TomFlannery.com

Do we really have to do this rebel flag gibberish AGAIN?

Each time I think we’ve reached a nadir of dumbness, my fellow Americans lift me up forcibly and carry me to the edge of a hole they’ve just dug, and it’s already been filled to the brim with even more stupid.

My life these days is like being locked in a room with Talkback-16 on an endless loop. The stupidness is stupefying.

I mean….NASCAR is Bubba Central, dude. And even they are fed up with the garish spectacle of overweight sun-burnt goobers waving a pro-slavery terrible-towel. It’s like the NRA saying “you know what, you’re right…..people don’t kill people, guns kill people”.

When Walter Cronkite came back from a Viet Nam trip and shit-talked the war, President Johnson knew the walls were closing in..”If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America” is what he famously said.

Well Bubba’s……this is your Cronkite moment.

This is your wake-up call. Look around you. There’s nobody left. All you have is that pointy-headed pillow-case with the eye holes in it that your Daddy left you in his will. And the skunked Natty-Ice in the fridge.

The civil war is over. 618,222 men died. The south lost. Slavery was abolished. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up. It was in all the papers. And I’m pretty sure a book or two has been written about it. They may even mention it in history class.

If you live in a state that attempted to secede from the union and you still jizz on the flag, you’re a racist dolt but can at least take comfort in the fact that there are plenty of folks in northern states with dead union soldier ancestors who every night before bed wrap themselves up in the flag that killed great great great granddaddy, so you are not quite at the bottom of the gene pool. Congratulations on that at least.

Waving that flag is you having a conversation inside your own head….

“I don’t like black people but I can’t say I don’t like black people because people will think I’m racist which I’m not because I went to school with Luther and he was black so that means I’m not by default but still ALL LIVES MATTER dude…..FREEBIRD!! ain’t nobody gonna tell me that I can’t watch the Dukes of Hazzard whenever I want to…so I’m gonna OWE ME SOME LIBS so you try to pull this here flag from my cold dead hands Hoover boy!!!”

Which roughly translates into “MAGA” because in 2020 big long words are definitely elitist and fake news.

Guess how many Nazi flags you see flying at German racetracks? You don’t see any. Because fuck the Nazis. You see what I’m saying?

Now, how many statues of Wilheim II and Hitler do we have in the US? How many of Emperor Hirohito? If the names don’t ring a bell there’s always google. We don’t have any. Because we fought wars against them. And we won those wars. We don’t erect statues for losers.

Except for, you know….

Speaking of statues of losers, those are coming down. General Lee is being trolled HARD in Richmond, and just last night Jefferson Davis was vanquished by Yankees yet again, ripped from his pedestal and left lying in the middle of the road. Does this mean that when I go to the library all the books about Lee and Davis will suddenly be gone, having been wiped clean by those big meanies from ANTIFA? It does not. When somebody makes the argument that getting rid of the flag and the statues equates to “erasing history”, I instantly suspect that they’ve never read a book in their fucking lives. If these people were on debating teams they’d be tasked only with making sure the actual participants had water. I just can’t anymore.

We should never stop studying the Civil War. And its slavery-supporting leaders. Lee. Davis. Their rationalizations and prejudices and at time political and military genius. Museums and libraries and classrooms should echo with the fog of this war. All so that the lessons learned can be those that appeal to the better angels of our nature, so that we do not tumble into a like cataclysm again.

You’d think the one thing we could agree on, in a time when we’re extra busy trying to out-patriot each other, is that traitors to the United States should not be lionized. You would of course be wrong.

No military general in our nation’s history has been responsible for more American deaths than Robert E Lee. Can you imagine an Erwin Rommel University? But Washington and Lee University in Virginia has a $1.6 billion dollar endowment. Only in America.

Lincoln once said “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

How much strain can passion endure?

In a bit…

–tf