Canister! (Bad Behavior Edition)
Small items that don’t warrant full posts:
- The seditious clowns who seized a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon in January and spent the next month fluffing themselves with the American flag on Facebook and YouTube are shocked, shocked that all that material is now being used as evidence against them.
- There’s something a little rancid about holding a Confederate monument rally on Juneteenth. Whether these folks are deliberately acting like jerks, or just oblivious to history, is not clear. Maybe both.
- In other news about Confederate monuments, the circuit court in Louisville has formally rejected the SCV’s challenge to the city’s plan to move the monument on the edge of the University of Louisville campus. The SCV had claimed that the monument was on state property, and therefore out of the jurisdiction of the City of Louisville, but the court found that the monument had been recognized as city property for at least 40 years. The SCV had also claimed that removal of the monument was prohibited under the rules of the Kentucky Military Heritage Commission, even though the monument had no designation by the commission, and in fact an application to the commission wasn’t filed until May 24, 2016, the day before the initial court hearing in the case. This may be part of the reason the case was dismissed “with prejudice,” which is judge-speak for “get the hell out of my courtroom.” Judges hate being played, y’all.
- The Supreme Court of Virginia has declined to hear an appeal by local groups challenging the City of Danville’s removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the Sutherlin Mansion, where Jefferson Davis stayed for several days after the evacuation of Richmond in April 1865. The Virginia Flaggers characterize this as a “small setback,” but it would appear to be the end of the road, litigation-wise, in the Virginia courts. We’ll have to see where it goes from here, if anywhere.
- In separate cases in South Carolina and Virginia, people were arrested for bad behavior directed at groups displaying Confederate flags. In Charleston, a young woman allegedly broke off a pair of small flags from a vehicle belonging to a member of the South Carolina Secessionist Party, and ran off with them. When one of the party members began chasing her, her father allegedly grabbed the man to stop him. The woman has been charged with “malicious injury to real property,” and the father with simple assault.
- In Richmond, a 21-year-old woman splashed sort sort of liquid in the face of someone participating in the Virginia Flaggers’ ongoing protest at the VMFA, and was subsequently arrested and charged with simple assault. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Flaggers went out of their way to extend thanks to the Richmond PD for arresting the person, but not to the VMFA security personnel who actually stopped the suspect and detained her until the po-po arrived.
- And in Sandston (a suburb of Richmond), an African American woman parked her car in a residential neighborhood to visit a nearby yard sale. The owner of the home where she parked objected, and allegedly jammed some tree limbs into her car, damaging the windshield. When she went to his door, he allegedly responded by shouting racial epithets, waving a Confederate flag, and brandishing a shotgun. He went to jail, too.
Got any more? Put ’em in the comments.
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Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
The Chief Historian for the Mississippi SCV has chimed in on the historical accuracy of the Free State of Jones movie. As you might expect, he isn’t very happy.
All assertion and bluster, with no specific reference to either the content of the film or the book upon which it’s based. And the quote from S. D. Lee thrown in for good measure.
How do you get to be Historian-in-Chief, anyway?
I’ve never known the Mississippi SCV to be concerned with historical accuracy, so I’m not suspired by all this pointless bluster from their “historian”. It’s rather odious a degree in history isn’t a requirement.
Ever notice how these folks can talk all day long without ever actually citing a specific piece of primary source information? Or how they can refute facts all day long without ever supplying credible information that refutes the facts? It is all bluster about preserving their fictional beliefs over factual information.
On another (not ACW) forum I read a comment about the film that the scene in which Newt Knight raises the U.S. flag at the local courthouse was apocryphal, never happened. I clicked over to the film history site, and within about 45 seconds found the citation to the original source, which was Confederate military correspondence in the O.R. Folks can argue about the reliability of sources on any subject, but it’s not just made up from whole cloth.
Neo-confederates aren’t going to let facts get in the way of their mythology. It’s all about how they want things to have been rather than how they were.
Drawing back a little further, it’s really about reinforcing a shared, communal identity. And for that, mythology serves just as well as reality. Better than, in fact, because reality is full of all sorts of nuances and contradictions that don’t lend themselves to Facebook memes.
I think Bond is (or maybe was) the Historian-in-Chief for the whole national organization:
http://www.scv.org/about/directories/genStaff.php
Also, apparently Ron Wilson, who was C-in-C from 2002 to 2004, has been “vanished” like a Soviet commissar who displeased Stalin:
http://www.scv.org/about/directories/pcic.php
Bond currently holds that position for the national group as well as the Mississippi division if I’m not mistaken. He’s a fixture here in Mississippi when it comes to spewing historical fiction.
He also has a lot of help from Marc Allen.
http://myjsutv.com/?p=4883
That’s all I got when I googled him — lots of quotes in the media. He seems to be in every reporter’s Rolodex from Biloxi to Oxford, the go-to guy for the de rigeur, heritage-not-hate angle.
Yep! That’s him.
I’ve read Prof. Bynum’s book and blog and found much of interest there. FWIW, my mother’s father was born and raised in Jones County. He was the grandson and grand-nephew of a half-dozen CSA veterans. I knew him well.
After serving in WW1 and completing his degree at Mississippi A&M he married his fiancée and they moved to Chicago where they lived for over 50 years, until their deaths. My grandfather often returned to the south to visit his wife’s kin in Alabama and Virginia. He seldom, if ever, returned to his family and acquaintances in Jones County and didn’t speak of them to me. Years later, I asked my mother why. She pondered and said, “I’m not sure. But, well, I really don’t think he liked those people.” (i know anecdotes are not data, but there it is, for the record.)
Heritage is about cultural identity and affirmation. The relationship between history and heritage is sort of like the relationship between correlation and causation. They are not the same thing and one does not necessarily imply the other.
This reminds me of the flagger group that showed up at Fort Pillow State Park in Tennessee a few years ago to protest a ceremony there by the Tennessee Historical Society, Memphis State University, and the State Department of Parks. The flaggers were upset because they believe the Fort Pillow Massacre to be a hoax conceived by the United States government to besmirch the honor of the Confederate solider.
You can’t make this stuff up.
I vaguely remember that. Likely Debbie Sidle’s group from Memphis.
That’s the circus troop!
Britain secedes from the Union. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron resurrects Abraham Lincoln from the dead. Lincoln immediately asks, “Who will pay our taxes?” All of London shouts in unison, “We don’t care. Free the slaves!” Lincoln, upon hearing “free the slaves,” organizes a 75,000 man army, and invades England, only to find the slaves already left for Greece on the underground railroad.
Cameron had urged Britain to remain in the Union, warning of economic and security consequences of an exit. Sound familiar? Too bad Britain didn’t feel the same way about the South seceding from the Union in 1861. Maybe the outcome would have been different, and patriotic southerners would not be forced to live among all the flag haters today.
Of course none of what you typed here made any sense. I find it interesting how neo-confederates think the Brexit is so great. Over half a trillion dollars of wealth was wiped out by that election and that is just in the US alone. The English just killed their country, but hey, they’re not part of the EU now. Of course a lot of them seem to be Googling just what they voted for and now have buyer’s remorse. especially the ones that just found out their retirement funds vanished as the direct result of their choice.
What do you mean, killed their country? In the best case scenario for the UK, you’ve been drinking pro-EU Kool-Aid/propaganda/whatever related term. In the worst case scenario for the UK, you’ve forgotten that the UK has been financially decaying since at least WWI, and arguably before that.
In any case, terry is wrong. An independent state leaving the EU is a world apart from seceding states that had no sovereignty to begin with.
All you have to do is open your eyes and look at the facts. The English just screwed themselves. Scotland is going to leave the union between them and England to stay in the EU. Northern Ireland will probably leave Great Britain as well and join Ireland. London would exit if it could.
None of what you say makes any sense. If you can’t understand my little parody, maybe you need a history lesson. Brexit is just fine. They will survive. Chalk one up for states rights, and minus ten for out of control, government by oligarchy. Seems I remember similar events to Brexit occurring in the U.S. about 1776 and 1860.
Any time you want me to give you a history lesson, just ask. Of course you need a lot of them based on that last sentence. State’s rights is a joke. It has always been a joke just as it is today.
Don’t bother trying to say state’s rights was a concern in 1860. It wasn’t. If you try to say that, then study history and stop trying to make it fit your ideology.
In fairness to Jimmy, it wasn’t clear to me, either, that you intended that as parody. People post some really ridiculous stuff sometimes, and are completely serious. Delusional, but serious.