Of perverse offense
“Do I believe the total perversion that I am witnessing?”—John Kennedy Toole, writing in A Confederacy of Dunces, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about strangeness in New Orleans.
Publication of A Confederacy of Dunces long preceded this session of the Arkansas Legislature. So it is descriptive thereof only in a metaphorical application.
What happened for real as recently as Wednesday at the state Capitol in Little Rock—that would be Jan. 28, 2015, a date to live in confederacy— was that the South rose again.
Confronted by a debate pitting non-evolved Confederates on one side and the American Civil Liberties Union on the other, the House State Agencies and Governmental Affairs Committee chose non-evolved Confederates. It found the ACLU offensive. The man testifying that Southern secession in 1861 did not qualify as rebellion because you can’t rebel against unlawful authority … he was deemed to be fine.
By his view, the federal government’s successful effort to end human bondage in the states in the mid-19th Century was an illegal infringement on the sovereign rights of states to practice what they danged well pleased.
Allow me to repeat for emphasis and clarity: This legislative committee was instinctively averse to the ACLU, but not to the Confederacy.
A motion was made to give a dopass recommendation to a bill to separate the state’s now-combined official observances of the birthdates of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The proposal was to remove Lee as a joint state honoree on what is King’s official national holiday.
Non-evolved Confederates showed up to oppose any de-emphasis on General Lee.
The motion failed on a voice vote, by which no one got officially recorded for the shouts of “no” that amounted to rhetorical firings on Fort Sumter.
State Rep. Bob Ballinger, a Republican of Hindsville who almost always votes on the wrong side of issues, actually favored the bill. He did so, he said, because “some” tend to think the joint designation with a Confederate general slights the civil-rights heroism of King.
You think? It’s as if Arkansas won’t let King have a holiday unless he shares it with somebody Arkansas actually admires.
Ballinger told a reporter after the meeting that Rita Sklar, the ever-weary and ever-beleaguered director of the ACLU in Arkansas, had killed the bill by testifying in favor of it.
Ballinger said Arkansas legislators tend to abhor the ACLU because it takes so many “wrong” positions. He explained that Arkansas legislators instinctively take positions opposite those of the ACLU.
Indeed, the ACLU stands guilty as charged of preferring the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of freedoms and rights to the human bondage practiced and defended by ancient rebels. It is, after all, a civil-liberties “union,” not a civil-bondage “confederacy.”
This legislative committee sided instead with a human anachronism named Loy Mauch.
He served one unfortunate term in the House and thus was a “colleague.”
Mauch was the one who testified that secession of the Confederate sort was not lawlessness because it was executed in defiance of unlawful authority.
We used to say that at Baseline Elementary School in 1961-62. We were children. We were little creeps.
State Rep. Nate Bell of Mena, who until hours before had been one of the Legislature’s more infamously reactionary right-wing members, sponsored the bill.
Two short years ago, Bell brought national shame on himself by chortling on Twitter about liberal anti-gun Bostonians cowering unarmed in their homes with terrorist bombers on the loose. The speaker of the House felt it necessary to apologize publicly for him.
But the recent election transformed the Arkansas Legislature into a body in which Bell and state Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway are relative progressives.
Well, centrists. Well, pragmatists. Well, post-Confederates.
Well, may we at least stipulate that they’re against slavery except in the case of pregnant women?
Bell thought he had designed an artful compromise to satisfy the powerful Confederate lobby. Beyond seeking to separate Lee from King for holiday purposes, he proposed in the bill to establish a state memorial day later in the year for Lee and other Confederate leaders. He wanted to call it Southern Heritage Day.
But the Confederates in the committee room didn’t like Lee’s downgrade.
Southern heritage is to be remembered, for sure, but mainly for regret and lamentation, not celebration. It needs to be commemorated only for this important lesson: We must never again behave as our heritage has sometimes had our region behaving.
How could we celebrate our Southern heritage, anyway? By driving to Central High and harassing black students as they enter?
But as long as this proposed Southern Heritage Day is for remembrance and lessons, then Bell’s compromise will garner my grudging endorsement.
But of course I prefer the USA to a Confederacy of Dunces. So that means my endorsement is no doubt as fatal as Rita Sklar’s.