MS Gov. Tate Reeves wants you to enjoy Confederate Heritage Month
People from here (in MS) like to say how far things have come, and what a great place it is today, however, this is the pervasive reality of this state, and it's not going anywhere any time soon. The new state flag did away with the confederate battle emblem from the previous one a half dozen years ago, but that was an outward gesture, bitterly fought as it was. But the whole 'heritage' idea, the last remnant of the Lost Cause is inward, and in all likelihood, permanent. If you ever happen to have plans to even pass through Mississippi... change them.
Tagged:
Comments
But the cruelty that allows a governor to blithely declare a avowedly racist history spanning only four calendar years as state-sanctioned 'heritage' is an absolute disgrace and an affront to humanity.
Times have changed. But in Mississippi, perhaps not so much?
It definitely isn’t as pervasive as it was four or five decades ago, at least where I am, but it’s still there. And I think many who would claim to disown it really don’t recognize the degree to which some aspects of Lost Cause Mythology are subtly interwoven into larger social patterns and assumptions.
As a culture, we’ve done a pretty terrible job of dealing honestly and constructively with our history.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAwhC_btAUU
😂😂
I love Tom.Lehrer songs! How did I miss that?
However this Antipodean is astonished that no poster has mentioned that ghastly TV series “ The Dukes of Hazzard” with the “ General Lee” ( Valiant Charger known in Oz at that time as the Wog Chariot). I did not ( and still don’t) have a telly at that time and cannot imagine how ( early 80s in Oz) how that crappy show got past the censors.
Sheer ignorance, I guess
There's also a thing where if you're a liberal in a conservative state, there's a measure of lip service you have to pay to certain deplorable ideas in order to win just enough votes to stay in office and hopefully get some good things done.
It's horribly awkward, but it's a game I think gets played in more than a few places in America. I think with social media, it's getting harder to play it now.
I went to high school with folks who didn't understand how the show was offensive. Honestly, if you'd asked me when I was in high school, I might've also double-taked. No joke. It was just a TV show and there wasn't anything overtly racist about it besides some old southern iconography.
Americans are rather odd in the things they choose to censure and how.
Personally I enjoyed seeing Boss Hogg get his ass kicked, the leaping into General Lee and of course Daisy Dukes.
It was very popular in the US and the UK, basically because it was funny. Did it, inadvertently, big up the Deep South? Well, it was a long time ago, but it didn’t affect me that way. I think it was possible to laugh a lot, but still maintain a strong anti-racist view.
YMMV
Also, of course, Daisy had very memorable legs.
It was a lot better than the A-Team which was also around that sort of time and which I have always felt was morally deeply pernicious.
There was another series about the same time, which featured a man with a talking car.
I never liked the show. I didn’t find it funny at all, and I thought it relied heavily on tired stereotypes of Southerners.
But I think it would be a mistake to view like or dislike of the show by white American viewers, and particularly white Southern American viewers, through a more contemporary lens. That’s simply not where most white Americans and most white Southern Americans were in the late 70s and early 80s.
The series about a man with a talking car was Knight Rider, and the car was called KITT.
It just wasn't a part of history that we'd been taught.
You say 'still alive' as if it were an exceptional achievement... I may say that I hurtled past that milepost some time ago.
Happy to acknowledge that UK sensitivities were not so sharp re Deep South stereotypes. And I haven’t watched it for years.
Go on, you've got a box set somewhere
Mind you …….
(Actually I’ve got two box sets. Cadfael and Pride and Prejudice -BBC series with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. And no working DVD player)
In the 2011 quake my bookshelf took out the Tv in a triumph of culture over crass commercialism.
Cadfael was a present from friends. It’s pretty good. But Pride and Prejudice (BBC series) is still wonderful 30 years on.
:-) I like that a lot. My Irish friend who lives in Christchurch told me he was walking down the middle of the road dodging flying bricks in that quake and 'dancing like Michael Flatley' :-)
(I had a similar experience in my 20s in a shared house, where one of the guys was a bit of a nazi about people's stuff being left 'all over the place'. He once packed all my shopping (neatly all together on a counter top, because my tiny cupboard was full, or so I thought) into said tiny cupboard, which fell off the wall in the middle of the night and landed on top of his (emphasis intended) microwave).
@Nick Tamen and @The_Riv, if you haven't seen these, I think you'd be interested. I found it all stunning when I saw it in person; the photos don't give you the sense of scale -- some of these things are more than twice life size -- but they're pretty good. In addition to "Unmanned Drone," the photos of Black women with their sons in the Pietà pose (same as the pose in one of the Confederate monuments) were very moving to me. There's only one shown on the website, but it's a whole series called "Stranger Fruit."
Here is a retrospective treatment of The Dukes of Hazzard from a decade or so ago.