So the latest thing causing my conservative Facebook friends' heads to explode is some cable TV network pulling re-runs of the old, campy, 1980s TV show The Dukes of Hazzard (but still allowing them to be streamed online). Before that it was the toy manufacturer who would no longer make orange "General Lee" toy cars with the offending flag on the roof.
Apple also removed all of its Civil War games featuring use of the flag. Perhaps that's a step I wouldn't take, but all of these being the business decisions of corporations operating in an ostensibly free market, mind you. Not mandated by government, only by prevailing market conditions influenced by contemporary cultural trends. It's the Free Market doing what the Free Market does. I thought conservatives were all about letting the Free Market run free?
These are separate circumstances quite apart from the removal of Confederate flags & symbols from public spaces; The latest news on that front that has angered my conservative Facebook friends is the decision to remove the Confederate flag(s) flying over the Fort Sumpter historical site. This I'll admit gave even me pause. But the more I thought about it, the more I said to myself, why does THAT flag deserve to fly over THAT Fort? It was a Federal Fort that the Southern rebels fired upon and occupied until it was abandoned near the end of the Civil War. Union naval forces attempted to re-capture it in 1863 but failed, losing just over 100 men in the action. The flags should be hauled down and displayed inside the Fort, under glass, for the purposes of historical instruction. They do not deserve to fly with honor in the breeze alongside the US flag.
I vigorously support those removals and the activism surrounding it. But the decisions made by private companies regarding rebel flag related products do exist in the same cultural Zeitgeist.
I watched The Dukes of Hazzard quite religiously as a child in the 1980s. I probably still have a matchbox General Lee toy car collecting dust & rust in a toybox somewhere in the house. It was one of my favorite shows on television at the time, in no small part because of the phenomenal car chase scenes; it even subversively had a quietly anti-gun theme...the Duke boys being prohibited persons under the law due to past crimes associated with bootlegging moonshine; they never carried guns and got by as modern-day Robin Hoods, carrying high tech hunting bows with high explosive arrow-heads. They were societal "rebels" in more of a social class sense, roguish heroes of the rural working poor against local corrupt aristocrats like "Boss Hogg" who dressed not unlike an updated version of a stereotypical plantation owner of old.
But as a product of the 1980s, it also served, regrettably, to normalize and popularize the Confederate Battle Flag, completely shorn from its actual historical roots and tied rather to a mythology and a mystique. It became conflated (unfortunately) with social rebellion in a generalized, even positive sense. The General Lee moreover represented a solidly American "muscle" car in an era where American automotive dominance a was being seriously challenged by Japanese imports. This jaunty, playful, rolling symbol of the Confederacy is meant to stand in for America as a whole. No less ridiculous than the Dallas Cowboys still claiming to be "America's Team".
Its distinctive car horn, the first 12 notes of the popular Dixie folk song, completely erases the lyrics and context of that song in favor of a wordless melody...a heroic ditty the Duke boys would blast every time they made an improbable leap over a formidable object.
Again, quite insidiously, erasing the actual historical context of that song, its very words, because the words are too tied to a painfully real and ugly history...better instead to invoke a mythic nostalgia seen through rose colored glasses.
More pedantic fans of the show may correct me, but I remember a very lily white cast and not one single black character of any significance in the show, which is quite remarkable for a narrative taking place in the American South.
The Dukes of Hazzard, as a cultural object, served to enable the ahistorical "Heritage Not Hate" meme found among contemporary NeoConfederate apologists and other battle flag defenders. It was definitely a fun show for its time, but it's legacy is very problematic in the rear view mirror of cultural history.
The Duke Boys, Bo & Luke, struck me as basically good people. They may have fallen on the wrong side of the law, but it was only out of economic desperation and survival. They are, I'm certain, how many White Southern conservatives would like to view themselves. That self-identification aspiration aside, I feel as though if Bo & Luke had a story where they sat down with a black preacher whose church had just been fire-bombed and he could talk to them about their car and its horn and symbols calmly and earnestly, I think these simple, pure-hearted characters (unlike far too many flesh and blood Southerners who want to identify with them) could be made to see the error of their ways and would voluntarily paint over the flag themselves, change the car horn, and change the name of their beloved car. I think a black preacher character could show Bo & Luke how they suffered under the same economic oppression from Boss Hogg that his community suffered from. THAT message would've been TRULY subversive and thus would never make it on the air.
Instead we get a ridiculous movie remake and now a car seller website commercial instead, evoking a 1980s nostalgia for the Reagan Era every bit as problematic as the toxic nostalgia for the Ante-Bellum South the shows' iconography invokes.
There are some that object that if we condemn the Confederate flag & symbols we must also (to be logically consistent) condemn the U.S. Flag, they argue, because it too presided over many heinous acts throughout our history.
And while it is undeniably true that heinous acts were committed under the shadow of the U.S. Flag throughout history, it is also true that the "Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible" has always aspired to higher human ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, The Gettysburg Address, MLK's I Have A Dream speech, and Kennedy's speech at American University. The short-lived CSA can make no such similar claim. It was a nation founded, unambiguously, on the premise of White Supremacy and the permanent enslavement of the negro race as decreed by almighty God himself, in their founders' minds. The U.S.A. doesn't always live up to its highest ideals and aspirations, but at least it has them.
PS: I write these DKos Diaries because a "Status Update" of this length on Facebook would be tl;dr and evoke mostly eye rolls and unfollows.