Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Black people in South Carolina were shot. A bar in St. Paul displays a Confederate Battle flag. Matthew Steen is upset enough to write to City Pages and also to Yelp.

Our Boy Steen’s “logic” confuses me.

The bar owner didn’t shoot those people. The bar owner’s flag didn’t shoot them. Nobody who ever went into the bar and saw the flag, shot them. If the flag had never been in the bar, they’d still have been shot. If the bar owner pulled the flag down today, they’d remain shot.

So what’s the point?

The Battle Flag is a symbol of hatred? Even if that were true, so what? Are we suggesting that if nobody displayed the flag, there’d be no hatred so nobody would get shot ever again?

The Battle Flag is a symbol of the Confederacy, an extinct nation with offensive practices? Even if that were true, so what? The swastika is a symbol of Nazi Germany, the hammer and cycle is a symbol of the Soviet Union and the rainbow flag is a symbol of Sodom, all extinct nations with offensive practices. Forbidding those flags’ display cannot change the historical fact of those nations’ existence.

Looks to me like a case of moral preening. Enlightened Matthew from Eden Prairie is so well educated, so well mannered, so superbly refined that he simply can’t bear to be in the same room with such crass, ignorant people and their crass, ignorant decor. And it’s important to him that we all know it. Because he’s just that special.

Wow. And people think I’m a conceited ass.

Joe Doakes

Words have meanings, and so do symbols.  I can see avoiding a place festooned with swastikas on the principle of it all.

The self-righteous snit is, of course, the part we’re discussing.

OK, not “discussing” so much as “mocking”.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Sunday, June 28th, 2015 at 5:00 am and is filed under Culture War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.