I hear defenders of the confederate flag insist we don’t make assumptions about what it means to those who fly it so I stopped to ask the owner of this one in Killington VT. “Heritage,” he said, & also it’s more socially acceptable than the Nazi flags he hangs inside his house.
Then he asked me “what” I was, which turned out to mean he wanted to know if I was a Jew. I am. “Half,” which meant, he said, I’m also half white, so he showed me his swastika tattoo. And his loaded gun. Then he said again his confederate flag isn’t racist at all, it’s “history.”
I told the Vermont confederate flag flier that my non-Jewish Tennessee ancestors had been confederates but I hate the flag. What was his so-called heritage? He’d never been south of Boston.
The confederate flag flier said his confederate flag wasn’t “a Klan thing.” And he knew, because he had in fact been in the Klan. So, you know, a man of many interests!
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