I seem to be doing a poor job of
writing about the future on this blog. And let's face it, there's
nothing quite as mired in the past as the Confederate States of
America.
Regular readers might remember a post I wrote about nineteenth century Austin city marshal Ben Thompson. He
was a larger than life gunfighter with a body count to rival the
worst outlaw. But he was largely forgotten by history, presumably because
he had a boring name and was never photographed in a cowboy hat.
If I were a journalist, I would have asked what those gold neck sashes were for, but I'm not,so I didn't. |
I have written about him several times,
mainly because he embodied the same paradoxes as Austin's current
police force, in that he was apparently well-meaning and consistently
charitable to others, but he was also prone to acts of
state-sponsored injustice (he once arrested a woman for wearing
slacks) and unchecked violence (he routinely avoided homicide charges
by invoking 'self-defense').
Presumably on the strengths of my
multiple posts on Ben Thompson, the organizers of the Ben Thompson
grave re-dedication offered me a press pass to the event. I accepted,
largely because they promised a twenty-one musket and cannon salute,
but also because no one has ever offered me a press pass before and
how could I turn that down? The ceremony took place at a city-owned
cemetery, so I assumed it was an official event.
At that time it hadn't sunk in that the
press release for the event used the word 'Confederate' six times.
Taken as a whole, the event was about
90% Confederate. Thompson's great-granddaughter spoke and she was the
only one who mentioned the parts of Thompson's life that fell outside
of the Civil War. The rest of the program included a notorious
Republican politician praising the “military tradition” of the
Confederacy, masonic Confederate rites, and a truly awesome
musket/canon fusillade.
I arrived right as the ceremony began. While on my way to the event I worried that I would have trouble finding Thompson's grave in the rather large cemetery. I needn't have
worried, all I had to do was follow the gay colors of four
Confederate flags of various designs, a Texas flag, and, almost as an
afterthought, the US flag.
You would think that there was no point
in having a press pass at an open event with about forty people, but I'm
glad I registered because my press pass came with a swag bag. The
contents included such treasures as invitations to join Confederate groups, a
commemorative wooden coin from a company called Rebel Trucking, and
tourist brochures for Giddings.
The master of ceremonies, a bearded
officer in the gray, called the ceremony to order with a pledge of
allegiance to the US flag, the Texas flag, and the array of
Confederate flags. I guess that's the appropriate order. I don't
know the words to the latter two, and everyone else in the crowd was mumbling so I may not
have been the only one. The MC saluted the flags, but as I have never served in
the military, either real or re-enacted, I merely doffed my hat. Have
you ever been in a situation where you take your hat off during the pledge of allegiance to the US flag, and the next
thing you know, you find yourself with your hand over your heart
while everyone around you pledges their allegiance to the Confederate
flag? It's awkward.
Texas Land Commissioner talks about Military Tradition |
An errant gust blows away the wreath and Jerry Patterson leaps instantly into action |
suspect that Patterson attended the event for the explicit purpose of having his picture taken in front of the Confederate flag. For those of you not from Texas, land commissioner is a not particularly high-profile post, probably about the fifth most powerful office in the state's executive branch (governor being about third or fourth). Commissioner Patterson has earned a name for himself by taking principled stands on issues where either the CSA or firearms play a prominent role. For instance, he's the reason why there's thousands of acres of quail and varmint hunting opportunities out by Big Bend, and as a holder of the Texas public hunting lands permit, he's earned my vote for just that reason.
Patterson arrived late, missing the
opening prayer (which we will NOT comment on), but when the wind blew
away Ben Thompson's wreath, he leapt off his folding chair to grab it
and return it to its rightful place. That's exactly the sort of
level-headed can-do attitude that one expects of a public official
when chaos strikes.
The next element of the ceremony was
the laying of flowers by the largely female re-enacting groups. One
of the groups, called the Soiled Doves of Texas, dressed in bawdy saloon wench corsets and skirts (but as it's affirmed on their website, they are not actually prostitutes). The other group, the Order of Confederate Roses, occupied the far
opposite side of the
nineteenth century continuum of womanly virtue. They dressed
entirely in black, their faces obscured under a black veil. They
looked like a cross between the Bene Gesserit and characters from a
ghost story (you know the one, where a guy on a train wakes up in his
sleeper car to find a strange woman in a rocking chair in the corner,
and then it turns out that the lump she has under a shawl in her lap
wasn't a child after all but her husband's severed head!). As
far as I could tell, they didn't say a word the entire ceremony, just
maintained their spooky silence as they proceeded one by one up to
Thompson's grave and presented it with a single black rose.
A widow glides across the graveyard |
The saloon wench shows her respect |
The MC then performed a ceremony where
he read off the names of the Confederate dead and then rang a bell in
remembrance. I believe they only read the names of the ones who
Thompson knew personally, which took a lot less time than I had
feared it would.
Cannons! |
Now comes the part of the article where
I address the elephant in the blog post: Aren't people with a lot of
confederate flags horrible racists? For instance, the KKK no longer
dresses in the white hoods, they cover their faces with Confederate
flag bandannas From what I saw during the Thompson event, I would say
that although the Confederate re-enacters occupy the same
iconographic continuum as the KKK, they don't seem like the same
social group. In essence they don't appear much less dorky or
guileless than the cosplayers the readers of this blog are familiar
with. Think of them as steampunkers, but without the sense of whimsy.
The ringing of the bell for the names of the Confederate dead |
Commissioner Patterson made the point (in roughly so many words) that although our Texas ancestors have a lot of warts when viewed through a 21st century lens, it's not wrong to
venerate the “military tradition” of the people who served.
Far be it for me to criticize someone
for celebrating their ancestors. After all, my family still holds the
vikings in high esteem and that's not considered distasteful (at
least in Minnesota). But maybe that's because so much time has
passed, or maybe it's because nobody really denies that vikings were
terrifying racist murders. Certainly nobody wants the vikings to come
back into power. Likewise, for all the talk of Texas secession, it seems
unlikely that there's any serious attempts by the South to establish a golden circle plantation
state any time in the near future.
Maybe there's a sliding timeline of
acceptable historical re-enactment? For instance, people celebrating
the Germany of seventy years ago are clearly monsters. But
Minnesotans celebrating the vikings of a thousand years ago (who were
at least as bad as the Confederates on a sheer human suffering level)
are considered cute. Flying the flag of the rebel south is probably
somewhere in the middle.
It has to be said that philosophy does apply, in some respect, to reenactment/fetishizing a past group. Germany 70 years ago and the US South during the rebellion were explicitly racist states; vikings were equal-opportunity murderous monsters. This makes me less comfortable with/more repulsed by the first two, since we actively confront these philosophical issues still today (whereas slaughtering monks for their gold has largely become a non-issue).
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