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More on Symbols

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I just got an email urging me to sign a petition asking Amazon and eBay to remove merchandise that features the Confederate flag. I’m not signing the petition. Neither would I sign a petition urging to remove merchandise with a swastika or with the symbols of the Russian terrorists in Ukraine. 

Of course, it makes me feel like I’m being punched in the gut every time I enter “Ukraine” in the search box at eBay and have “Novorossia” symbols thrust into my face. But there are things that are more important than my feelings, and freedom of expression is one such thing.

And because I know somebody will ask: if a student came into my classroom in a T-shirt featuring a swastika or a Confederate flag, I’d ask them to leave. But I wouldn’t do that if a student came in wearing the Russian terrorist symbols. My job in my classroom is not to protect myself from the discomfort that only I am likely to experience.

20 responses to “More on Symbols”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    There’s something very… Borg-like about the current confederate flag mass-indignation. People who’d barely noticed it before are suddenly seething with rage.

    I personally don’t have much use for that flag but it’s a symbol of a symbol that is interpreted in lots of ways by lots of people and banning it will probably only cause something worse to fester underground.

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    1. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
      J. Otto Pohl

      It is not that they haven’t noticed it, but that the leadership of America’s “progressives” has been fighting a revisionist struggle to portray the CSA as the greatest evil in world history for years now and they have finally gotten some traction. I am old enough to still remember that in the 1990s people regarded the Nazis as the greatest evil in world history. In fact I still even remember the 1980s when there were a few dissident voices that suggested that Stalin or Pol Pot were more evil than Robert E. Lee. Those days are gone forever.

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        It doesn’t make much sense (except as the Civil War finally becoming an ongoing live issue for the North as well as the South).

        That’s not exactly what I would call ‘progress’….

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      2. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        And while I’m here, how much of this is American Exceptionalism gone mad? There seems to be some kind of weird obsession on the left to portray the US as the greatest violator of human rights ever – if that’s what they think they need to push their agenda then it’s an open admission of defeat.

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        1. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
          J. Otto Pohl

          I suspect a lot of it is the extreme parochialism of the US left. Chattel slavery of blacks was hardly unique to the US and in comparison to the Portuguese in Brazil, the Spanish in Cuba, and the British West Indies it was far less deadly.

          http://jpohl.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-comparative-look-at-numbers-in-slave.html

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        2. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Oh yes. This is just a weird form of extreme patriotism. People feel very offended when one suggests that the US had no relation to a calamity someplace around the globe. They take the news as if I told them that they personally don’t matter as much as they thought they did. The reaction is so similar to a narcissist ‘ s who’s told “This is not about you”, that it’s scary.

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        3. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
          J. Otto Pohl

          This is exactly what I mean by “progressives” considering Robert E. Lee more evil than Hitler now.

          http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregoryferenstein/2015/06/25/as-apple-purges-the-confederate-flag-the-nazi-swastika-stands/

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          1. cliff arroyo Avatar
            cliff arroyo

            Back in the 1980s when disinvestment in SAfrica was a campus issue I remember a conversation with a professor (and some other students, grad and undergrad)

            The professor whose research was with a couple of minority groups in Latin America didn’t quite understand all the fuss. They were sure the situation in SAfrica was bad, but the US getting self-righteous about it seemed a little like the Bible verse about the splinter in your neighbor’s eye…

            Someone volunteered that the Americans often acted like reformed drunks and someone else volunteered that Americans often act like reformed drunks who still get sloshed when there’s no one around to preach at.

            And I think that kind of sums it up. Rather than address the real and corrosive effects of racial animosity in the US it’s just so much easier to get behind a hot button issue and self-righteously preen.

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      3. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        What I don’t get is why we need to have this hierarchy of evil at all. Honestly, it seems a bit childish to approach history with this scale of “who’s the most evil.” This doesn’t serve any useful goal other than letting people engage in a very primitive form of identity building.

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        1. cliff arroyo Avatar
          cliff arroyo

          “it seems a bit childish to approach history with this scale of “who’s the most evil.””

          Americans have a cultural (linguistic?) obsession with quantification. It’s present within the other western English speaking cultures* but reaches its apogee AFAICT in the US. This is just an offshoot of that.

          *not so sure if it’s a feature of the language use of places like Ghana or India where English was imposed from outside and exists on very different linguistic substrates

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          1. J. Otto Pohl Avatar
            J. Otto Pohl

            I don’t think quantification is unique to the US or even English speaking world. A lot of Russian language academic writiting on history has almost more numbers than words. I don’t find that nearly so much in academic histories written in the US.

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            1. cliff arroyo Avatar
              cliff arroyo

              I don’t mean numbers, I mean the idea of relative amounts woven into everyday language structures.

              IME neither Polish, Spanish, German or any other language I know something of does this to the same extent.

              It’s also one of the hardest things to do (for me at least) in translating from other languages into English – choosing what quantifier to use, especially when the context doesn’t make it clear enough if it’s a relatively large, neutral or relatively small amount.

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          2. Clarissa Avatar
            Clarissa

            Absolutely true. I will never forget the strangest conversation about “what COUNTS as sex” that I once witnessed. And it’s like that with everything. People become very uncomfortable when something can’t be counted.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s scary how fast the framework for the discussion of what happened was found and locked down airtight. He’s a loner, he did it because of the flag, remove the flag, and everything will be peachy. And for 3 easy payments of $19,99 we will sell you a foolproof solution for this problem.

      This is consumer society at its most disturbing. I’m in pain, sell me a pill for the pain to go away.

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  2. Tim Avatar
    Tim

    Having these things readily available also helps people brand themselves as people I don’t want to talk to. And that is a very good thing, because if I will tear my hear out if I have to talk to one more marxist communist upper-middle class sociology student.

    Liked by 1 person

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  3. The Dark Avenger Avatar
    The Dark Avenger

    Gee, slavery wasn’t that bad in the U.S., is that what you’re trying to say?

    A great way to summarize the reactionary mind, J. Otto.

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  4. The Dark Avenger Avatar
    The Dark Avenger

    Well, Clarissa, this is a case of the mighty and wonderful capitalist system at work. Without any protests, threats of a boycott, or, indeed, any action whatsoever on the part of any activists, left, right, or center, the mighty Amazon, Wal-Mart, Sears, eBay, etc, all decided that not selling the Confederate flag was in their best interest.

    Of course, like any good reactionary patriot, J. Otto sees this as an American flaw, not a good thing. I suppose he could start a factory or contract to export the flags them thru the mail or other means to America, where they will be bought by some, but not all, of his counterparts in the American South, who like Otto, are about heritage, not hate.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      These activists you mention sound strangely passive. Maybe we should call them passivists. 🙂

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  5. The Dark Avenger Avatar
    The Dark Avenger

    I think this excerpt from an article on Salon summarizes what’s going on here:

    All of these companies, and the others like them surely to follow, were simply looking at the future; and what they saw was an America where a business implicitly legitimizing the flag had more to lose than to gain. As Jonathan Chait rightly argued, an old understanding of what it means to be American — an understanding profoundly bound to a certain definition of whiteness and constructed on a foundation of racist, revisionist history — is fading. “I know we’re going to lose eventually,” one pro-Confederate South Carolinian told the New York Times. His ranks, and the influence of his kind on the American mainstream, shrink a little more every day.

    http://www.salon.com/2015/06/25/wingnuts_confederate_flag_crisis_why_they_cant_admit_whos_really_responsible_for_dixies_latest_defeat/

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Somebody wrote the other day that taking down the flag should be the very first step in a long chain of other steps. And I agree with that. I’ve met many racist people here and elsewhere, and none of them sported the flag. Many, I’m sure, would be horrified at the idea. But then they still say, “I’d prefer not to hire her because she’s black.” Or they don’t even consider hiring a black RA, even if he’s a lot more qualified than the string of white competitors. And so on. I just want to see a lot more, A LOT MORE, than this flag being taken down.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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