OPINION:
The mob is loose. The debate about race that naive and sometimes well-meaning people say the nation needed has descended into an evitable burst of midsummer madness. The Confederate battle flag that is said to have driven a nut case to commit wholesale murder has become merely the backdrop of national lunacy. The millions quail at the sight of the Stars and Bars, a bit of cloth for all that. You would think Marse Robert at Appomattox surrendered too soon.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate, extended the debate over guns and flag when he found an obscure monument to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy and a native son of Kentucky. Indeed, Davis was born not far from the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. History feeds on such ironies. Mr. McConnell, no fan of history’s ironies, wants to take down the obscure monument.
Sen. Harry Byrd of Nevada, the Democratic majority leader before his majority evaporated in the congressional elections of last November, scoured Nevada for a Confederate flag and, not finding one, settled for the nickname — “the Runnin’ Rebels” — of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He demanded the university change it to something else. Perhaps the Runnin’ Robbers, to commemorate the famous casinos.
Stars and Stripes, the privately owned newspaper for American military troops, asked its readers whether U.S. military bases named for Confederate generals — Forts Bragg, Rucker, Hood, Lee, Benning, Gordon, Hill, Polk, Pickett and Beauregard — should be called something else.
The search for villains extended into popular music. The Nation magazine, which is the leftmost appendage of the body politic, suggests that it was not only the devil and the Confederate battle flag that made Dylann Roof a killer, but the rap music embraced by skinheads, jerks and crazies on the right. The editor isn’t sure Roof ever listened to it, but she blames such music, anyway. “It’s not clear exactly what Roof was listening to, or how it influenced him,” she writes. “But it wouldn’t be surprising if music were one of the channels through which his racism crystallized.”
Such careful reasoning is typical of a mob, when reason is dispatched and anything else goes. A newly discovered photograph of Roof, in a Gold’s Gym T-shirt, burning an American flag, made it to the Internet Wednesday. Maybe it wasn’t the Confederate flag that made him do it, after all. Maybe it was the American flag, or the matches he used to set the flag alight, or even Gold’s Gym. One never knows.
Certain merchants moved quickly to take Confederate souvenirs, including the battle flag, off their shelves. Wal-Mart sanitized its shelves of everything Confederate, and Amazon won’t any longer sell the Confederate battle flag. But it still offers for sale Nazi Germany regalia, including, for $7. 35, a Nazi SS flag of Hitler’s “Schutzstaffel” that carried out the annihilation of 6 million Jews during World War II.
Controversy over President Obama’s use of “the N-word” continues. The president was making the point that there’s still work to do to eliminate racism. “Racism, we are not cured of it,” he rightly said. “And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say ’nigger’ in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years [ago].” Hear! Hear! But many Americans, including not a few of his friends, fainted and required resuscitation.
The good news is that the fever that drives the mob will soon subside, and calm and sanity will return. Then we can talk in a deliberate way about what should be done to make the changes that should be made, whether about the Confederate flag, T-shirts, and the president’s “bad” language. No more fainting allowed.
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