If you guys feel like youâre losing out, fucking work harder. I donât know what to tell you. If youâre a white supremacist, if you think youâre the master race, how come weâre kicking your ass so easily? Youâre the master race! How come youâre not winning everything? Why arenât the Olympics dominated by you? Youâre the master race. What do you have left? Golf and tennis, maybe, maybe. And even then, the first black people you came across, youâre like, âWe canât play this game anymore.â Williams sisters, Tiger Woods. O.K.
Suppressing political violence is a matter of will. It requires that we rise above our tribal loyalties and defend the political system that is at the heart of America.
Trump is having trouble keeping members of his advisory councils:
Trump uses wrong finger:
Is the Confederate Flag about heritage? Absolutely:
Orchha, on the banks of the Betwa River, India – photo by Arian Zwegers cc 2.0
Quite the week: After threatening nuclear war with North Korea, musing about invading Venezuela, and equivocating over Charlottesville, Trump folded two advisory councils and then decided against forming a council on Infrastructure. He also Twitter-attacked more Republican senators than Democrats this week, a bad strategy for someone who canât be sure what Special Counsel Mueller may come up with.
But, according to a Survey Monkey poll as reported by Axios, Trumpâs statements about Charlottesville have overwhelming support of Republican voters. Survey Monkey asked whether people agreed with a verbatim quote from President Trump on Tuesday:
You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent
Republicans agreed with the Trump comment, 87%-11%. Democrats disagreed, 83%-15%. Independents disagreed, 59%-39%.
When we no longer agree on basic facts, civil debate is impossible.
This is a dangerous moment. America is split. We need to stop fighting about the little things. Wrongo usually is against âslippery slopeâ arguments, but will make an exception in the case of our Civil War history: What is the objective of removing Civil War statues and monuments? Will their removal change the historical record of slavery?
Of course not. How would supporters of removal say we should polarize the continuum of history? What would be next? Removal of history books that mention the Confederacy or former slave owners?
One of Wrongoâs favorite histories of the Civil War is âA Diary from Dixieâ by Mary Boykin Chestnut. It is a day-to-day diary of her experience as a southern partisan during the Civil War. Most Civil War historians have read and consulted it in the preparation of their own work. Should we burn the book because it was written by a slave-holding partisan?
Of course not.
Many want to draw a red line regarding slavery and the Civil War, and that is totally understandable. But where to draw it? Can it be drawn in a way that keeps our children in touch with our past, even the sordid bits?
We need to own our history.
We should ignore the false moral equivalencies mentioned by Trump, such as Lee and Washington. Both owned slaves, so statues of Washington must go too. It is true that both owned slaves, but Washington fought to build this country, while Lee fought to destroy it in support of slavery.
Some have pointed to the fact that Jews would never let Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald be taken down. This is another false equivalency. Auschwitz is maintained not to celebrate Nazism, but to show its horrors.
Maybe that IS the lesson: Add interpretation to the Confederate monuments: Make them say that we do not want anyone to forget what happened, and that we want to make sure it can never happen again.
Itâs Saturday, so we MUST get some distance between where we are as a country now, and where we need to be.
Wrongoâs prescription? Brew a cup of Brooklynâs  Tobyâs Estate El Ramo Columbian coffee. El Ramo means the bouquet in Spanish ($14 for 12oz.), close the door, and put on your over-the-ear headphones. Now, listen to G.P. Telemannâs âConcerto in G major for Viola, Strings and Basso continuo, TWV 51:G9â.
Wrongo and Ms. Right heard it last week at the final summer concert of the New Baroque Soloists at the Washington Meeting House in Washington, Connecticut. Here it is performed live by the Remember Barockorchester, in the Unser Lieben Frauen Church, Bremen, on November 21st, 2015:
In recent years, many on the right talk as if they have inside knowledge of what the Creator wants us to think and do. As reported here last week, we have been arguing about the role of religion in our politics since the founding of the Republic. In 1789, George Washington declared a day of âpublic thanksgiving and prayer.â 12 years later, Thomas Jefferson abruptly canceled the ritual. The First Amendment, explained Jefferson, erected a âwall of separation between church and state.â
But Jeffersonâs contractor failed to make that wall strong enough.
So, Wrongo is adding a book to his summer reading list. It is âOne Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian Americaâ by Kevin Kruse. The book tries to explain the religiosity in our politics. Kruse investigates how the idea of America as a Christian nation was promoted in the 1930s and ’40s when industrialists and business lobbies, chafing against the government regulations of the New Deal, recruited and funded conservative clergy to preach faith, freedom and free enterprise. He says this conflation of Christianity and capitalism moved to center stage under Eisenhower’s watch in the ’50s, when the words “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase “In God we trust” was inserted on the back of the dollar bill.
This week saw the USA Womenâs soccer team take Manhattan, the NYSE go dark, Greece on the verge of going dark, the Confederate flag comes down in Charleston and Trump jumps into the lead in Republican opinion polls.
Womenâs soccer is Americaâs new role model:
Stock Exchange glitch wasnât explained clearly, so speculation ensued:
Here is a photo with commentary by the indispensable Charles Gaba, who runs the site, ACA Signups, the go-to place for data about the Affordable Care Act:
 Apparently, 12 people showed up for the Confederate flag rally.
There will be limited blogging for the next seven days, as the Wrongologist and Ms. Right head to Bermuda.
It was an epic news week, from the killings in Charleston to the ACA decision by the Supreme Court, 6-3, in which Antonin Scalia wrote the 21 page dissent. Then came the Marriage Equality decision. Antonin Scalia wrote another dissent, starting with:
I write separately to call attention to this Courtâs threat to American democracy
Here is the Cliff notes version of both Scalia dissents: âI stole the 2000 election for thisâ??
They shot and missed:
Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press
Republicans secretly happy about SCOTUS decision on ACA:
Marriage equality decision not popular with everyone:
And the Supremes said, âLet them eat cakeâ:
The big change on the Confederate flag doesn’t change much:
On Monday, South Carolinaâs governor Nikki Haley announced a plan to remove the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the SC state house. That got many Republican presidential candidates off the hook after a weekend in which most delivered waffles about the subject.
But, everything you need to know about the conservative Republican position on the Confederate flag in 2015 was summed up by Bill Kristol on the very same day:
OK. Time to talk about history. The South seceded, and then fought a war to preserve slavery. It was not a war of Northern aggression. It was a war of Confederate choice, and the choice was made first by South Carolinians, who were the first to announce their secession.
SCâs Declaration of Causes of Secession was issued on December 20, 1860, after the election, but three months before Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office. If you choose to read at the link, youâll see the entirety of their complaint had to do with slavery. They were angry:
⢠That slaves were escaping from their territory and Northern States were refusing to send them back
⢠That blacks had been granted citizenship in some Northern states
⢠That the election of Lincoln would lead to slaveryâs exclusion from the new territories
Here is a snippet: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the Common Government, because he has declared that that âGovernment cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,â and that the public mind must rest in the belief that Slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
Lincoln was explicit during the early years of the war that he fought back, not for slavery, but to preserve the union. Today, some modern âconfederatesâ use those quotes from Lincoln to argue that the war wasn’t about slavery, but that is revisionist history.
The people who started the war, in every confederate state, were explicitly doing so to preserve slavery. Read the other secession statements. Read the speeches of leading confederate politicians. Read the founding CSA documents, in which the CSA states were free to do anything they wanted except end slavery. In fact it’s clear that the main purpose of even having a confederation was to preserve slavery.
The Confederate flag was basically forgotten after the civil war until the civil rights movement when the battle flag was resurrected by those in the south who were against the federal laws prohibiting lynching, segregation, and vote blocking. In other words, that flag has been used only by those promoting white supremacy. Heritage? Of course, but for a flag that represents something that existed for four years?
The flag is just a start. Why are there Civil War reenactments in the South? Battle field reenactments where they honor their defeat of the north, focused on battles they won in a war that they lost. Imagine if Mexican Americans had an Alamo reenactment where they storm the Alamo and kill Davy Crockett.
Taking down the Confederate flag over the South Carolina Capitol, along with Walmart and EBay stopping sales of the flag, and the number one Confederate flag manufacturer ending production are all important steps, but they are the just a few steps on a long road.
The next big question is will country music follow the lead of Governor Haley and distance itself from the Confederate flag? The rebel flag is deeply interwoven into country and southern rock music, that relationship is both deep and wide.
This stuff is symbolic, and a very important symbol is being phased out.
