What Do You Get When You Remix the Confederacy for 2015?

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/what-do-you-get-when-you-remix-the-confederacy-for-2015/

Seriously: It’s not the Southern romance but the Confederacy with which I have a problem. But the Confederacy, as bears reminding, lost the Civil War. The American flag—the one to which we make a pledge of allegiance—is the flag of the United States. That’s a dispositive legal distinction, not a whimsical or emotional one. The Confederate flag stands for the Confederate Constitution, which was virtually identical to the US Constitution but for one really important sentence: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”

The mash-up of that message with an assault rifle is why I drove quite slowly behind the enormous pickup truck, letting the distance grow between it and me. I slowed my car intentionally to let the truck race on, backward into the future.

Recently, I heard Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, hold forth in a nuanced discussion about borders, national identity, pluralistic pedagogy, so-called philosophical untranslatables, and the linguist Roman Jakobson’s concept of marked and unmarked terms. It was so impressive and sophisticated that I confess my brain wandered sideways to a parallel universe in which any given American politician brought such insight to the crisis at our own borders. We need more than Donald Trump as American interlocutor in these crucial global debates. It was this sad thought that weighed on me as I drove slowly in the wake of that enormous Confederate death threat, cowering at what ex post facto bill of attainder might await around the bend.

Black lives matter. Confederate lives matter. Mexican lives matter. Syrian lives matter. Iraqi and Turkish lives matter. Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist lives matter. Police lives matter. Swedish lives matter. Cecil the lion’s life matters.

But power matters too. All lives are not treated with the same care, but are received differently as we cross from neighborhood to neighborhood, nation to nation, one social setting to another. In their rejoinder that “All lives matter,” the newly visible ranks of neo-Confederates ignore the responsibilities of power, instead labeling dissent as a “hatred of us.” They avoid the hard question lurking just beneath the surface: Who defines “us”?