Boy have the bells been ringing. You know the ones that rang on "the night they drove old Dixie down."
I've been thinking a lot about that song lately, given the drubbing the South has been taking in the media. (Not just the national media, but in the Southern newspapers as well. Self-hating Southerners, I suppose.) I keep wondering why no one, besides LewRockwell.com and a few others, will stand up for the South against this latest reconstruction of history.
Why aren't more people outraged when Democratic congressman and Presidential candidate Dick Gephardt, D-Missouri, said "the Confederate flag no longer has a place flying anytime, anywhere in our great nation"? What right does he have to tell South Carolina what flag to hoist on the statehouse grounds, or to tell me what to fly in my own yard?
If Americans had any courage, rebel flags would pop up everywhere just to spite him.
Why aren't more people outraged that the Democrats are going to drag a good Southern judge's name through the mud, based mainly on the fact that he is a Republican from Mississippi? Instead of defending the judge's record, the new Senate Majority Leader – a Tennessean, no less – told National Public Radio that Judge Charles Pickering really is a friend of minorities. Why didn't he say that the judge is a friend of all Americans' liberties, no matter their race or ethnic heritage? Groveling gets one nowhere in the mean world of Washington politics.
Back to that great song, lush with atmosphere. I love the version by The Band, but Joan Baez did a credible job too. But one shouldn't be too willing to admit a fondness for such lyrics these days:
Virgil Caine is my name and I served on the Danville train ‘Til Stoneman's cavalry came and tore up the tracks again In the winter of ’65 we were hungry, just barely alive By May the 10th, Richmond had fell, it's a time I remember, oh so well The night they drove old Dixie down, and the bells were ringing?"
The song touches on the noble Confederate cause, yet to admit that the South embodies some of the most honorable traditions in American history is akin to saying that one believes in lynching and wants to restore slavery.
It's nonsense, of course. But those who want to destroy the reputation of an entire region smell blood now that they drove Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott down from his post. Lott, of course, said some generous things about a 100-year-old colleague, praising Strom Thurmond's presidential run on the Dixiecrat ticket. I've been to many going away parties, where speakers say overly effusive things that aren't meant to be thought about too closely. But in the world of Washington gotcha, the Democrats scored a big victory.
Despite the ambush, Lott and the Republicans could have turned the problem into an opportunity to inform and enlighten the public. Rather than deplore segregation while explaining that the States Rights Party's platform was remarkably close to the platform of America's founders, Lott became a born-again supporter of affirmative action, and was cast aside by most everyone, Democrat and Republican. Conservatives, especially those cheeky young neocons who run the publications that represent the pitiful remnants of a once great movement, were the worst distorters of the truth.
Their goals are not based on principle, but on partisan maneuvering. How can the GOP refashion itself into a hip, new party that appeals to minorities, with baggage such as this? That was their motivating thought, even though no one in their right mind believes that black Americans will in our lifetime abandon their commitment to Democratic socialism in favor of Republican national socialism.
I'm not interested in being hip, if hip means abandoning the limited-government principles that are supposed to be the bedrock of the Republican Party. I'm more concerned about salvaging a few scraps of Christian civilization than being an acceptable guest at cool parties. If defending the truth means a temporary setback in one's long-term political strategy, so be it.
But it keeps getting worse. In California, a candidate for the state Republican chairmanship, Bill Back, has been savaged for having in 1999 distributed an article by William Lind asking "What if the South Had Won the Civil War." One cannot even ask a serious historical question, or distribute an article that asks such a question, or argue that Reconstruction destroyed race relations in the South, without being drubbed into silence. (Whatever happened to free academic debate? Oh yeah, it exists, but only for those on the left side of the political spectrum, such as when a black Vanderbilt professor argued recently in a Nashville newspaper that Confederate soldiers should have been executed like dogs.)
"The thoughts behind it [the Lind article] have no place in modern America," thundered Jim Brulte, the California GOP's principle-less Senate Republican leader. Now, we're not even allowed to think incorrect thoughts.
Is this still America?
Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that there was nothing of any value coming out of the States Rights Party platform, which – as one writer noted on this Web site – means that Powell either hasn't read the platform or doesn't believe in the US Constitution.
Why does the South evoke so much hatred?
It's not the region's racial past. I grew up in the supposedly enlightened North, where segregation was even more rife. I lived in a 95-percent white county that bordered on heavily black Philadelphia. There was no integration, other than the nasty, government-mandated kind – such as when the feds plopped a hideous, crime-ridden high-rise housing project in the midst of settled South Philly Italian neighborhoods.
In my travels, I've found less respect for blacks by white people up North, than by white people toward their black neighbors down South. When I lived in the South, most of the blacks I knew had a respect for their region, and were far less willing than northern liberals to denigrate all things Southern and often had a sense of humor about racial issues.
Here's the answer. Modern-day liberals, and the Cold War liberals who claim the mantle of the conservative movement, understand that the idea of the South – the South that stood up to northern aggressors, to Reconstruction-era dictators, and to federal authorities in the civil rights era – still resonates among those Americans who want to stand up to centralized government.
They know that honoring rather than running down the South (and Christendom, for that matter) can ignite resistance to their political goals. That's what this really is about.
If the South stands only for racial hatred, why is a Romanian friend of mine here in Southern California, who spent much of his life living under a communist tyranny, and who has never been to the South, so eager to fly the stars and bars from his car's antenna?
I grew up as far, psychologically, as one could get from the Deep South. Yet I remember kids often sporting the rebel flag on T-shirts and on car bumpers. My Dad, despite his hopelessly left-wing politics, insisted until his dying day that the Southern cause was a righteous one. It was a view he freely expressed, even I suspect in the New Jersey public school classroom where he taught social studies. My family was more Seinfeld than Gone with the Wind, yet I learned to have a healthy respect for my neighbors below the Mason and Dixon line.
When I moved for a short time to middle Tennessee in my late 20s, I was disappointed by the degree to which the region embraced the national culture. The ideas that are destroying America are destroying the South also. But there was something special about the place nonetheless. There was the warmth and friendliness of the people, and the independent, conservative, and Christian attitudes that hung on. I got tired of the small town ethic, with its limited career opportunities and frightfully slow pace of life. Still, I remember the South with fondness, and wonder where the Southerners are now to defend their homes, their history, their sense of honor.
Maybe they can't get their voices heard in a media dominated by liberals and neoconservatives, the two sides most eager to portray the South as a dark and mystical place where everyone harbors a secret desire to lynch his black neighbors. Whatever the case, it's a sad commentary on our society. Even sadder still that one cannot defend the South in polite company. It's a good thing I have no plans for public office.
January 15, 2003
Steven Greenhut (send him mail) is a senior editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif.
