In a South Carolina focus group, a citizen says he doesn't want to hear another damn word about that flag.
John McCain and George W. Bush try to oblige. They deal with the problem the way that New Yorkers do when they encounter a ranting nutcase on the street. They avert their gaze, they sidestep and walk quickly by. The Confederate battle flag flying from the state capitol in Columbia, the candidates agree, is an issue that South Carolinians must decide for themselves.
A little craven, perhaps, but McCain and Bush, after all, are politicians locked in a close primary fight made nastier by other matters (assassination by push-polling, for example) who know that the flag is a loser any way they spin it. Blacks don't vote much in South Carolina Republican primaries. The candidates stare at their shoes. Let the people of the state decide.
But which people? South Carolina has 3,760,181 of them. Of those, 1,130,354 — that is, 30.06 per cent — are black.
There are two ways to resolve the flag question. One, the less preferable, is by politics. The second method, the better one, would deploy a much neglected social instrument — good manners.
With deference to the white majority's pride of "heritage," it seems a fairly stunning act of discourtesy for the majority two thirds of South Carolinians to insist on flying a flag that so painfully insults 1,130,354 fellow citizens. What rotten manners, especially in the South, with its tradition of courtliness. But of course courtesy is called for only among, shall we say, equals. That seems to be the rub.
South Carolina should explore the possibilities of a more enlightened politeness. The "heritage" argument for the flag doesn't quite wash. The flag has flown over the capitol only since 1962, when it was installed allegedly to celebrate the centenary of the Confederacy. In fact, the flag went up as a symbol of defiance against the federal government and its efforts to desegregate the South's public schools, sometimes using federal troops.
Why is the flag still flying? The year 2000 seems awfully late in the American game to be having this quarrel, permeated as it is by retrograde delusions and the repellent odor produced by mixing machismo and defiant postbellum self-pity. That parochial romanticism should have vanished over the years as modern life (in the form of Michelin, BMW, General Electric and Hitachi factories, for example) has overtaken the state, bringing in more cosmopolitan outlanders.
Southern heritage loses its charm, even as a decorative touch, in discussions touching upon race. Do those ancestral lost-cause refulgences still give an Ashley-and-Melanie shine to families who think it was a noble thing to try to destroy the American union and to perpetuate the enslavement of black people? (Of course the Southern Cross acquired other cultural meanings outside of history, as a sort of motorcycle jacket badge of rebellion, a hell-raiser's insignia.)
The descendants of slaves — along with most other people on the planet — see the battle flag above the state capitol pretty clearly for what it is: a bullying and atavistic, almost nostalgic semaphore of white power.
Why revert to a politics that dead-ends where it began? A solution by courtesy is infinitely preferable. Polls suggest most South Carolinians think the flag should go anyway. The state should say: "This flag offends you ladies and gentlemen? Of course, it shall come down immediately."
Everyone would feel better. And South Carolina could get on with the future.