And So It Goes …

Remember what I said about predictable patterns of press coverage and responses to press coverage?  As I suspected, a faithful reader, Jackie Haddock, decided to prove my point in the comments section to my blog entry on how a newspaper reported an incident concerning the display of the Confederate Battle Flag in the Phoenix metropolitan area.

Here’s Jackie Haddock’s final comment in full:

So now you are playing me as a racist you don’t know me, you’re only taking the same path you always do stereotyping someone of Southern Heritage who wishes to fly the colors as a rascist. I was raised in the south on a tobacco farm worked side by side and played with black boys and girls everday until I left the farm as a young man. As an adult I have many black friends today, and for the past ten years have maintained a graveyard for blacks across the road from my house without having been asked to do so or neither have I charged anyone for my labor. I do it so there resting place will remain a place of beauty for everyone that rides by to see. No one should be killed for what they are struggling for whether it be for ones civil rights or desire to fly the colors that their ancestors fought under. No Mr. Simpson it’s you that manipulates ones death to fit your blogs. How sad. How typical.

Now, let’s review what happened:

I highlighted a story about a controversy surrounding the decision of a business to fly a Confederate Battle Flag.  The business owner said that the decision had nothing to do with Confederate heritage: indeed, once the owner discovered that some people found the display of the flag objectionable, the flag was removed.  That should have been the end of something that I don’t deem newsworthy, except (as I suggested) the reporting of the event followed predictable patterns that I find tiresome.  I also suggested that someone would find what I said to be objectionable, and that the objection would be equally predictable.

Then along came Jackie Haddock.

Haddock apparently found Margaret Blough’s recounting of another incident, one that resulted in the murder of a white man, Michael Westerman, by a black man who took exception to the white man’s display of a Confederate Battle Flag on his truck.  As Ms. Blough pointed out:

In all the furor, including the SCV claiming it was a heritage violation and trying to make a hero out of the murdered man, at one point, the widow admitted that he flew the flag because he liked the way it looked with his beloved truck.

In short, while the motives of the murderer were connected to how he felt about the display of the Confederate Battle Flag, the victim had no such intent to celebrate Confederate heritage.  Like the business owner, the victim simply found the flag to be attractive.

That did not satisfy Jackie Haddock.

So what was so wrong with him having the flag on his truck that he would be murdered, surely if the black man was flying an African National Flag and he was murdered by a white man for that indiscretion it would have been an hate crime.

This seemed to me to be beside the point.  No one was defending the murderer.  No one was justifying an act of murder.  No one said there was anything wrong with the victim’s decision to display a Confederate Battle Flag.  All that was said was that the victim was not celebrating Confederate heritage, but that Confederate heritage groups had hijacked the story to serve their own purposes.  It seemed to me that Haddock was doing the same thing … in predictable fashion.

Haddock’s next reply continued down the same road:

Who said anything about anyone justifying a murder it can’t be. For some flying the flag is a celebration of herirtage and for that some are murdered, I guess.

Again, it did not seem to matter that the victim was not celebrating Confederate heritage by displaying a Confederate Battle Flag.  However, the truth did not satisfy Haddock’s purposes.  As for what Haddock meant to say in the first sentence, beats me.  However, as Haddock was drawn to the story of people being murdered for espousing beliefs, I called his attention to the civil rights movement.

Haddock was not impressed, nor was he detoured from the fact that he had erected a straw man.

Oh my Brooks how we do carry on it always reverts back to dragging out the old race card doesn’t it, nonetheless he was killed while having the banner on his truck how did you miss that.

It’s not clear why Haddock would try to conceal the fact that it was he who brought out the issue of the race card (an increasingly overused term); the import of the rest of his comment is (to be kind) unclear.  How mentioning the civil rights movement constitutes playing the race card escapes me, as I noted.  Haddock’s next reply offered no illumination on that point:

You always turn the worm towards everyone else, everybody knew what you were playing with your civil rights movement reference.

There’s not much one can do with that.  But, as Haddock seems concerned about the victims of racist violence (and it can be argued that Michael Westerman was the victim of racist violence, whatever one makes of his beliefs), I suggested that someone might take the time to visit Birmingham and see the church where four black girls were killed in a bombing in 1963.

This brought forth the outburst that heads this discussion.

I have offered nothing to suggest that Jackie Haddock’s a racist.  It’s irrelevant to the concept of Confederate heritage that some of his best friends as a child were black (and let’s not lose sight of the fact that Haddock manages to confuse southern heritage with Confederate heritage).   As for the declaration that “No one should be killed for what they are struggling for whether it be for ones civil rights or desire to fly the colors that their ancestors fought under,” no one’s argued that, either, although Haddock continues to miss the point that in neither case was the person flying the flag honoring ancestors or Confederate heritage.  I now think that it is crucial to this predictable complaint that he ignores this fact and distorts the story because he needs to do so to advance his perspective.  And, of course, I did not mention Westerman’s death; it was Haddock who tried to turn a murder to advantage, thus manipulating the facts of the case.  That’s predictable, too (as will be the content of the comments section that follows this post), just as the pattern of the original newspaper article about the flag incident in Arizona this past week was very predictable (indeed, last March I outlined the pattern in another blog entry).  Just watch.

It strikes me that those folks who talk about the “evilization” of Confederate heritage (often they try to claim it’s really “evilization” of the South and southern heritage) are really into victimization.  They want to be seen as victims … and a discussion about the past is really a discussion about them.  Thus the claim by Jackie Haddock that some of his best friends are black people, which has absolutely no bearing on anything discussed.

And so it goes.

Some Advice for Modern Day Secession Advocates

Over the last several years there’s been quite a revival in the use of the concept of secession as one way to address various problems.  While some people claim (with a great deal of support) that the claim for a constitutional right of secession was rejected by the Supreme Court in 1869, and others say the issue was resolved through force of arms (an argument that to me asserts that might makes right), still others endorse the concept.  Moreover, the concept is not restricted to white southerners, although it does seem to attract them in disproportionate numbers, including those who would like to create a separate southern nation.

Commemorating the Baltimore Riot of April 19, 1861

I came across this rather interesting account by Greg Clemmer of how people chose to commemorate the attack upon soldiers of the 6th Massachusetts Infantry as they changed trains in Baltimore on April 19, 1861.  It strikes a pleasant note of mutual respect and reconciliation; moreover, I can understand why Clemmer may have taken exception to aspects of an opinion piece by Leonard Pitts, although I note he did not contest Pitts’s main argument.  Then I saw that Clemmer had already offered basically the same criticism of Pitts’s piece days before the event.

Taken together, it’s all rather odd.  Clemmer complains that Pitts is stereotyping white southerners and taking extreme examples as representative.  Fine.  I’ve made that point rather recently about how wrong it is to empower extremists who claim to speak for the South as if they really do speak for it.  However, Clemmer then makes what I see as his own unfortunate comment about stereotyping: “Yet what Mr. Pitts really did was reinforce the unfortunate stereotype of African-Americans being more interested in their originations than their destinations.”  Pitts’s commentary does not merit that characterization, either, and perhaps Clemmer would have been better off to have omitted that observation all together.  Meanwhile, he neatly sidesteps Pitts’s major argument, preferring to notice the mutual respect shown by the reenactors … who, let’s remind ourselves, are reenactors, not participants, in an interesting takeoff of the tale about Joshua Chamberlain, John B. Gordon, and Surrender Triangle at Appomattox on April 12, 1865.

Once more, race squares off against reunion.

Undoing a Reconstruction Wrong?

Seems that once more William W. Holden’s raising something of a ruckus in North Carolina, some 140 years after he was impeached and removed from the governor’s office.  For now comes a story (courtesy of ASU graduate student Victoria Jackson) about an effort to grant Holden a pardon (which passed the state senate) on, of all days, April 12, 2011.

Another License Plate Dispute

Mississippi’s not the only state in the news when it comes the the efforts of the Sons of Confederate Veterans to have a state issue a vanity plate supporting the organization.  Moreover, in Florida the story’s a little different, as Republicans and Tea Party supporters are at odds.  The SCV seems to have the upper hand at the moment: could this be because Nathan Bedford Forrest never fought in Florida?

Y’all Can Exhale Now …

… for Governor McDonnell has issued his proclamation.

The floor is open for comments.

A Burning Question in Atlanta

It appears that the efforts of the Georgia Historical Society to commemorate an event in Civil War history that happened in Atlanta has met with opposition from the city’s chapter of the NAACP.

Only in this case it involves an effort to commemorate the burning (final burning, I may add) of Atlanta by William T. Sherman before he commenced his March to the Sea.

“It seems to be honoring something that reminds us of some tragic occurrences that happened to our people at the time. The whole war itself centered around the slave issue,” said R.L. White, president of the NAACP’s Atlanta branch. “We accept that it’s history but would like to see it done somewhere else than the heart of the civil rights historic district. It’s kind of tragic that the state is choosing that location.”

This is confusing on a number of levels.  W. Todd Groce, who is president of the society, argues that the marker’s placement is historically accurate (down by the railroad yard).  So that should mean that the SCV should support him, because that organization’s all about historical accuracy.  The misgivings of Mr. White seem a bit curious.  After all, Sherman’s occupation of Atlanta liberated black people, and I’d assume that’s not a painful memory.  That it was Sherman who did that was ironic, given his lack of concern for the welfare of blacks or the destruction of slavery, but there were other Union generals, including Oliver O. Howard, who felt differently.  That said, the “hurt feelings” defense has also been used when it comes to displays of the Confederate Battle Flag, and once you admit it’s a valid complaint in that instance, how can you contest its validity in another instance?

That said, I hope Dimitri Rotov smiles when he comes across this:

“It’s all about trying to capture heritage tourism dollars,” said Will Hanley, the marker coordinator for the Historical Society. “We feel there will be a lot of tourism dollars spent on the Civil War anniversary.”

Ah, so that’s what it’s all about.  Set up markers so people will visit them and spend money.

Just another day in the life of the Civil War Sesquicentennial.

Being Fair to a Defender of the Faith

George Purvis had a lot to say in response to my April Fool’s post on the SCV.  In his replies he confessed that he had not read the Constitution, defended acts of white supremacist terrorism, and claimed that enslaved blacks were citizens while avoiding other questions.

Sins of Omission, Sins of Commission: Virginia’s Governor Does It Again

Last April Virginia governor Robert McDonnell ignited a big fuss when he declared April “Confederate History Month” in Virginia.  Several bloggers, including yours truly, criticized the view of Civil War history contained in the proclamation.  Other critics seized upon the governor’s omission of slavery, and that became the subject of most of the commentary, including humorous remarks.

An Uncertain Message: Calling the SCV to Account

Take a look at the website of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  It exists to honor the service of the Confederate “citizen soldier”: the organization reminds us that “the  tenacity with which Confederate soldiers fought underscored their belief in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.”  Finally, “Membership in the Sons of Confederate Veterans is open to all male descendants of any veteran who served honorably in the Confederate armed forces.”

Here’s where things get tricky.