Confederate Kitsch '08

In a post below, I marvelled at David Brooks's odd column about how the high school lunchroom (geeks and jocks) explained the cultural differences between Democrats and Republicans. While struggling vainly to vindicate the GOP as the party of "cool," Brooks showed his obliviousness to the impact of race on political affiliation. But his more glaring flaw actually involved class. The purpose of his exercise seemed to be a rebuttal of the charge that today's politics flowed from class distinctions: the GOP isn't the party of wealth, it is the party of "athletes," those superior natural specimens who succeed by their own talents but often breed irrational resentment as a consequence. I.e., Rousseau's Second Discourse, in reverse.

Problem? As anyone who has attended high school (or seen at least one teen movie) knows, the "cool" clique in most lunchrooms is determined more by social class than by athletic prowess. The rich kids rule. And as anybody who has seen today's GOP knows, its leaders are less the fruits of American meritocracy than of enduring privilege, as our "Cheerleader-in-Chief" helps personify. So why would Brooks devote time to a swiss cheese argument? I'd been wondering, but I think I discovered an answer on the cover of the New Republic: this is all about George Allen's presidential run in 2008.

If you haven't read it, I strongly recommend taking a look at Ryan Lizza's cover story on the Virginia Senator ("Pin Prick"), especially since he's the GOP establishment's current "It Boy." Be prepared. It almost makes you wish that George W. would just cancel the election (again!? better get Nino on this quick!) and graciously serve a third term. In short, Lizza presents Allen as a grade-A jackass, almost the stereotype of the unbearable high school jock: a football-playing bully who talks constantly about the game, drives around in a red mustang, beats his siblings silly, and, most notably, flies the confederate flag. And boy does he fly it. He puts it on his license plate, he wears it on a pin for the yearbook picture, and he even gets suspended for an incident in which he rallies school spirit for a game against a rival black high school by covertly spray painting "DIE WHITEY" and "BURN BABY BURN" on his own school and blaming it on the black kids. Oh yeah, in case you're wondering, this was in the late 1960s. Years later, Allen displayed a confederate flag in his home and a lynching tree complete with noose in his law office.

Now all this would be bad enough if Allen were, in fact, a southerner. As it turns out, he just a frickin' poser. Or maybe I should say "poseur," since, while his dad was a famous football coach in Chicago and LA, his mom was French. Not just genealogically, like say, Tom DeLay--she's a bona fide Frenchie who hated America, did her housework in frilly lingerie, and competed in belly button contests (she apparently won). Young George grew up rich and urban, mostly in southern California, so his confederacy chic was pure fiction. He was just a deeply confused, Frenchified, racist meat head in the throes of an identity crisis (with possible Oedipal issues) from which he never recovered. Apparently, Virginians didn't notice when they voted him first governor and then senator. Heck, all that tobacco he spits at campaign events is just a sign of "authenticity."

On its own, this story would just be pathetic. Yet this is not an isolated incident. It has to be understood as part of the GOP's celebration of the southern poseur as the pinnacle of heartland authenticity. George W fits this bill too: preppy, old money New Englander who drills some dry oil wells, fakes a southern accent, buys a ranch, and cuts brush (in his pennyloafers) so that he can run for president. Allen kicks that up a full notch. There's an obvious point here about the GOP: corporate America gussied up for the tent revival. But I'm actually more interested about what this says about today's South. Because we're the ones who, overwhelmingly, buy this shlock. Call it "confederate kitsch" and notice that it is now virtually everywhere. Just have some breakfast at Cracker Barrel, walk into your neighborhood mega-church, or turn on country radio to hear slick studio sounds that are almost indistinguishable from LA pop music.

Much like the Arab world, where wealthy, westernized Muslims like Osama seek authenticity by hurling themselves into radical fundamentalism, the South is caught in a crisis of hyphenated identity. Ironically enough, the south as "South" is disappearing, by precisely those forces that now revel in southern nostalgia. The old, slow agrarian life, celebrated by writers like William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Richard Weaver, is fading away, replaced by unrelenting corporate drive. We're becoming much more similar to the rest of the US, with the same chain stores, the same SUVs, and the same soulless suburban architecture. Few of us who live here are pure southerners, either (for the record, I'm southern on only one side, and I was born in Baltimore.) And the best way to reconcile this change is to become oblivious to it, so oblivious that we can righteously elevate kitsch as authenticity and cool.

Luckily for us, the national news media goes along for the ride, egging on Congress as it stages a "Come to Jesus" impeachment spectacle for Clinton, the real southerner gone astray, while flattering Bush's every pose: "He's a cowboy!" Well, maybe at a drag show. (My apologies to our transgendered readers; the comparison is unfair to you.) Of course, David Brooks doesn't see any of this. Like many wealthy, northeastern conservatives (Ann Coulter, anyone?), he's too enthralled with the fake masculinity of this charade to question it. Like Rousseau, he's looking for his "golden age." Let's set all the fact aside, said the great Frenchman (OK, Genevan, so French-speaking Swissman), and imagine a bygone era, one where men were men, and where no government interfered with their natural goodness and freedom. A final irony: the conservative movement that began with Edmund Burke's anti-utopian and anti-(French) revolutionary pragmatism has ended with a Rouseauean dream. The revolution has now officially devoured its children. Mon Dieu!