Lehe: Don’t tread on Lehe

People are always getting upset about Confederate flags. Why do Southerners fly the stars and bars on their trucks? Today, I’ll speak to that.

You might say I have some authority on the subject. I was born in Virginia, moved to Alabama when I was six months old and lived there until I went off to college. My family has been in Alabama for hundreds of years. Several of my ancestors fought in the Civil War and wore Klan robes. By any objective measure, I’m a Southerner.

Really, though, you don’t have to be a Southerner to grasp why people fly Confederate flags. You just have to understand human nature.

All people want to feel novel. As much as we try to fit into the larger, blandly American community during middle school, from high school and onward we want to fill a small niche within the community.

But for certain white males, there is no niche. We are not so much normal as we are plain. Out of all the different white people in the United States, we are the ones to whom you just throw up your hands and call “white folk.”

This isn’t necessarily a bad situation. We face few expectations imposed from birth. Whether he is talking about straight-laced Baptists or West-Coast New-Agers, millionaire bankers or trailer-dwellers, electro disc jockeys or country musicians, a black comedian will get laughs by asking, “What is up with white people!?”

He doesn’t mean that both ends of these spectrums are typical — they contradict — but that any extreme is plausible for whites, and that this is so exclusively a white thing you should laugh out of shock of recognition. Ha.

The sense of plainness is most acute in the South.

Southern whites are almost all descended from the Scots-Irish. We aren’t Polish or Italian or Irish or any of the peoples who have food festivals and cool stuff like that. Our ancestors came to the United States long ago and didn’t value record-keeping; we have no formal cultural memory.

Wikipedia, of all places, says it best: “Interestingly, the areas where the most Americans reported themselves in the 2000 Census only as ‘American’ with no further qualification … are largely the areas where many Scotch-Irish [sic] settled.”

The Scots-Irish are descended from certain clans in lower Scotland. The clans were so unapologetically Calvinist and violent that they were made to leave Scotland for Northern Ireland and then Ireland for Appalachia.

That’s why they call it “the Klan,” like a Scottish clan. That’s why the Confederate flag is a St. Andrew’s cross, like the Scottish flag. That’s why we drink whiskey, like Scotch whiskey. That’s why we still have a culture of honor and hence more murder and less property crime.

But these legacies aren’t conscious or purposeful. We don’t realize they exist.

The result is that Southern whites live in a novelty vacuum. If society is a hotel, we sleep in the hallway — open to everyone, but no good for partying. There is no conversation topic always on hand, no happy instance of solidarity when someone you meet shares this meaningless-yet-somehow-worth-talking-about characteristic, no satisfying narrative to explain parts of yourself as “classic X.” Our identity is the sum of our actions. We are involuntary existentialists. And so there is the natural anxiety, dread, angst, etc.

Unless we put Confederate flags on our trucks. Then, thanks to a war fought 150 years ago, we become, a priori, somebodies — with an essence that precedes existence. Now we have a “thing.” It is like we were making a shirt out of a bedsheet, then someone gave us a sewing pattern. That pattern is the Confederate flag.

The fact that people get upset about the Confederate flag only boosts its power to mold an identity. The flag is not only something to be defended, but it is pretty much the only thing about a Southerner that can be defended — nothing else is directly under attack. It’s like how Catholicism was more serious in Soviet Poland than in modern Poland.

The flag’s apologists say the flag stands for heritage and not racism. But many of the people who fly the flag actually are racist. However, please remember that the stereotypical racism came after the flag’s creation. Racism is an oft-highlighted part of Southern history. If you are trying to fashion yourself into a “typical Southerner,” a touch of racism will seem to complement your efforts.

My theory explains why white people nationwide fly the Confederate flag. They are not Southern, but they might have family down South. So Southern is the closest thing to an ethnicity they have, their best shot at novelty.

As long as humans want to feel novel, Southerners will keep flying Confederate flags. Of course, maybe you don’t want to live in a country where people fly Confederate flags, but let me remind you: My ancestors did not want you to live in a country where people fly Confederate flags, either. They wanted you to live to the north of that country.

E-mail Lewis at lewis500@gmail.com