The South Shall Rise Again

I wish I was in the land of cotton,

Old times there are not forgotten;

Look away! Look away! Look away, Dixie Land!

In Dixie Land where I was born in,

Early on one frosty morning,

Look away! Look away! Look away, Dixie Land!

Daniel Decatur Emmett

One hundred and forty-five years later my southern kin are still fighting the War Between the States. Give it up, loves. We lost. Just like you, not me, lost the presidential election in 2008. An African-American is our president. Get over it.

And just like my other southern-born-and-raised kissin'-cuzzins, we've known since day one that all this shoutin' and hollerin' on  the extreme right is nothing but pure naked racism disguised as anger over taxes and

galloping socialism. We've known better when social scientists and political pundets denied the existence of racism in the Tea Party movement.

We've known better when Tea Bagger activists claimed they weren't racist. We've seen it too often. "I'm not racist," they protest looking you straight in the eye. And in the next breath, "Ain't that monkey ever gonna get me ma drink?"

Not to be outdone, elected representatives of all the people are getting into the act. Chafing at the bit since 1964, or 1865, they're gonna win that damn war once and for all.

Pulitzer Prize winning Newsweek editor Jon Meachem explains why Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell's proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month is a giant leap back to the days of them thar ole cotton fields.

In it he celebrated those “who fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth” and wrote of the importance of understanding “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.”

The governor originally chose not to mention slavery in the proclamation, saying he “focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” It seems to follow that, at least for Mr. McDonnell, the plight of Virginia’s slaves does not rank among the most significant aspects of the war.

Inadvertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia’s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. Whitewashing the war is one way for the right — alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary — to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.

And then Meachem talks history - beginning with Lee's surrender at Appomattox. "Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration."

He takes the reader through World War Two and into 1948, when "supporters of Strom Thurmond’s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops."

Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.

As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states’ rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.

But, "If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government."
 
We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America’s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.