Signs of the times.

Gone With The Wind has been removed by HBO from its demand offerings.  The film (I've never read the book) definitely has racist elements, but should they have done that?

In some recent posts here I've noted how the services have banned the display of the Confederate battle flag on their installations.

That was long overdue and I was quite surprised, really, that it was allowed in any form at all now.  Having said that, I didn't take into account coffee cups and bumper stickers and things like that, which would make up most of the impacted displays.  A search for official, or even unofficial, U.S. military use of the Confederate flag failed to reveal any, although a long serving soldier (now long retired) indicated that you would see it in Vietnam from time to time.  A search for that did reveal an obviously posed instance of that, but I don't know the context.

If anyone has any more on this story, please post it as a comment.

Anyhow, as a Westerner who always found the Confederate flag offensive and who grasps why it's offensive to blacks, this is a good move by the services even its probably mostly symbolic.  If it isn't mostly symbolic, it's long overdue.

I'll note, fwiw, that we've posted on the Confederate flag here as long ago as 2016, so we're not taking a new position to be in the current midstream of popularity.  That thread was one of the few here that got a lot of posts, mostly by upset and made people, and for some time after it was posted it'd suddenly become one of the most popular ones of a day or week, as probably mostly made people stopped in to view it for some reason.

There's also a move to rename the ten U.S. Army installations named after Confederate generals in the 1917 to 1942 time frame.  That's more complex and I'll post on it here soon.

On the Confederate flag, NASCAR has now banned it.

NASCAR has is origins as a Southern sport in a very distinct way, and it grew out of rum running.  Many of its early racers were rum runners. I've never warmed up to it and never know anything about it. Indeed, I've cited NASCAR as a reason that you shouldn't have people who don't participate in an activity regulate it, as if I was put in charge of NASCAR there'd be no NASCAR.  It's not that I don't like it, I don't get it, and accordingly its one of those activities that I don't care anything about and if left to run it, I wouldn't.

Anyhow, NASCAR is a Southern thing in its origin and as late as the 1980s its easy to imagine the "Good Ole Boys" of "Hazard County" driving to a NASCAR event in the General Lee, with the Confederate battle flag painted on the roof.  Now it isn't.

Of course, NASCAR isn't a Southern thing anymore either.  It's gone national. Still, seeing NASCAR ban the flag is actually pretty surprising and significant.  I'll be really curious to see where this all leads as I suspect, but may be in error, it'll provoke a bit of a counter reaction from some fans.  Having said that, it really isn't a Southern thing at all like it once was, so I may very well be way off the mark and this will pass without a note.

For that matter, we may actually be in an era, which started a few years ago, in which symbols of the Southern cause in the Civil War are losing their appeal to Southerners in general.  Confederate symbols have been removed from state flags to a large degree.  I don't know if any remain. Those symbols were incorporated in the 20th Century during the Lost Cause era, but have pretty much come back off in the last few decades.  That was controversial itself, but it doesn't seem to be now.  Maybe modern Southerners have lost their attachment to the "Blood Stained Banner" that was their third national flag.

The "Blood Stained Banner" is the nickname given to that flag, and it wasn't actually adopted, oddly enough, as the Confederate standard until March 4, 1865, about a month away from their ultimate defeat.  It was closely based on the square standard adopted on May 1, 1863, however.  That the Confederacy would run around worrying about flags in the Spring of 1865 gives insight to the human mind and how it self distracts.  In March 1865 Confederate troops were departing the service of the Confederacy en masse and the war was all but over.  Nobody was making flags at that time and adopting a new one was really silly, but then even after Hitler killed himself in May 1945 the successor German administration appointed a national postmaster, as if they were delivering the mail.

That last flag was incorporated on a lot of Southern official and unofficial things thereafter, from state flags to the cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd albums, but that was a 20th Century thing starting in the early 20th Century.* One hundred years later, the opposite is going on pretty quickly.

One thing that's also going on is the mass defacement of monuments, here and abroad.  Included in these are two Christopher Columbus statutes which are claimed to have been seen by the vandals as symbols of "white supremacy".

Defacing monuments, even controversial ones, is really problematic if they've been up for awhile and tend to be a symbol of virtue signaling.  An oppressed population tearing down a statute of a current oppressor, such as Iraqi's treating down statutes of Saddam Hussein, are one thing, but a population tearing down an old symbol, like Russians toppling statues of Lenin, or Americans toppling down statutes of Columbus, are hypocritical to a large degree.  The same populations that do that are often the same ones who were all keen on putting them up in the first place, and would be again today if it fit the zeitgeist.  A population expressing their current view about a current figure is one thing, mobs defacing things of the past are quite another and don't tend to pass the test of time well.

One reason for that is that every single living human being is a descendant, every single one, of thieves, murderers, rapists and colonizers without any exceptions whatsoever.  This doesn't excuse past injustices of any kind, but much of this sort of activity is based on the concept that some group is uniquely to blame and that doesn't pass the smell test.

Colonizers may have been doing something we don't approve of now, but in the past it was a universal human activity.  The Spanish in Mexico, for example, defeated an imperial power in the form of the Aztecs, and that's just one example.  And while moderns might like to wring their hands on the Spanish in 1492, both in the New World and in Spain itself (the year that the Spanish Reconquista was completed, which was regarded as much more significant at the time), if we want to go back and correct all colonial injustices we have to recall that the Spanish were the victims of Berber and Arab Islamic colonization, and that the Berbers and the Arabs were the victims of Islamic Arabian Peninsula colonization, which came some years after the fall of Roman colonization, which of course was simply following in the wake of Greek colonization. . . etc. etc.  

Indeed, the anti colonial concept didn't exist in the world in any concrete form until the American Revolution created it in 1776, and it took us a long time to really hone that.  It didn't spread as a concept notably until Simon Bolivar picked it up some decades later, and as a global concept, well that really took Wilson's Fourteen Points for it to become rooted.

So the basic gist of it is, that before you lop of Columbus marble head, you better first look closely at your own culture and find the colonizers in it.  There will be some. That doesn't mean that taking in that fashion is justified, but it does mean that it is to some degree a human norm.  The concept that it should not be is a Christian one, and if we're going to adopt that view, and we should, we need to adopt all of what goes with it, which people generally aren't too keen on doing.  

Indeed, those inclined to assault a statute can't be presumed in total to have adopted the only set of values that would hold that the deeds of man, much of which are negative, should be regarded as folly.  It's unlikely that very many attending to a statues defacing are then going on to express vows of poverty and chastity so as to make their act pure.  Probably hardly any, as in none.

Finally, a person has to wonder where the societal statute of limitations applies to such acts.  If current populations are allowed to deface a current symbol, as noted, that would be one thing. But if defacing a statute of a 15th  Century figure is a good thing to do, would it accordingly be a good idea to take down statues of Caesar and Alexander, where they might be found, given that those guys were perfectly okay with a lot of things we might find offensive today?  Should the Pyramids and Egyptian monuments be destroyed, their antiquity notwithstanding, on the basis that the Egyptians were pretty bad, pretty often?  There are thousands of such examples that could easily be made. The point is that if you can justify defacing fairly old statutes on the concept that they represent oppression suffered by you and your ancestors, pretty soon you end up acting like the Taliban and are blowing down ancient monuments in the desert in the name of your own personal sense of the definition of purity.

In terms of symbols, HBO is removing Gone With The Wind from its stable of on demand offerings.

Gone With The Wind is largely viewed as a great film, but it has racist elements without a doubt.  At least one of the female black actresses, Butterfly McQueen, simply hated her role as she was portraying her character which, under the old studio system, I don't blame her for a bit.  I.e, she was forced to play a demeaning and insulting role.  The portrayals of blacks in the film are insulting and the romantic portrayal of Southern planters absurd.

Still, it's a great film, and that's the problem.  The story is, for all its flaws, and there are some whopping ones, engaging to watch and the technicolor filming is awesome.  Clark Gable's wry smiles and glances in the film make it worthwhile to watch all in themselves.  At the same time, it's Lost Cause sentiments are rampaging insulting to anyone with a sense of what the Civil War was about.

HBO, by doing that, is engaging in a little bit of cinematic book burning, sort of.  Gone With The Wind isn't Birth Of A Nation by any means.  If some of it, indeed a lot of it, is shockingly racist to watch, well that might serve to remind us of what the Lost Cause era was like and why we are where we are now, in terms of African Americans still suffering what they suffer.  Gone With the Wind came out in the late 1930s and tells us a lot about the views of that time, coming as it did right before World War Two and a good decade before the Federal Government started its push towards civil rights.

If HBO, and for that matter, all of the entertainment industry, wants to act in virtue and not just virtue signal, it might take a look at more contemporary offerings.  Hollywood is all about looking good but at the same time it's all about violence in films.  If you watch nearly any television channel you'll stray across a police show at some point, and it won't be long, in which burnt out police are using questionable tactics along with burn out DA's using questionable tactics to bring in the bad guys.  Indeed, entertainment centered on police went somehow from Car 54, in the 50s, to the "law and order" presentations of the 70s, something that was reflective of a public reaction to the protests of the 1970s, and it's never really come back.  It's funny how an industry that is the flagship of "Me Too", rediscovering old values and branding them as new, so as to not have to really adhere to them in depth, hasn't really grasped this one yet.  If life imitates what passes for art, we shouldn't have much doubt on why we fall so short.

In other news, Starbucks, which like to do virtue signalling itself, is closing 400 stores in a shift to a takeout marketing strategy.  This is no doubt as a result of the Coronavirus Pandemic.

I'm not personally keen on Starbucks even though I really like coffee.  Part of this is simply because I don't like their coffee very much.  Quite a bit of it is, in my limited experience, blisteringly acidic.  I like good coffee but I don't like feeling that I just drank something that was brewed to strip paint from a merchant tanker making an overall call to a dry dock in Seattle.  But in addition to that I really hate chain merchants virtue signalling.

If a local store, whatever it is, takes a stand on something, well the more power to them.  They put themselves at risk by doing that, and I'll give them the thumbs up simply for doing it, and I trust they give me the thumbs up if I choose to eschew them thereafter as I don't agree.  That's the exchange in doing that, and that's to their credit.  But with chain merchants its just a bunch of hooey, in my opinion. Usually by the time they've done that they're grown so large that their local competitors are either nonexistent or so marginalized that the virtue signalling is risk free in the extreme.  That accordingly smacks of simply riding the zeitgeist.  I'd fully expect such chain outfits to support McCarthyism in one moment and oppose it in the next.  In most cases the risk is about the same as it would have been to support the war effort during World War Two or the National Recovery Act during the Depression.  M'eh.

I do feel differently, I should note, about entities that support something to do with their target market.  Grocery stores doing something on hunger, sporting goods stores doing something on conservation, and things of that type, mean something. Coffee shops doing anything other than worrying about hungry people or the conditions of the growers are another.

Anyhow, Starbucks is one of those outfits that I don't admire for the reasons stated above, but I also frankly don't admire how the American economy has come to so closely resemble the manufacturing of a Model A Ford.  It's an assembly line.  Coffee can be brewed by about anyone pretty easily.  Starbucks doesn't need to be on every corner.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*Not to pick on Southern Rock, a mostly defunct musical genre, but the Confederate flag seemed to be really popular in that community at the time and its really difficult not to view that as a white Southern reaction to the Civil Rights era and its focus on the region.  The Lynyrd Skynyrd hallmark Sweet Home Alabama is itself a reaction to Neil Young's Southern Man, although Young himself thought he'd gone overboard with that song.

Southern Rock, which was based in the blues and therefore had a genuine Southern origin, was part and parcel of the other sorts of Southern electric music that traveled with and was part of rock music at the time.  All it was heavily blues based and its sometimes difficult to tell where the blues left off and rock genres began.  Swamp Rock, out of Louisiana, was another example, but even British rock like that of Ten Years After shared a lot of similarities.  As rock music moved increasingly into glitch and glam with the big hair bands of the late 1970s a lot of the more genuine rock music of the 50s, 60s and 70s started to fade away and today they very much have.  This was part of the reason for the rise of Country Music from the 80s to the present day.

Country Music has a heavy base in the South and its really a form of Southern music.  Association with the rural South or an imagined rural South is strong in it and while I can't think of any use of the Confederate flag within it, my guess is that it'll take steps to distance itself from the South of the Confederacy as well.  Indeed, as one odd example, I've often wondered what the name of the band Lady Antebellum was supposed to mean, and the association with the glorified Antebellum South is nearly impossible not to make.