Stars And Bars

by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Special to TLE

           I grew up in the Deep South -- any deeper and I'd have been out swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. In the 1960s, going to junior high and high school, I hated what you might call "professional southerners", with their rebel yells, their faded glory, their might-have-beens, their lame excuses, their poor white trash, and their goddamn Dixie cups. Spanish moss gave me a rash and southern patriotism was often nothing more than an excuse for forced conformity and dullwitted bullying.
           (What I didn't understand then was that in junior high and high school, anything is an excuse for forced conformity and dullwitted bullying.)
           I disliked the Confederate flag and anyone who wore or displayed it. Shortly before his death, my own father gave me a leather belt embossed and painted with that flag and I have never worn it. I write an ongoing series of novels about a confederacy, the North American Confederacy, an alternate world that has no connection with and bears no resemblance to the Confederacy of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.
           Over the years, my attitude changed a trifle as I learned more of the real War between the States, the reasons that people on both sides gave for fighting it, and especially the vicious, power-hungry fascism and the perverse taste for mass murder that characterized the Lincoln Administration.
           Still, I had no great liking for that flag. But now I'm beginning to reconsider even that, thanks to Mayor Wellington Webb of Denver. I would be extremely interested to hear what justification -- under the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution -- Wellywebb and his strange and corrupt administration have to offer for their bizarre and probably illegal behavior on the capitol steps the other day in Denver.
           You may have seen it on TV.
           Just like every other large city in America, Denver has become a festering boil on the backside of an otherwise wonderful state to live in, a churning sinkhole of dirt, grime, crime, pollution, socialism, outright jackbooted thuggery, and welfare parasitism, lorded over by a comic-relief collection of latterday Mussolinoids whose antics and attitudes make the late Emperor Joshua Norton look like a serious statesman.
           Travellers beware: this is the gang of slimy thieves who'll steal your car if the cops find a perfectly Constitutional gun or knife aboard.
           "Liberal" Democrat Wellywebb -- the very incarnation of one of those inflatable bopping-clown toys kids like to play with -- is still stinging from a humiliating defeat at the polls some years ago, when the people of Colorado decided not to give special protected status to yet another minority (in this case, homosexuals) and we got labeled, consequently, the "Hate State" by the round-heeled eastern mass media. For some reason, even a bogus Supreme Court declaration that the vote was unconstitutional failed to ease his agonies and those of his hangers-on.
           Aside: do my views on this subject make me "homophobic"? Hardly. I'd oppose special protected -- and, I might add, undemocratic -- legal status for middle-aged Polish-American males, which is what I happen to be. Exactly as each and every one of us is personally different, we're all politically the same under the Bill of Rights. That's all we need, and that's the way it should be. Nothing else is necessary.
           More recently, Wellywebb and his drooling hordes failed miserably to use the Columbine High School murders as a lever to promote English style victim disarmament in Colorado, even though the tragedy was milked beyond decency or belief by the media and despite the best supporting efforts of our evil and stupid Republican governor Bill Owens.
           I repeat, evil and stupid: Bill Owens.
           It appears sometimes there's a limit to what forced conformity and dullwitted bullying can accomplish -- even when it's undertaken by "liberals".
           So what -- in an election year -- did that leave Rocky Mountain bedwetters to be conspicuously liberal about, in order to work off with the press what they imagine is Colorado's shameful public image? You guessed it: the Confederate flag. That hated and controversial rag that currently flies over the state capitol of South Carolina. Wellywebb and his sniveling gaggle of political mouthbreathers held a highly publicized rally on the Colorado capitol steps to denounce what they called a vile symbol of slavery, racism, and oppression -- by showing the Stars and Bars in a form big enough to land Navy fighters on!
           It looked beautiful on TV.
           Speakers included the predictable collection of crooks, cretins, crazies, and commissars, including His Dishonor himself and Allegra "Happy" Haynes, who always manages to look like a museum exhibit labeled "Marxist Woman". They all called for an economic boycott of South Carolina -- significantly -- like the organized homosexual boycott of Colorado so costly to convention-related businesses in this state.
           Or so we're told.
           Let's get this straight once and for all, shall we? The War between the States had no more to do with black chattel slavery than the War of Jenkins' Ear. The very fact that Frederick Douglass and his fellow abolitionists had to work so hard trying to make it be about slavery -- well after the shooting had already started -- is more than enough evidence of that. Abraham Lincoln thought black people were subhuman.
           Wellywebb and his ilk have already cut George Washington out of public school history texts, and Thomas Edison, as well. They're working on Thomas Jefferson (although presently, he's sort of stuck sideways in their gullets). What's next after South Carolina's flag, the Gadsden flag with its rattlesnake and politically incorrect dire warning? The Pine Tree flag that was the first flag this nation ever flew?
           Let's stop kidding one another, shall we? From their previous work, we know too well what sort of flag Wellywebb and his bunch would raise over the South Carolina capitol. It would feature a hammer and sickle.
           Or a swastika.
           To them I say, leave the battered south's history the hell alone.
           After all, it's all they have.
           For my part, to honor this boycott of South Carolina, I'm going to see if they make anything in that state that I want and can purchase online. In the name of undermining and defeating Wellywebb's attempt at forced conformity and dullwitted bullying, I urge you to do the same.

An unreconstructed rebel in his own cause, L. Neil Smith is publisher of The Libertarian Enterprise and author of 24 books including The Probability Broach, The Lando Calrissian Adventures, Forge of the Elders (forthcoming in April, 2000), Pallas, and The Mitzvah, with JPFO founder and executive director Aaron Zelman.

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