble you with complicating realities? Just you mind your work and
leave all that to the Korrespondents, Kolleges and Kouncilmen.
The Staunton News-Leader’s “Confederate Flag Should Be Restricted” by
its editorial board restated the view of many ban supporters at the
Council meeting that though the Confederate flag has an honorable
history, its subsequent dishonorable misuse by some fringe groups so
taints it that it should be Rated R. This strange construct holds
that if bad people make an ill use of good things, evil should
triumph. Decent society should thus surrender to its basest elements
every noble thing the wicked can smear. In short, they demand that
the sons of the South should unconditionally surrender to the Ku Klux
Klan. But since when is negotiation with terrorists and capitulation
to hate groups the righteous option? Hate groups must never be
appeased! Who could dare suggest letting them win? Only liberals.
On September 8 a Delaware man woke to find on his lawn a cross-covered
with racial epithets, but there is no call for banning Christian
crosses or for Old Glory to be “restricted,” though the KKK regularly
misappropriates these. Shall we cut “Sic Semper Tyrannis!” from the
Commonwealth flag since Lincoln’s assassin once spoke the phrase? Why
is the flag of the Confederacy singularly subject to prohibition?
Moreover, the underlying premise that Americans of African descent
somehow aren’t discerning enough to rationally separate the objective
flag from its subjective abuses is patronizing, representing racist
bigotry at its most virulent.
Every American should take gross offense at the condescending notion
that a remedial paint-by-numbers version of history is provided at the
back of the educational short bus for Blacks, presumed benighted,
uneducable and incapable of telling a period flag from a Klan rally.
Does anyone believe Booker T. Washington or Martin Luther King, Jr.
would espouse this demeaning plantation mentality that “the poor old
Black man ain’t smart as Whitey,” requiring a booster seat at the
history table?
True equality means exactly that---no softballs, no grading on the
curve, no training-wheels for some races. It means every American
rolling up his own sleeves, doing the hard homework himself and
reaching his own conclusions. It means taking men as individuals
again, not as demographic blocs, Mayor Elrod.
Posturing over American slavery that ended 148 years ago is a lazy way
to evade doing anything costly about worldwide slavery today. A lot
of self-absorbed consciences have been stroked and hollow political
chests will be pounded about how “meaningful” the City Junta’s flag
ban imposed by 4 individuals on the city’s 7,000 citizens was as
democracy triumphant, etc. (Until they’re booted out next fall and
it’s all undone.) But not one thing has been done about over
27,000,000 slaves around the world who will labor under constraint
tomorrow if they survive this night as smug official Lexington pillows
her sanctimonious head on silks, congratulating herself for
prohibiting an historic flag on a bridge for one day next January.
It’s a cheap way of stealing acclaim for doing something significant
without having to spend a dime, get their hands dirty or sacrifice
anything. I suppose empty people have to grasp for what negligible
cover they can. No one will be talking or writing about---or even
remembering---them one-hundred fifty years from now, while history
will still be honoring Lee and Jackson. That’s exactly what galls
every insignificant bureaucrat about all true greats.
As Virginia’s Democratic Senator Jim Webb says, “To tar the sacrifices
of the Confederate soldier as simple acts of racism, and reduce the
battle flag under which he fought to nothing more than the symbol of a
racist heritage, is one of the great blasphemies of our modern age.”
When I marched into Lexington with two distinguished Black Americans
waving their Confederate flags, I walked with freemen not bound by the
chains of political correctness or shackled to historical ignorance.
Truth had set them free.
If Black Americans are free only to reach a single approved conclusion
they are no freer than Soviets with a single candidate on the ballot.
It is time to stop rounding down expectations for one race. History is
neither Black nor White, Blue nor Gray. What matters to us all is
that history be clear.
Sherwin W. Dillard, Jr.
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