This Damn Thing

Same as it ever was...I was driving through my new town of Vista, California, last week after having just posted about my old town of Canaan, New Hampshire, when I came upon an accident. A Honda SUV had broadsided a Toyota pick-up with such force that it knocked it over on its side. Just a few feet up to my left I could see that the participants in the accident and those who had stopped to help were a mix of black folks and brown folks. Ahead in the lane to my right was a white Mustang with Wisconsin plates and a Confederate flag decal prominently displayed on the left bumper. The driver had his window rolled down and his white hand out holding a cigarette. Hard to tell if the flag decal would've pushed my hot button had I not just an hour before finished writing about an ugly racial incident that happened in Canaan at a delicate time in US history...but there I was on a Saturday morning blithely heading for the farmers' market when suddenly I found myself in a fit of rage.
I should clarify here…the red the Confederate flag makes me see has less to do with race or slavery than it has to do with treason. If I see that flag filtered through the prism of racism, I must borrow outrage from those most directly affected by slavery. That places a degree of separation between me and that flag. But when I see it through purely American eyes, I see it as a symbol of treason against my country and an attack upon the US Constitution, and my contempt is my own…unfiltered through someone else's experience. The Confederate flag is to my eyes, I guess, what the crescent moon flag is to certain others who conveniently forget that the Confederacy caused approximately 375 times as many American deaths as al-qaeda ever did. Yet, in the most perverse act of patriotism imaginable, the yahoos stick this damn thing on their cars and trucks and drive around flaunting its blatant betrayal of our country.
That was my mindset as I was sitting there stuck in traffic looking at the rear end of that white Mustang. I started to contemplate taking advantage of that open window if I got up alongside him to roll down my own window and yell, "Traitor!"
The traffic finally loosened up herky-jerky as is often the case at these scenes and about a mile later I found myself at a light in the right lane, and I could see the white Mustang approaching on my left. The Good Lord was about to grant me another opportunity to vent my righteousness. The car pulled up alongside me. I put on my best Old Testament God face and turned to my left. Seated there in the passenger seat was a laughing young black woman. She did not look at all oppressed. They looked, in fact, like one of the typical military couples from the nearby Marine base. I quickly calculated that his poor ass was most likely on its way to some foreign hellhole...maybe both their asses...so yelling traitor out the window was probably not in order...and I sure couldn't be calling him racist.
So I drove off to the farmers' market, my rage somewhat mollified, and I began to ruminate on the lessons of this experience. In doing so, my mind harkened back to a similar incident two years earlier involving a big black Mercedes. It had missed the two left turn lanes designated for Costco shoppers and had decided to carve out an exclusive left turn lane of its own from one of the middle lanes. This, I should note, was on the busiest, most dangerous thoroughfare in the area. Cars not planning on making that left turn at Costco are traveling down the three right lanes at high speeds. At the moment of this incident, which I was watching in jaw-dropping amazement from the light at the cross street, cars were furiously braking and jumping lanes to avoid crashing into the back of the Mercedes. It looked for all the world like an accident was about to happen, though I was able to cross the intersection unharmed and take my place in the gas line at Costco
Lo and behold, what did I see as I got out to pump my gas? The Mercedes with heavily tinted windows pulled up in the adjoining gas line. I was still angry enough about the dangers I had just watched this person create for so many others that I determined to give the driver a very good piece of my mind. When the driver stepped out of the car, I saw it was not a he as I had imagined, but a she...and not an ordinary she, but a she in a burka. Suddenly I was in conflict with myself: if this was some rich old fart or some rich young punk, I would have been all over him with my wrath. But, now, did her sex and religion mitigate against that? Not if I had any integrity, I concluded. And I had a full tank of integrity, so I yelled at her, "Do you know how many lives you just put at risk?

She hardly acknowledged me. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

"All you had to do was go up a quarter of a mile to the next light and make a u-turn instead of stopping in the middle of the road like you own it," I countered.

She stared back at me like she did own the road...and me, and the gas, and the whole damn world.

Before I knew it, another customer jumped in (probably a goddamn liberal like me), and he shouts at me, "Hey, leave that woman alone."

Me. Now a bigot.

So, the first lesson: Road rage is for suckers.
The second lesson? Kids do the damnedest things. Driving away from the encounter with the white Mustang brought back another, much older recollection. In college I actually had a large Confederate flag beach towel of my own hanging in my room...a souvenir from my first trip to the American South. I believe I thought of it in the same way World War II vets thought about the Nazi paraphernalia they brought back and would proudly display in their homes after the war...proof that they had ventured into enemy territory. It's a primitive behavior...by possessing a piece of the enemy we believe we possess the enemy. The Nob's patron saint, Norman O. Brown, writes about it thusly:

Head hunting. An enemy must be killed for a boy to grow up; a head must fall. The boy kills his father in the person of the enemy. And then the slain enemy becomes his guardian spirit…The pile of skulls that represents the chiefs mana [power] are those of enemies...

Irony, ubiquitous as ever, also applies. I hang the Confederate flag in my room to show my disdain for it. After all, look at the purity in my heart. So, too, perhaps the young fellow driving the white Mustang put the flag decal on his car to declare himself a rebel. After all, look at the smiling black girl by his side.