THE CONFEDERATE FLAG GETS A NEW LIFE

larry rivers

My back goes up and stays up over this new spate of Yankee assaults on working class Southerners for failing to be their intellectual equals, for thinking differently from middle-class white people writing in Boston and New York offices. Insults fly, the air a swarm of arrows, like in a Chinese medieval war movie, arcing over the Mason-Dixon line aimed at cartoon visions of the South, Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, unrepentant racists. I see quite a lot of it every day without looking for it. I don't comment or make anything of it, because I don't care what they think about the South. Just stay out of the South, stay up North where you belong, read about the South, write about the South and have opinions all you want, but stay home, please. One of my favorite of the slurs is the picture of a white flag said to be the only true confederate flag. I'd be happy to take that flag for my own, the flag of ultimate peace. As for confederate flag a flag of surrender, this only says whoever thought this one up does not know shit about the South or Southerners. My interpretation is they can't handle it that the South is an actual culture separate from their own absence of culture. 

larry rivers

It's the great American story, Be Like Me, going about believing they know more about other people's lives than the people living their own lives. I feel myself charged up inside over these Yankee assaults of blame on the Southern people over their identity around a flag that pisses Yankees off. Nobody in the South is going to say, Aw, poor Yankee got his feelings hurt. Yankees still don't get it the South does not back down. The civil war was an attack of aggression from the North. It was all fought on Southern land by Southern farm boys defending the homeland from a professional military machine. They were saying, and would have to the last man, Hell No, we will not submit. They'll have to defeat us again to make us give up the flag. There's nothing they can do and every redneck in the South knows it. In simple Southernese, they can go fuck theirselves. Aint nothin a bunch of fellers likes better'n self-righteous Yankees stayin at home. One of many things I embrace about the South is that I can get in my car, drive to Tennessee, Mississippi or Alabama, be comfortable and feel at home. My accent says I'm a friendly, part of the family, share the same belief system of what constitutes decent behavior. 

larry rivers

The South is not just a flag that most people in the South don't care about, anyway. A vast majority of Southerners don't care a lick about the flag, but a great many of them would stand firm against a Yankee assault against it. The most this media feeding frenzy on everything Southern has accomplished has been to recruit young white men to the klan. The klan may be the imaginary new confederate army defending the homeland from Yankee assaults, at least a powerful symbol. Nobody stands up for the South outside the South and Southerners mostly don't stand up for the South either, because they don't care what Yankees think of them, as much as Yankees don't care what Canadians think of them. Down here in the South we don't even think about the North except as an irritant that won't go away. We certainly do not entertain any secret desire to be like the North. Arrogance is the most frowned upon, least tolerated of human characteristics in the South. Yankee arrogance grates all the worse from the perspective of people who don't experience it much, left to themselves. 

larry rivers

First thing I saw when the finger-pointing and blame started piling up was a redneck reaction planned to give the Yankees a fit. Yesterday I saw something about an 8-mile long parade of cars and pickups, bikes too, flying the forbidden flag. I forget where. It doesn't matter where. Could be anywhere in the South. Like a school massacre can pop up anywhere in television viewing America. I saw something about amazon selling twice as many of the flags as before. Only historians know about the early 60s association with the flag in the South. Rebel boys, the only ones that make something of it, don't care about that. It is their rally flag, all the more now, identity as Southern rednecks like Hank Williams III and Larry the Cable Guy. Git-er-done. Our humor may not be as sophisticated as Yankee humor, but we don't care. We got better music. If they want to start taking down Southern monuments, they'd better be ready for unpredictable reaction. It's more corporate media stirring division for control, devoid of moral responsibility. This present round of Yankee efforts to shame Southern identity is just drawing us closer together under the canopy of Southern unity, a great big confederate flag that people are rallying to now, who didn't care anything about it before.    

larry rivers by larry rivers

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PROFILE OF A SOUTHERN BOY

My friend Justin came through again to crack me up so bad I had to hang on to keep from falling out of the chair and rolling on the floor. This week's race happened Saturday night instead of Sunday afternoon. Justin played in a softball tournament all day and his team won every game. He arrived home at the same time the race started and I arrived a few minutes after. In front of the tv, he told me highlights of the game, like the hardest he ever hit a ball. He said the ball went in a straight line, no more than four feet above the ground all the way to the fence, hitting the ground once. He said he would rather make base hits than home runs. This hit was a home run with two people on base. The pitcher, a huge guy they call Tiny, told Justin later he never saw the ball leave the bat. While his team was at bat, standing about watching the game, an X girlfriend walked by with three black guys playing in the tournament too, one of them her significant other. He asked Justin, they know each other, if the truck was his with the confederate flag on the front bumper. Justin affirmed it was. He told Justin it offends him. My jaw about dropped to the floor. I took it for it an act of foolish effrontery. To say such a thing to Justin in front of a dozen or so rednecks hanging about, especially in this time, was stupid. Justin said, "Fuck you. Pull up your pants. They offend me."

I've already settled the racism issue to satisfaction in myself, and do not take a commercial for television issues to be my role. I practice allowing my friends to be who they are, and receive same in turn. I've known Justin all his life. His riposte came from who he is by way of birth, culture and experience. He's somebody gentle as a toddler until confronted. His confrontational nature springs to the surface quick as a spinning donkey, ready for whatever comes next. The tag on the front of his truck is a quietly confrontational gesture. It says, This is who I am, no apologies, no justifications. He's a Southern white boy and he aint backing down. The flag is his identity. He also knew he had backup if the three confronted him. Whenever somebody gets in Justin's face, I shudder inside for their safety. He's a scrapper and gets a big kick out of fighting, hasn't had a good fight in several years, since he's been married to Crystal. It's not that she's opposed to him fighting, he doesn't have that mind anymore. He's not a trouble maker, he just doesn't back down. When it comes to loyal friends, Justin's loyalty is all the way to the grave. Several years ago, I realized Justin would willingly die defending me. I thought, would I die for Justin? Answer came with hesitation. I got with self and said it's time to take a look at this. I came to, Yes, I would willingly die defending Justin. This understanding in myself changed our friendship to brotherhood. It resonated all the way to the soul. 

Rocker Kid Rock made headlines last week for saying, "Kiss my ass," when told he needed to abandon his use of the confederate flag onstage. Every redneck in America rallied to Kid Rock that moment. He may be Skynyrd the next generation by now. Justin respected Kid Rock's gesture so much that his own gesture affirmed himself a loyal Southern boy. He will respect Kid Rock the rest of his life for standing up for the South, the homeland threatened once again. The South is family, extended family and all the way back, heritage, a word now being denied the South by national media. The only heritage the Yankee drama media see in the South is slavery, due entirely to their ignorance of the South. Southern culture is a culture of poverty held down by the Union for a century after the War of Yankee Aggression. Not until the 1960s did the New South start generating an alternative to poverty. The Southern boys were defending homeland, mama, daddy, mamaw, papaw, cousins, aunts, uncles, wives, kids, their dogs, their farms, culture, home, everything they loved, their babies. The South feels threatened again, like in the 1950s and 60s when the media dismissed the South and the Southern way of life with blame and shame.  

All the time Justin was growing up, I kept him aware of his Southern mountain heritage as something valuable to be proud of not ashamed of. I've encouraged awareness that hillbilly is a term of praise. Other people don't know what they're talking about when they use it to run people down. I have taught Justin without teaching him to love his heritage as something important in who he is. As I see the identity with the flag, it is so big and so multifaceted, so interwoven complex, an outsider pointing at it with blame over slavery is so superficial as to make every self-respecting Southerner laugh out loud, except it makes them so damn mad they want to fly it from a pole on their front porch, show it to the world. Justin said he wants to get a confederate flag tattoo. And he will. Soon. It is a gesture of defiance that says you will not break my loyalty to my own life. The flag means rebel. It's why motorcycle gangs of the not-too-distant past would wear the flag on their jackets, on their bikes. What the flag means in this context is, I am I, do not fuck with me. It's the Allman Brothers, it's George Thorogood, it's Charlie Daniels, it's Free Bird, it's Southern beach parties, it's identity. Southern rock is knee deep in Delta blues. Another thing the Yankee accusers miss is the people who fly the rebel flag have such a high regard for the American flag they do, have done, and will die for it. They're loyal to Old Glory a million miles beyond loyalty to the rebel flag, the latter a subculture only, and everybody in the South knows it. This present round of rednecks embracing the rebel flag is saying nothing more aggressive than, Leave us alone. 

photos by tj worthington

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REBEL REBEL

john marin

Watched a documentary about GMOs, Strange Culture, that left me mortified and at once realizing I've survived somehow. A lifetime of eating manufactured food and I've lived. It wasn't the food so much that took hold of my throat as the absolute violation of human rights by federal law enforcement that took place without recourse. Yesterday the Supremes, we know which five, declared law enforcement no longer needs a warrant to enter my house uninvited and take charge. They didn't anyway, though now it's official. The Confederate flag issue has pushed my buttons more than I thought it would when it started. I'm tired of smug Yankee attitudes toward the South. They've found another easy target, people up front about who they are and what they believe. There is quite a lot about the South that runs in the negative, disdain for education a big one, though American as big pickups. Everything that can be said about the South can be said about all other regions of the country, the whole country. Southerners are Americans first. The flag thing is a redneck identity tag. The people that fly the Confederate flag are Americans first. As Americans, Southern is their culture, their way of life, porch honkies. And the South is poor. American media hates the poor. 

john marin

Now that it's ok to assault white people the same as black people, the poor whites are targets. Now that it's ok for law enforcement to kill poor white people as freely as poor black people, the South is a wide-open barn door target. Ask a Yankee in denial if he's a racist and he'll say, No, I aint no racist. Ask a Southern redneck and he'll say, Hail yeah I'm a racist. What of it? I know, it's not kind, it's not nice, it's hurtful. It is and I regret that about it. I live among Southern rednecks. I love Southern rednecks. They're not all the same. They're individual human beings born without access to much resources, grew up in a world that had no place for them and looks down on them, a world that swindles and lies to them, a world they can't believe in. They're a perfect tinder box for political propaganda appealing to their anger. These are working people who work their asses off all week at labor jobs nobody reading this would take, especially for as little as they work for. They get taken advantage of by management, by government, by the Bank, work like hell and have nothing to show for it but hopefully most of the bills paid every month. Your income pays for less and less until you're working like a mule, your wife leaves and takes the kids. 

john marin

You leave the dog with the kids and put what you have left in a used Harley, attach a Confederate flag to the back of your riding jacket and you're a rebel. Rebel is what the flag is about. You keep your job, but you're a different man. A man develops a give-a-shit attitude, your ex-wife raises the kids to be nothing at all like you. You let your hair grow, let appearance go, conform to the criminal code of watching each other's backs, carry a gun at all times because twenty people want to kill you and four of them mean it, all over stupid shit you did drunk on white liquor and/or on crack. The flag says for him, By God, I'm my own man, take it or leave it. The white Southern working class man is limited to construction work, of which not much is going on now, and factory work, most of which went to Asian sweatshops, and truck driving. Factory work is demeaning. The white working class man has fallen to the same place as the black working class man, nothing available but work that is a personal affront to your manhood and your humanity. These are the people Rush Limbaugh and Fake News target to stir up their anger to take political advantage of them. More redneck boys are popping caps in their own heads and ODing than ever before. They see only hopelessness ahead. It's the same among the black boys.

john marin

The entire working class left to getting by the best they can, both white and black, intense frustration in the air, everybody with guns galore, anything can happen. Anything does happen. Corporate radio and television twists anger into hate, dividing us to conquer us, using the working class for pawns as in war. The conditions that create the disquiet in the working people are not looking to improve any time soon. The conditions for the working people have only devolved in my lifetime. Again, it's beyond my sphere of influence. I deal with it like everybody else deals, do what I can to get by and hang with it. I have no solution. It's too big for a solution. All I know to do is fly below the radar and let other people fight it out. Move inward, pay closer attention to my closest friends, give more attention to Caterpillar the cat, read more, paint more, dwell less in news and more in the people immediately engaged in my life. Pay more attention to God and the way of the spirit. We're in a time that is way out of balance, and my own balance is what I seek. We're always in a time out of balance, no matter where or when. It's the nature of the landscape we live our lives in. When I live in my own balance, it doesn't matter if the world out-there is in or out of balance. It's just a mind game. I live closer to home paying closer attention to the people I interact with in everyday life, the donkeys, the birds, the squirrels, the chipmunks, music and the wildwood flowers. 

john marin

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TALK ABOUT THE CONFEDERATE FLAG

milton avery

Media interest in pointing the finger of blame at the South over racism has become uber-tiresome. The southwestern quadrant of USA is at least as racist as the southeastern; so is the northwestern and the northeastern. To solve a deep-running issue, NY and LA media want to rid-a-flag they've defined racist. Suppress one, another pops up. In the Soviet time, religion was suppressed. As soon as the Soviet system went away, religion came back. American media is engaged in another frenzy of make-a-law-against. We're so overrun with laws against, we're about painted into a corner. Already, any one of us can be arrested at any moment for something we're doing or have done or conspiracy. Example: the word nigger has been suppressed for the last half century. The working class uses it freely, as does the ruling class. It is only the white middle class that says, "the enword," or uses asterisks between obvious letters. F*t is the same as spelling fat. Saying enword and using asterisks is an act of denial that denies nothing. It's being nice, denying it while saying it. Like it was ok to say shit in front of mommy if I quoted somebody else saying it.

milton avery

I don't mean to be going on like I'm serious about the matter. The flag is too complicated an issue to limit to right or wrong, true or false. Like everything in this phenomenal world we call living, too much is interwoven, experience, thought, beliefs, to call anything or anybody one thing or another. I don't like the way somebody who got drunk and did something stupid that lasted maybe three seconds is called a criminal. I also don't like the way people who have served their time are treated and watched as criminals after their time is served. This is getting into things I have a problem with that I can't do anything about, but I don't have to be that way in my own behavior. Ex-cons I've met along the way, I regard with the same respect as anyone else, with a bit more respect for what they have been through in what I consider an unjust legal system, especially if you're black or any version of non-white, colored, or poor white. Again, nothing I can do about it. I fall back on my boycott of one. Today, I set out to buy a watermelon, wanting to paint one again. I chose to buy it at a roadside stand instead of Food Lion. I can't see giving my five dollars to a corporation that underpays its employees and treats them like shit when I can give somebody an assist who goes into the field early in the morning and selects the produce herself. 

milton avery

I stopped by the welding shop on the way home to visit with Ross and Harry. Milly, Ross's sister, stopped by for a bit and we had a good time sitting and standing in a circle, smoking cigarettes, laughing like the bunch of rednecks we are. These are people I feel at-home free with. We're so close in the heart, I'm about the same as a Richardson. I'm natured a lot like one. Milly and I have been at each other's throats almost with knives, Ross and I have too, and they're my friends I can count on for backup if needed unto the grave. It runs both ways. The subject of the flag came up and we had different thoughts and passions on the matter. Harry most of all. Harry is a retired Army lifer. He said the Confederate flag is treasonous, they fought against the American Army. He called it "you-guys' flag." I said the Civil War was a Yankee invasion. The South defended homeland. Ross said he knows what the flag means. It don't make no differ'nce to him. Milly, the Civil War buff, went off on Yankees and we laughed quite a lot. Except Harry, who identifies Southern, but not with any glorification of the Civil War. It was the Richardson in the rest of us that got us wound up about the South the homeland. 

milton avery

Yesterday, watching the race, Justin told me he was out of sorts with Dale Earnhardt Jr, his favorite driver, for coming out and making a statement that Nascar shouldn't have anything to do with the Confederate flag. I hated to see him so disappointed by a guy he looks up to so personally, like an older brother. He likes Jr's character. I told him Jr is not his own man. I said every time you see him in a commercial, he gets at least hundreds of dollars per showing. He was told by Nascar and corporate sponsors this is what he will do. To say no would cost him hundreds of thousands, millions, maybe his career. I pointed out that television is about money not ethics. Jr is in that world of high-paid celebrities. Once you cross the line into celebrity, your life is no longer your own, you're a product, your name a logo. I wanted to remind him this is a show, this is not real. I knew he knew, just forgot it in a moment of passion. This just a pie-slice of my friends. Very few of them would repeat any other. One can give a hundred reasons for, and another a hundred reasons against, every one of the two hundred reasons valid from some point of view. 

milton avery

The only thing I can see coming of this banning of the flag is a new item in the inventory of underground collectables, flea markets loaded with inflated Confederate flag items, if you know who to ask. Suppression never works and the ones doing the suppressing never get it. We'll have roadside stands selling velvet wall hangings of the flag, tshirts, belt buckles, an infinity of possibilities, just like now. My solution: deal with racism up front and let interest in the flag fade away as it will when nobody cares anymore. I feel like it is healthy for collective American culture to face up to racism as our way of life. Everyone knows it, everyone lives it. We act like we never heard of it. Our racism is rooted deep in our American denial. Which came first, denial or racism? Something like this needs to be brought into awareness collectively, as it does individually, before any real work can be done toward untying the knots of habit patterns that go all the way back to the beginning. It's looking like the Charleston church slayings have brought awareness of pervasive racism in white rule to the surface. If we don't get past blaming the flag, it will have been for naught. I can't imagine television allowing awareness of racism in the white American heart to go beyond blame and punishment, especially not unto self-awareness. 

milton avery

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CONFEDERATE FLAG THE NEW COLLECTABLE

The  public argument around the Confederate battle flag tells me more about the public than the flag. We have people defining what it means, both literally and symbolically. I've learned more about the Confederate flag this week than I ever wanted to know. Jon Stewart continues to make me want to tell him to shut his Yankee mouth. He fails to notice the North invaded the South, not the other way around. Of course, it can be said the South fired the first shot at Ft Sumter. Another Tonkin Gulf story. "He had a gun." My argument with Stewart has to do with him characterizing the South the invader. He doesn't say it, but talks as-if. I tire of his sweep of the hand dismissal of the South and Southerners like his dismissal of the white woman who wanted to be black. He lost credibility for me over his cheap shots at her from his perspective of self-righteous conformity to the social code of the moment calling himself liberal. He's most self-righteous on the subject of racism, quick to point and judge, just like the rest of us. The South is the same to him as a cartoon figure. 

I've lived in the South throughout my adult life. The South I know from the inside is very different from the South Stewart thinks he knows from outside---New York, of all places to point the finger from. I'd like to see him go on about police brutality on black and poor people by NYPD to the same extent he's made fake issues of the South. Of course, he's put himself forward as the model non-racist. He's not the model non-misogynist, but he keeps that under the desk. My argument is not so much with Stewart as with taking such an absolute stance on a matter that goes deeper than good and bad. And I'm not going to be a racism apologist. I grew up in a racist family, near and extended, went to racist church and racist school, outside the South. I started shedding my racism young, knowing some black people, seeing they were not as characterized by white people. I was attracted to black people because they did not do denial. Every black person I knew talked straight, recognized a thing for what it was. I felt black people were refreshing, like clear mountain spring water. I remember the cartoon Indians in cowboy and Indian television of the Fifties saying, "White man speak with forked tongue." As a kid, all white people lied to me. I liked the black people I knew for not lying like white people. 

Evidently, Yankees see the South a two-dimensional caricature, Bugs Bunny in a gray Civil War uniform. The decade I lived in Charleston, SC, deep South, I knew only liberals. The right wing was everywhere, even the majority of the population, but a large percentage of the people are not right wing. In the Blue Ridge, the majority of the population is right wing, though I only mix with people who are liberal or don't care about politics. That's just a social dynamic. People of the right don't like me for not being of the right. It's ok by me. I've come to stay away from white men my age, my peers. One look at the scowl on a white man's face with white hair and I know what tv channel he watches. Yet, exceptions abound. Myself, I hope. People in the South, like people everywhere, are not just one thing, not caricatures. Yankees display a conviction they're better than white Southerners, and certainly better than black Southerners, the way white middle class looks down on white working class, the part in the denial drawer. Racism is more taken for granted in the South than the rest of the country where the white people are racist too, but practice denial. Black people are racist. It's what we humans do. The only solution I can see is to acknowledge racism in self and be conscious of it, aware of it. Awareness is the beginning of addressing change in self. 

I gave up on racism by the time I was out of high school. Black kids went to school and some were my neighbors. They were good people. The people living here from Mexico are good people. As far as I can tell, the only difference between us is culture. Black people have their culture, white people have theirs, and Mexicans have theirs. It is the cultures that make us different. Intolerance of other cultures is a problem. Racism boils down to ego. It amounts to saying, Not me. It is saying, I don't like a given point of view because it's not mine. I used to have a friend I had to stop knowing because he believed his the only true and valid point of view, all others nonsense, especially mine. This is how white people are toward black people, making it clear their whiteness is the only pigmentation and civilization valid. It can be said a general belief among white people that black people have no value. Otherwise, there would be something besides justification coming from white people about cops killing so many unarmed, young black men and women, even children and old people. The greatest justification of all, they kill white people and dogs, too. Racism is too complicated to be dealt with superficially. It can only be dealt with superficially in America. In the land of television, we only deal with social issues superficially, by distraction. This Confederate flag issue is a distraction from something else that matters we're not to know about. As soon as whatever the flag is covering up passes, concerns about the flag will go away with it. 

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