A woman protestor shimmied up a flagpole on capitol grounds in Columbia, South Carolina, and took down the Confederate flag.  Today it went back up, flying proudly and hated for a new phase of what will probably be the last weeks of its life.  Governor Haley declared the flag will come down regardless of the result of upcoming South Carolina legislature debate. 
     Confederate flag backlash and support has ranged from nostalgic to irrational, with pundits making nonsensical comparisons and suggestions.  Rich Lowry of The National Review said, "The Confederate flag didn't kill the people in that church in Charleston."  He may as well have said, "Why punish cloth?"
     Pro-Rebel flag worshippers point to its historical merit and its honoring of Confederate soldiers, but from the other side we hear comparisons to the flag designed by Adolf Hitler: black swastika in a white circle against a red background.  That flag, the argument goes, represents a regime that practiced evil and degrading policies against millions of people.  True, but a comparison of the Confederate flag to the flag of Nazi Germany misses the difference in scale and political policies carried out on respective populations.  The Confederacy continued enslavement of African-Americans in its territory, but did not exterminate them, as Nazi Germany did to its "undesirable" peoples and those they conquered in World War Two.  Yet, Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC said the Confederate flag is as bad as the flag of Nazi Germany.  At this point I must shift my cognitive faculties from the issue and determine what's worse: flag displays, or slaughtering people?
     Rich Lowry, God love his simple rhetoric, is right: the Confederate flag did not kill the nine people in Charleston.  Dylann Roof, the killer, did not fire a gun that extended a Confederate, or any other flag, written over, perhaps, with the word Bang!  He fired real bullets, with murderous intent, wasting and terrorizing innocent and peaceful people.  He was influenced in his beliefs by white supremacist philosophies judging blacks and other minorities in America to be the real problem.  He had a thing for the Confederate flag, too.  Pictures have been repeatedly broadcast of Roof posing with it.  That flag, for many, represents rebellion, a rebel spirit, but it also represents an extinct nation that split treasonously from the United States in 1861, leading to a civil war fought by President Lincoln to join the country back together, with freedom for the slaves a secondary concern.
     In the American Civil War, hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides fought and died under the banners of both of their respective flags.  The North won, its flag regarded more and more over the decades as a cult object, like the Confederate flag was and still is by the losers.  The U.S. flag, since World War Two, has come to cover the world along with the military units bearing it in the current planetary-wide zones created by minds in the Pentagon.  The U.S. flag flies over the base at Guantanamo Bay and flew over Abu Ghraib Prison, places of torture and no equal justice under the law.  The U.S. flag accompanied American troops in the Philippines in the early years of the twentieth century, when waterboarding Filipino guerillas by Americans was common practice.  Under the U.S. flag, Americans pummeled Vietnam, killing millions of people and practicing chemical warfare. 
     American campaigns under their flag against non-American humanity, including Native Americans, is far longer a subject than I can write about here.  The U.S. flag didn't torture terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, but that flag, like all flags, is a symbol.  Some symbols inspire hatred and loathing, as the U.S. flag does in many parts of the world.  The woman who ascended and descended the pole in Columbia, who faces charges for doing so, sees that symbol as hateful, and no government building or piece of government property should display it.  I agree, or, as cable news people like to say, I don't disagree.
     The Confederate flag in this time, flying on government property, is inappropriate; it offends black citizens and voters as well as many others, but an additional layer, one of dubious judgment, has opened in response to the Confederate flag controversy.  The TV show The Dukes of Hazzard had a fast car called General Lee, featuring a Confederate flag on its roof.  Makers and distributors of model cars of General Lee have come under fire for selling this toy with the hated symbol.  Walmart has purged products with Confederate flag imagery, including a Confederate flag handgun holster.
     Most absurd have been suggestions that Gone With the Wind be banned.  It takes place in Georgia, there are many slave characters, Plantation-owning Southerners are depicted sympathetically, there's a famous crane shot showing wounded Confederate soldiers in a courtyard with Scarlett O'Hara wandering among them in an overwhelmed daze, the image ending with the Confederate flag flying vigorously.  Apart from the impossibility of totally banning works of literature and cinema, accompanied always by a ban making a work more sought after than ever (To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance), it's stupid to believe that preventing people from seeing Gone With the Wind will improve America.  The Dukes of Hazzard, though a lesser work of art than Gone With the Wind, is, like the epic 1939 film, very popular.  Censorship, in the grand scheme, doesn't work, and the censors always end up seeming like ninnies. 
     Still, I'm in favor of that flagpole climber in Columbia, like I'm in favor of the Iraqi man who threw his shoes at George W. Bush.  The Confederate Flag and Bush have both presided over a great uncounted number of unnecessary deaths.

                                                                             Vic Neptune