George Allen, the Confederate Flag, and Southern Sanity

The New Republic's Ryan Lizza won't relent in his effort to pin the "racist" label onto Virginia Senator George Allen. What's Lizza's evidence?

Well, let's see:

• There's Allen's high school yearbook photo, in which he had a Confederate flag pinned to his lapel.
• There's the pickup truck Allen drove while he was in law school at the University of Virginia from 1971 to 1974. The truck had a Confederate flag affixed to the bumper.
• There's Allen's dorm room at UVA, which had a Confederate flag on the wall.
• There's the time that Allen referred to Northerners as "Yankees" while he served in the Virginia legislature. The remark came during a committee meeting in which a Civil War battle (Lizza doesn't say which one) was discussed.
• There's a campaign ad from the time Allen first ran for Governor of Virginia back in 1993 - a tiny Confederate flag appears in the background.
• There's the time that Allen, in jest, "referred to his neighboring state as 'the counties that call themselves West Virginia.'"
• Then there's Allen's proclamation of April as "Confederate Heritage and History Month" while he was Governor of Virginia.

Lizza's premise (echoed by Andrew Sullivan) seems to be that Allen's sympathy for the Confederacy and his reverence for its battle flag indicate that he is a closet racist. There are lots of people - not all of whom are from the South - who would disagree with that, but I'm afraid that Lizza's view is more common than it should be, especially among those whose perception of Southerners has been shaped predominately by Hollywood and the media. These guys really need to get out more. If they did, they might learn a few things...like...

Today, the Civil War is a distant memory, the South has been reconciled to the Union, and the nation has made great strides toward overcoming the painful legacy of slavery. So, why do many Southerners still cling to the Confederate flag? Different people have different reasons, of course - heritage, history, regional pride, and yes - on occasion - racism. But, complementing each of these is the fact that the rebel flag remains exactly what its name suggests - a symbol of rebellion. Not a physical, taking-up-arms kind of rebellion, but a cultural and intellectual one, directed against the mind-numbing political correctness that has become so pervasive in every corner of American society.

Now, maybe there are more rational ways to express our discontent than flying Confederate flags, but since when have Southerners been known for their rationality? Florence King discussed this very topic in a book called Southern Ladies and Gentlemen*. In the first chapter, entitled "Build a Fence Around the South and You'd Have One Big Madhouse," she wrote:

I have good reason to know that the only way to understand Southerners fully is to be one. When I was in graduate school at the University of Mississippi, I found myself party to a drunken kidnapping and ended up in a rowboat in the middle of a lake at 2:00 AM with an hysterical Southern belle who kept hissing: "Kill him, Wade, kill him!"

Suddenly I wondered: How did I get into this? What am I doing here? How was it possible that a sane young woman like myself could merge so effortlessly into a situation that bizarre?

The answer came to me just as suddenly. I was not sane, I was a Southerner.

True, that. And we wouldn't have it any other way.

*Miss King's Southern Ladies and Gentlemen is hilarious, by the way. If you haven't read it, you may want to check it out sometime. They don't call her a curmudgeon and a misanthrope for nothing. (National Review has an archive of her "Misanthrope's Corner" columns here...some of my faves are "Earl got saved", Princess Di, and Catholics, Protestants, and OJ.)