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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 24, 2015

Tweets in search of a context: saying farewell to the Confederate battle flag

June 24, 2015 by Terry Teachout

imagesEver since I was old enough to understand what it meant, seeing the Confederate battle flag on display has made me squirm—and the fact that it continues to fly over state houses in the Deep South makes me genuinely angry. That said, I’m also not fond of “debates” driven by self-righteousness, of which vast amounts have been evident on both sides of this particular fence. Nor do I usually think it wise to take action on anything in the heat of the moment, which is, needless to say, what’s happening right now.

But it’s also true that America is a country in which things tend to get done either in the midst of a crisis or (more often) not at all. And in a sense, what we’re really debating is the wisdom of the post-Reconstruction policy of temporarily tolerating institutionalized racism in the Deep South in the hope of healing the hideous wounds of civil war.

I can’t help but wonder how far Abraham Lincoln would have gone in that direction had he lived. He was, after all, a pragmatist who believed in both the morality and the utility of magnanimity. Magnanimity is incompatible with the all-or-nothing mentality of the ideologue, and Lincoln was anything but that. Yet he truly hated slavery, and it’s hard to suppose that he would have had much patience with the latter-day argument that the Confederate flag can rightly be understood as a symbol of anything other than that monstrous evil.

UnknownTo be sure, there are serious-minded people who believe that its symbolic value can under certain circumstances be benign, and others who simply don’t know enough about American history to understand what it means to a black person to see that flag flying over a government building one hundred and fifty years after Appomattox. Still, I think we all know in our hearts what at least some of those who continue to fly it today really have in mind. Certainly Dylann Roof was in no doubt about it.

In any case, such debates are academic. Whether or not it was at one time wise for the federal government to turn a blind eye to southern racism in the hope of serving a greater good—and hindsight, as they say, is always 20/20—the moral statute of limitations for that policy has long since run out. That’s why I believe that the Confederate battle flag and all its prideful variants should now be lowered forevermore.

Will that put an end to racism? Of course not. Nor will it stem the rising tide of self-righteousness that is increasingly driving this debate. (I wrote this at the peak of the controversy.) No conversion, after all, is complete enough to suit an ideologue. Even if you kill yourself out of self-loathing, he’ll spit on your grave. But that’s no reason not to do the right thing, and those who still believe in the possibility of good will should be no less willing to trust the sincerity of Nikki Haley, the Republican governor of South Carolina, who tweeted yesterday:

July 4th is just around the corner. It will be fitting that our state Capitol will soon fly the flags of our country & state, and no others.

I couldn’t agree more.

* * *

Newsreel footage of the government-sponsored reunion of Civil War veterans held in Gettysburg in 1938, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The last surviving veteran of the Civil War died in 1956:

Hearst Metrotone News covers Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. She is accompanied by Kosti Vehanen:

Snapshot: Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland perform Lincoln Portrait

June 24, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERALeonard Bernstein leads the National Symphony in a 1980 concert performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait commemorating the composer’s eightieth birthday. The text is spoken by Copland:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)

Almanac: Thomas Berger on Henry James

June 24, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Henry James. He is someone to contend with, but an awful lot is missing—how much can be seen by comparing him with Proust. His sexual sensibility is that of a Victorian maiden of the upper class: he seems to ache to be deflowered. And I think it was Chesterton who said something to the effect that James’s work was too well-written and therefore slightly vulgar.”

Thomas Berger, letter to Zulfikar Ghose (Mar. 26, 1975)

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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