[For any readers not from this country, the U.S. began as British colonies on the Atlantic coast. They reacted to exploitation and abuse of power by the then-current regime by breaking their ties to England, but they did it without any specific plans. Even with the snail's pace of communications back then it took less than ten years for everyone to realize that having no standard currency, legal code or even language made them a prime target for invasion by foreign powers. So, after a few years of heated arguments representatives of the former colonies compromised on a basic foundation with provisions built into it to make alterations as the needs arose. It was the Constitution that turned loosely affiliated confederates into a united republic. However, in order to get the cooperation of states that permitted slavery, the states that didn't promised to allow them to count a large fraction of their slave population when calculating their proportionate representation in legislature. Eventually they all had to deal with the obvious 'elephant in the living room': the additional representatives earned by the slaves' numbers weren't really representing the interests of the slaves, and inadequate representation in legislature was the whole reason for breaking away from England in the first place. Those who refused to allow slaves to vote planned to revert to a less structured confederacy. Unfortunately for them, the U.S. had been a single country for decades by that point and the republic had grown to include additional states and territories, complicating matters.]
.....For one thing, "strength through disorganization" isn't an inspiring motto for most of the human race. For another thing, what most people refer to as the Confederate flag was never "the" flag, it was just the last one in a long line of flags and most of the member states in the Confederacy flew their own state flags instead. Some of those states would incorporate small versions of it within their flags, but not all did. (Again, disorganization was a sacred creed for them.) You'd think that anybody in that much of a rush to look like a Caribbean island would be nicer to black people.
.....It doesn't even make sense in terms of underdog appeal. Someone walking around wearing a cap or sweatshirt from a high school team that never made the play-offs can at least imagine next year's team going all the way. There's no 'next year' for the Confederacy. The last possible 'next year' was fifty years before that flag was created. They didn't lose the Civil War because of anyone "cheating" or "being sneaky" or "shameful conduct" of their enemies; they lost for the same reason that they didn't start out as colonies of a druid empire. There was no way England could have become an international power since the Middle Ages without changing its political structure to manage that growth. The same was true for the U.S. It had grown too much since the revolution to throw all semblance of organization out the window. The Confederacy lost because there wasn't anything to win. If the Confederacy had got what they wanted and became a collection of Luxembourgs and Monacos they would have eventually been picked off one by one by European countries looking for sugar and cotton. How is that winning?
.....Variations of the U.S. flag were used when changing the course of two European wars, a Pacific war, winning two gulf wars and claiming the moon. It's also used when delivering foreign aid and participating in disarmament talks. What exactly does the Confederate flag commemorate? If you already have a flag that says "this is what 'E Pluribus Unum' can do for you", why would you knowingly choose one that says, "Oh, yeah? Well we lost. Take that, suckers!" It's like showing up in a stadium with a giant foam rubber hand that has two fingers raised and chanting, "We're Number Two! We're Number Two!... In a field of two!... We're Number Two!..."
.....Maybe I'm completely wrong about this. Maybe the Confederate flag has been around so long because it isn't a relic of history. After all, it wasn't even used that much until the secession attempt escalated to warfare. Maybe it's popular because each generation projects their own meaning onto it. For some it may mean warm memories of entrenched local power strangling employment opportunities, for others the comfort of glaring illiteracy rates and for still others epidemic teen pregnancy and the abstinence-only education policies that caused it. It's just that whenever I notice it flapping in the company of a 70's model Chevy blaring Lynyrd Skynyrd through mono speakers, I don't think of the Center For Disease Control. Well, not at first. I also don't think of the Tuskegee Airmen or Audie Murphy or R.E.M. or Truman Capote or peanut butter or Andy Griffith or gospel choirs or anything remotely commendable or decent or admirable. Well, maybe fritters. Still, if you're going to tip those scales, you're talking about an awful lot of fritters. And then we're back to pulmonary disorders.
.....I can just imagine sometime hundreds of years in the future when the human race is colonizing space. A teacher will be showing a room full of children the symbols of the home world and asking them to identify what part of the culture each symbol represents:
- A caduceus? "Medicine."
- A cross? "Christianity"
- A euro sign? "Money"
- A Confederate flag? "Umm... Wal-Mart?"
The teacher just stares blankly at the holographic image. "Yeah, sure. Sounds good."
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