When War Comes

When war comes, it will be the enemy’s fault. It always is. Your country wants peace, it has always been a peaceful country, but the enemy’s affronts have grown numerous, outsized, intolerable. He has committed actions, he has made preparations, he has stalled in negotiations. It is on all the shows and all over the web, and even the amiable anti-war commentators seem to have been won over. The enemy has revealed himself as dangerous, implacable, insane. You simply have no choice.

Your neighbor, with whom you have been waging a desultory feud for years, suddenly takes down his yard sign promoting a candidate you despise. You think for a bit, then take down your yard sign promoting the candidate he loathes. One afternoon the two of you meet at the fence-line and have a surprisingly cordial, animated conversation about the worrisome state of things. You look him in the eye and realize that you both want exactly the same thing: to crush the enemy, to grind his face into the dust. To hear the laments of his children and wives around his funeral pyre. This moment of fellowship will feel better than you could ever have expected. We are off to war. In the cool air is a tang of brotherhood and vigor and bracing adventure.

Years later, those who are left will realize what was really happening. Your Maximum Leader had felt his grasp of power slipping, and this was the way to regain control. To deflect the anger over countless unkept promises and repeated lies. But his escape was temporary. He was burned in effigy many times before he was burned for real, in a public ceremony whose memory now shames everyone. In the cemeteries everywhere are many new headstones.

Flagging Enthusiasm

1

I almost didn’t notice it. The veterinarian’s assistant was a chunky teenager, friendly, polite, a little shy. No make-up, an old sweater, her strawberry-blonde hair pulled straight back, jeans stuffed into the tops of tall cowboy boots. She seemed very young, possibly too young to be doing what she was doing, but then, these days, nearly everyone seems too young to me. She took the dogs when I handed them to her, soothed them, put them on the scale, picked them up onto the exam table, telling me please and thank you. It was only when we were nearly done, as I leaned over to write the check, that I noticed the pendant she was wearing: a two-inch Confederate flag.

Well, there was nothing so unusual about it. This downstate Illinois county is a long day’s drive from the deep South, but every so often you hear a voice that is pure Dixie. A couple of years ago the town, Charleston, celebrated the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a shootout near the courthouse, in 1864, that amounted to a Copperhead riot. Local politics haven’t changed all that much since then, except that now the anti-Federal sentiment calls itself Republican, and reliably elects that party to most offices.

At restaurants down at the square and over near the interstate, ten miles away, the waitresses call me “Hon,” very consistently. After I passed sixty, I started getting “Dear” every so often, but “Hon” is basically correct, the safe term for a woman addressing an older man – or for that matter an older woman, since my wife gets “Hon” and “Honey” also. “Sir” or even “Ma’am” would be too frosty and might convey annoyance, though on the other hand either would seem natural from the counter staff (poor devils!) at McDonald’s, confronting you over the register, aiming to project efficiency rather than down-home friendliness. For waiters, less numerous than waitresses, “Sir” and “Ma’am” seem about right for males or females, at either counter or table. A complex code is in operation, any anthropologist will tell you. Truckers and farmers and anyone who says y’all seem to have special permission to use “Babe” and “Darlin’,” but that is what the waitresses call them, too.

The kicker, though, is a college-town dynamic that complicates everything. Students stream into our town in about equal numbers from surrounding counties and from Chicago, three hours away. On campus the two streams mix in all kinds of interesting ways, but out in the town they remain more distinct.

My wife and I came out to Charleston with two toddlers in 1979, drawn from the left coast by a job offer in English for me. We’ve had a lucky life here, especially lucky after Dollie got her RN degree and became a Women’s Health Nurse at the school. Count us happily retired now. But the university crowd we still mostly run with consists mostly of people who, like us, came from somewhere else. Our circle sometimes reminds me of the ex-pat communities I observed when I taught for a while in Korea and the Philippines (long story). It is lively, welcoming, close-knit, but also, feeling its own foreignness, jittery, conflicted, mildly paranoid.

Right after we came to town, I was shopping one day at the town’s biggest supermarket, when I spotted something that stopped me in my tracks: a little box of candy Winstons, perfect for grooming kids to be future smokers. Fresh from the coast and several liberal universities, with two kids to protect and a humiliating cigarette habit of my own to compensate for, I never hesitated. I went straight to the service desk and asked to see the manager. He wasn’t available, and I ended up haranguing a woman who looked twenty-five or so. Don’t you know that this encourages kids to smoke? That you are starting the process of getting them hooked, long before they have any idea what is happening? That this kind of candy is banned in most places, for obvious reasons? Et cetera, while she nodded and listened, eyes a bit wide, and promised to tell the manager.

That was the only time I saw candy cigarettes for sale in Charleston, and I believe the companies simply stopped making them. My protest was likely quite unnecessary. Still, I would do it again. But I like to think my delivery would be better: slower, more cordial, more roundabout and cheerful. I might remember that a drive of about three hours due south from here will bring you to the first tobacco farms, the fields of pretty elephant-ear leaves that stretch in increasing numbers through Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and on into the Carolinas. It is the same cultural argument that repeats itself with coal, with oil, with pesticides. My side wants to see things in the harsh simple light of political or ethical right and wrong. The other side replies, asymmetrically, that this is the way we have always lived, Sir.

Back in the day, if I had tried calling any of my women colleagues “Hon” or “Babe,” I would have gotten quite a look. The second or third time, I would have gotten quite the lecture – from the victim or conceivably, no doubt more harshly, from a male colleague who overheard. I would have been told, this is the language of oppression, a subtle piece – but still a piece! – of the social machinery that keeps women down in this culture. We didn’t have the ugly word “microaggression” back then, but that would have been the idea. Perhaps the whole thing would have been more abbreviated and gentle: come on, man, that’s condescending language, listen to yourself. You have a daughter.

Of course the lecture was never necessary, because I had long since absorbed that way of thinking. I really do believe that misplaced endearments and asymmetrical forms of address are – or can be – subtle parts of the social machinery that keeps women down. But this perspective, and the hard-and-fast verdict it yields about terms like “Babe,” is one I have to suspend when I am sitting in Denny’s or Steak’N’Shake, staring out the window at a parked eighteen-wheeler.

Another snapshot from my personal culture war. In eighth grade, my daughter came home with the news that her English teacher had decided it was time for the kids to tackle a “really long” novel. Her choice? Gone With the Wind. This was in the 1980s, and I swallowed hard. Of all the novels on earth, that one? I had devoured it in my own quaint youth, back when kids still read books that had not been assigned in English class. I remembered how fun the story is, how enthralling, how excellent in its way; but also how unabashedly Margaret Mitchell puts forward, every so often, her take on slavery: that it was not such a bad system, really, except when abolitionists unnecessarily sowed discontent.

Then, too, there was that scene in the movie, nearly as bad perhaps in the book (I couldn’t remember), when Rhett cures Scarlett’s blues with a brisk dose of what would nowadays be called marital rape, though the eighties did not quite have that language yet.

So I found myself tempted to be That Parent, the one who storms in to complain about the syllabus. A dizzying brief moment, because usually, in my mind at least, I was on the other side of the barricade, the teacher-provocateur who made a point of shaking things up with “controversial” readings. Of course I did nothing, too aware as I was that if nothing else, my protest would embarrass Christy and make her a bit of a target. She rather liked the novel, just a story after all, and went on (if you’re wondering) to become a capable young woman whose vanity license plate read FEMNST4, not LUVTARA.

Anyway, back to the flag. In downstate Illinois you can find that banner in any number of places: flying on front porches (side by side with Old Glory sometimes), on T-shirts and belt buckles, on wall plaques in bars, and especially on the license plate holders and rear windows of pick-ups. Drive over to a swap meet in St. Louis or Terre Haute or even Chicago, and you will find it in one form or another in every third booth, competing with dollar DVDs, Scarface posters, velvet Elvises, leather jackets, singing-bass wall plaques, bales of factory-second socks, naked-lady ashtrays, shelves of knock-off cologne and perfume, socket sets, Hulk Hogan biographies, displays of African-American hair-styling products, steeply discounted car stereos, Road to Jesus joke books, racks of T-shirts with slogans like Puerto Rican and Proud. It seems to fit right in, even when the down-market clientele is majority-minority.

And then the other day, I went to an auction at a farm and ended up parking behind a pickup that had an especially flamboyant rebel flag, maybe 4 feet long, flying from the tailgate, with a huge slogan silk-screened onto the fabric: “In God We Trust.” How’s that for an unexpected combination of messages?

But what gave me pause, at the auction and in the vet’s office, was the flag-bearers’ timing. Hadn’t they heard? After the Charleston Massacre in 2015 (in that other Charleston), a mass slaying rendered even more ghastly than usual by the killer’s smug explicit bigotry – his online manifesto, his snarling “explanation” as he fired, his selfies with the battle flag in hand – after the heartbreaking spectacle of the victims’ families publicly forgiving him – after all that, the battle flag came down at last from the places it had occupied (incredibly, to my crowd) on statehouse grounds in South Carolina and Mississippi. Wal-Mart pulled the flag and all other Confederate memorabilia from its shelves, and NASCAR tried, at least, to ban the image from its tracks. Puffy white guys in sleeveless shirts were on TV, saying “it was time” and not much else. They did not try to disrupt the flag-lowering ceremony at the South Carolina statehouse, as they might have five years earlier, by driving round and round the grounds gunning their custom-lifted trucks.

So a long debate seemed to have been settled. The majority had decided the flag was “an emblem of hate,” as the New York Times put it, and the heritage-not-hate minority acquiesced in that verdict. Done deal. So far so good, but where, exactly, did this leave me with the friendly girl at the vet’s, with the equally friendly (I would bet on it, though I never met him) farmer flying his gaudy super-sized version over his tailgate? What were they trying to say?

2

I can still vaguely remember learning about the rebel flag back in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the fifties, in what may have been sixth grade, in what may have been a unit on the Civil War. The basic idea was that brave men had died for it, however mistakenly, so it deserved a measure of respect, though it was inexorably and forever subordinate to Old Glory.

In those days nothing seemed political, though of course in retrospect everything was. New Mexico had had no dog in the fight of the Civil War. But nineteen-fifties Albuquerque was a military town, with three big bases and a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons buried out on the mesa, certain (so everyone whispered) to make us a prime target if the Russian missiles ever flew. So Cold War patriotism infused everything in our classrooms. The implicit theme of all kinds of lessons, the unspoken first and last line, was how much better Our Way was than Communism. In a spirit of appreciation of all things American, we learned “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” but also “Dixie,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” but also “Old Folks At Home,” “The Star Spangled Banner” but also (as if!) “Old Black Joe.”

And then, that flag. What any child sees instantly is how much prettier it is than the other one, the real American flag you are obliged to salute and revere. The design is just better: bold, sure, simple, all of a piece. By comparison Old Glory looks bureaucratic and “busy.” Every star and stripe is there for a reason the teacher wants you to learn for the test, but the whole never quite meshes into anything the eye can enjoy. Setting the two side by side is like comparing a J.E.B. Stuart cavalry raid to McClellan’s hapless infantry maneuvers in the Peninsular Campaign. A child looking at both feels a throb of guilty sympathy for what is supposed to be the wrong side.

Does any of this matter? I think it does, because catchy, eye-pleasing icons, very much like catchy, ear-pleasing phrases, tend to have lives of their own. Semiotics begins in aesthetics. So the Rebel flag’s beauty – nasty beauty, if you like – may yet prove the hardest thing for reformers to overcome. New generations may keep getting charmed and seduced by the old icon, finding new meanings there, or ways to see the old meanings in an unduly positive light.

That, indeed, has been pretty much the flag’s history to date. As John Coski explains, the jaunty rectangle we now imagine flying over the fields of Gettysburg and Chickamauga was actually a rarity at the time, used primarily by the Army of Tennessee. Far more current was a square version that at first was only the battle flag of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, but which, as that army’s victories accumulated and its prestige grew, became effectively the flag of the Confederacy itself, subsumed into one corner of the rectangular “Stainless Banner” that was otherwise pure white. But it was not until the early twentieth century, after a long process of rediscovery, that the colored square itself  lengthened into a rectangle, pushed out of memory “the wide variety of battle flags under which Confederate soldiers had served,” and emerged as the dominant symbol of the Old South. As Coski notes, “The history of the flag since 1865 is marked by the accumulation of additional meanings.”

By the time the flag arrived in my grade school classroom, the process had gone so far that the banner of slavery could be, in a weird way, a symbol of liberty. In the Cold War telling of the tale, the bloodiest war in our history (by far) had had a happy ending: no treason trials, no reparations, no generations of simmering guerilla resistance. Instead there was Appomatox: the grave sad meeting of two titans, both white and male of course, to honor the enormous blood debt by declaring the country whole again. It had always been a war between brothers, after all, not real enemies. In Bruce Catton’s account, the Union soldiers astonished Lee’s troops by saluting as the latter, many of them barefoot, stacked their muskets for the last time. Meanwhile in Washington, a jubilant Lincoln ordered a band outside his window to play “Dixie,” sneering that the song had been stolen by the rebels but was now a “lawful prize” of war. In the popular imagination the tale soon softened, and in the version we got in Monte Vista Elementary, the command became a sentimental tribute, a fatherly expression of love to the prodigal states now returning. The majestic melancholy of the Second Inaugural brooded over everything.

So by 1960 or so, the rebel flag could seem, not the antithesis of Old Glory, but a fervent adjunct and amplification. What could be more American, after all, than rebellion? Why else were sports teams all over the country, north and south, named the Rebels, the Fighting Rebels, the Running Rebels, and so on? The architects of Secession, of course, always believed as ardently as the North that they were inheriting and completing the work of 1776. That the two banners could flap together in the same mid-twentieth-century breeze showed how tolerant our system was, how resilient and clever, how instead of extinguishing the energies of revolt it reclaimed and redirected them. The Russians and Chinese and Nazis would have sent round the secret police; we slapped our malcontents on the back and bought them a beer. Courage however mistaken – perhaps especially mistaken – had a place of high honor with us, and we likewise respected its cousins, mischief, anarchy, orneriness. In a way Lee’s old flag of sedition was more patriotic than Old Glory itself, denoting a more extreme commitment to personal autonomy.

Thus until quite recently, the banner in most contexts could seem not offensive at all (at least not to whites), but cheery, mainstream, almost anodyne. Remember the flag on the roof of the car (“General Lee”) in Dukes of Hazard? Remember the version folded into the Georgia state flag on Burt Reynolds’ black Trans Am in Smoky and the Bandit I and II, those unspeakably silly films my wife made me watch back in the eighties? There, the flag becomes the badge of a certain brand of Tom Sawyer manhood, a model dominant throughout the culture but especially so in the South, where “good old boys” are called by diminutives (Johnny not John, Billy not William) and expected to drink, hunt, whore, pray on Sunday, fight at the drop of a hat, and never grow up. What the banner says in such contexts has precious little to do with slavery or the Civil War or states’ rights. It is more a style choice, an expression of purely personal attitude and philosophy: I’m friendly but ungovernable, so be ready to back off. Like the racks of tee shirts next to it at the swap meet, each of them bearing  some more or less snotty slogan, the flag deployed in this way aims to boast and bray and ruffle your feathers a bit, but nothing worse.

Well, I've been kicked out of might near every bar around

I've been locked up for drivin' a hundred and twenty through town

Well, I've been shot at and cut with a knife

For messing around with another man’s wife

But other than that, we ain't nothin’, just good ol' boys

            (Moe Bandy and Joe Stamper, “Just Good Old Boys”)

3

But to me the relentless cuteness of the Dukes and the Smoky movies already hints at denial and bad conscience. The vision of the South as a twilight paradise of endless Caucasian boyhood will not quite fly, because too many darker elements have been too obviously crowded out: chains, whippings, lynchings, centuries of systematic rape, all the rituals of violence and humiliation required to sustain white supremacy. For of course, in the Cold War version of the Civil War, the elephant in the room – the behemoth, the brontosaurus – was that Appomattox had been a compact between white men only, with blacks excluded and women barely acknowledged. Slavery fell only to be replaced by the slavery lite of Jim Crow, a system that persisted on up to and through the sixties, and which in too many ways (poverty, mass incarceration, hellhole schools) continues right to the present. So what was to some a banner of gaiety and mischief could seem to others – liberals, minorities, women wrestling with their own disenfranchisement – too like a smiley-face band-aid over a festering wound.

Meanwhile the forces of racial and cultural backlash had taken up the rebel flag, aiming to exploit its romantic associations and basically respectable air. It is this, of course, that has finally done it in, shattering a strained fusion of semantic opposites that was perhaps bound to fail in any case. The flag became window-dressing for the Klan, for the American Nazi Party, for George Wallace’s presidential campaign. It became a reliable symbol and symptom of hyper-patriotism, all but certain to be found in the cellar along with the canned drinking water, mylar blankets, Ted Nugent poster, and old copies of Guns and Ammo. After a time, the relevant association was not to the Dukes of Hazard but to David Duke; not to Lee and Stonewall Jackson but to Bull Connor and Dylan Roof and immigrant-bashing and Dixie-crats in Congress and the English-only movement. What mattered was not anyone’s intention, but the inexorable way the pretty red banner got sucked up into the culture wars. Many of us remember that something similar had happened to Old Glory itself, back in the sixties and seventies, when for a time displaying it could seem to signify, not reverence for the country as a whole, but specific support for a disastrous policy in Vietnam. That moment has passed (with some help from movies like Easy Rider), but with the rebel flag, appropriation by the extreme right looks to be more permanent.

As for the left, where I live most of the time, our policing of forms and terms can be, at worst, its own kind of bigotry, but is best understood I think as a continuing quest, uncertain and error prone but nonetheless vital. “How do we find a language that includes everyone?” is a question that points us toward a better future, but always a thorny question and sometimes an impossible one. What is obnoxious is to behave as if the question were easy, as if that still-unimagined language already existed and always had, then to treat those who run afoul of the present system’s failings as culpable or ignorant. At a recent freshman orientation, I read somewhere, the students were instructed that the phrase “you guys” was offensive because it excluded women. Phrased in that cocksure prescriptive way, the edict itself is offensive, implicitly accusing you of moral culpability for an expression you have used a million times meaning no harm. But it’s not hard to imagine the point re-stated in a more reasonable way: “Isn’t it interesting that, in addressing mixed groups, we still use a phrase that seems to privilege the masculine? And why is this? And what if anything should we do about it?”

To me such debate recalls the fight for more-or-less standard grammatical forms by which Medieval clerks and scribes and secretaries – all those unremembered scribblers and sniffy proofreaders – brought modern English itself into existence, midwifing a standard language from a host of dialects. Theirs was a work of creative destruction, since it entailed stigmatizing as incorrect and churlish everything that did not fit their necessarily narrow protocols. But it gave us the institution that, probably more than any other, keeps our knives away from each other’s throats. English teachers are charged to repeat the process in little with each new generation, nagging our charges into some semblance of standard usage as we scribble in the margins of their papers, and it seems no accident that, since 1970 or so, over howls of objection from the right, we have so avidly and untowardly taken on the additional, seemingly tangential, enterprise of hammering out and enforcing protocols of political correctness. In fact the two projects are parallel, if only because both require us to be pains in the ass. We keep chasing the ideal, the language of perfect fairness that keeps slipping over the horizon, and real problems arise only when we think we have found it.

So take all this as an analogy for my girl at the vet’s with her pendant. Finally it does matter that the rebel flag has become, as the New York Times truly but incompletely says, “an emblem of hate.” But what matters more there in the office, what matters primarily, is what she means, not the particular form of expression she has chosen. (Basic rule for English teachers: correct the grammar, yes, but always remember that content, or call it intention, matters more.) And what she means, pretty clearly, is not offensive at all, but cheery and comprehensible and not all that different, really, from what my liberal daughter tried to express with her long-ago FEMNST4 license plate: I am a freedom-loving soul, and intend to stick up for myself in the face of unfairness and force majeure. Allow for the differences in symbolic dialect, perform the necessary translation, and much unnecessary conflict melts away.

I suppose I could instruct her about all this. I could tell her, “Hon, I know what you’re trying to say with that pretty pendant of yours. But what I think you should understand is that you may also be saying a lot of things you don’t really intend. To many people these days – most, probably – that flag stands for white supremacy and hatred of immigrants and indifference (at best) to racial slayings and police brutality and income inequality and women’s rights. It stands for the murder of abortion doctors and more guns for everyone and Creationist claptrap in science class and stupidly aggressive foreign policy and your duty to laugh it off or shut up when a man touches you inappropriately.”

But when I imagine myself saying all this, or any of it, I picture her eyes growing very wide. Her shoulders stiffen and she is quiet for a long moment. She knows her job may be at risk, here. But the flush spreads up her neck and, hell with it, she decides to let me have it.

“Sir, I know perfectly well that some people might take it that way, but that’s their problem, not mine. If they can’t get what I’m saying, too bad.

“You want to talk about exclusion, Sir? You want to talk about sensitivity? How about excluding me and my family and most of the people I know from using the language and the symbols that come naturally? How about saying we can no longer honor Confederate soldiers and generals, though we have done so for generations? How about the idea that courage and self-sacrifice are honorable things in themselves, and if you are also going to insist that heroes must be ‘on the right side of history’ or whatever, you will have to tear down the Vietnam Memorial and God knows what else?

“Really, Sir, how about all those Confederate soldiers in that unbelievably bloody and destructive war? How about the fact that they were, by any fair measure of hardships endured and odds overcome, the very best fighting men this country has ever produced? How about the fact that southern white men are, to this very day, as that nice lady Ann Coulter says, ‘the backbone of the U.S. military’? How about the fact that, if you have recently told a veteran, in your slightly stuck-up liberal way, ‘Thank you for your service,’ you have quite possibly thanked someone who has that flag quietly hanging on his back porch, or tattooed on his bicep, or at least has pleasant memories of it displayed at his uncle's or cousin's or grandma's? 

“So thanks for the advice, Sir, but I’m keeping the pendant. Eighty dollars, please, forty for each dog.”

Quite likely, though, she would not have it in her to say all this. Who would, on the cusp of such an awkward, unlikely moment? So she would probably just swallow her annoyance right then. Later, though, she might take it right down to the voting booth. She might vote for the Hell-With-It-Anyway candidate, the screw-you candidate, the Orange Moron, the human bomb packed with white rage.

                                                                         ***