Zorro, Father of Blicero (who criticizes the amount of time his son spends writing this blog, yet contradictorily increases that time spent by contributing to and thus perpetuating the debate) writes:

While reading the paper today about the latest Dean blunder regarding Confederate flags, I was reminded of a conversation with my brother, uncle of Blicero, shortly after General Clark declared himself in the presidential race. My brother was supporting Clark and made the point that the southern politicians are more skillful at rallying the black vote, that they have a better understanding of the dynamics that affect the relationship between black culture and white.

Now to quote Mr. Dean. First, he said that he wanted "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in [sic] their pickup trucks." Naturally, the Reverend Mr. Sharpton made like Vesuvius and demanded an apology. Dean first replied, "I'm no bigot." Does "I am not a crook" ring in anyone's ear? He then added to his explanation with "I make no apologies for reaching out to poor whites," adding that he was trying to reach out to white voters in the South.

Let me see. How many people has he offended? First, all those people--including myself--with pickups without Confederate flags, by attaching some stereotype to pickup drivers in general; second, almost any black person, since that flag has become so symbolic in both white and black culture; third, anyone who grammatically links up non-bigotry with non-crookedness; fourth, those people with Confederate flags in their pickups, by equating this group with poor whites in the South. He has clearly not seen my 2002-one ton-4 door-dually-diesel-long bed-4 wheel drive-Ford pickup nor any of its jillions of clones throughout the southern clime. Poor people do not drive this vehicle.

People with Confederate flags flying from their trucks are, taken as a group, mainly a group of bigots. It is a kind of in-your-face, "Shove it and your African American mother too." Possibly, there is 1 in 100 who flies the stars and bars purely out of love for the South, but the other 99 are closer to the white supremacy side of the balance beam.

I ask the non-rhetorical question, "To whom were these statements, taken as a group, appealing?" My answer is absolutely no one.

These comments connect with General Clark only in that he was one of 8 people who did not make such stupid statements. Perhaps, the others are equally skilled in this sensitive area. I am only saying that there is a Darwinian gene in General Clark that does not even recognize such statements as speech and therefore would never come from his lips.

--Zorro, Father of Blicero

Well, Blicero for the most part agrees with his Zorroastrian father, but not necessarily for the same reasons. Point one: Dean should know better than to say stuff like this publicly, and the fact that he doesn't--rather than the content of what he said--strikes me as a serious problem. Point two (regarding the content): Dean is right about the South. But he's right in the way that I, like other academic types, am right: in the belief that many white Southerners have sold out their hope and their livelihood for the scraps of pathetic hate-based false pride that Republicans throw them. Everyone knows this--even (I suspect) those sold-out Southerners. Among communities of despair, the feeling of angry moral indignation and self-righteousness is simply perceived as more valuable than the bitter pill of bonding together with blacks and liberals in the common-cause struggle for economic and social justice.

Everyone knows this is the biggest swindle and mass-deception in American politics, and in this regard little has changed since the revolutionary precedents set during the Goldwater campaign of 1964. The rage and bitterness over the civil rights movement (and its aftermath) are still the controlling force behind the American geopolitical makeup of today--though it's scarcely apparent as such, buried as it is beneath various strata of evolving culture-war code and symbolism, decades in the making. Just look at the current fetishism of the signifier--i.e. the role of the Confederate flag icon in the South Carolina and Georgia elections of 2002--and how it (the Confederate symbol) has come all but detached from the underlying reality: poor blacks and poor whites living side by side in a world in which they are increasingly alienated, marginalized, impoverished, and silenced.

And so, in this environment, a poor white Southerner can come to believe that he has more in common with a spoiled-brat New England corporate oligarch who says his "heart has been changed" by Jesus Christ than with the poor God-fearing black down the street or the well-off liberal elitist who always thinks he knows what's best (and does, but that's not the point).

Which brings us back to Dean: what he meant was right-on, but what he said was an embarrassing, arrogant, stereotyping, socially-inept disaster that no politician with judgment should have made. There was an amazing moment in Tuesday night's debate when someone--I think it may have been Lieberman, though I could be hallucinating--actually brought up the fact (without using pejorative images) that the source of Republican success is in the South is precisely white anger and long-lingering bitterness over the civil rights movement. Sharpton suggests as much (though why he doesn't speak out on it more directly, I don't know--probably because he knows he has no chance of connecting with white Southerners) when he says that if people understood and acknowledged the actual life-affecting choices they made when they voted Republican rather than Democratic, in plain and simple terms, they might well choose differently. That's all well and good. But the situation remains the same: you just can't come right out and say that an entire segment of the populace has been voting based on the insidious appeal of destructive fantasies of personal superiority and had better just get over it.

I don't know what the way out of this conundrum could be--maybe there is no way out. The only workable model to date is Clinton, who appealed to white Southerners because of the way he communicated his sympathy and humanity. But the fact that that sympathy also extended to blacks (and feminists, and gays, etc. etc.) ended up hurting him. He came to be seen as a cultural traitor, made all the worse because he was "one of us" (i.e. a good ole boy, who cozied up to not-so-good-ole boys and girls).

So that's all we have right now: the Democrat who smoothes-over his true standing on the cultural divide by virtue of his affecting personality and manner. And until some Democratic Ubermensch comes along who can raise hearts and minds to a level where the old culture-and-race divisions start to seem less important in view of higher civic purposes, that's what we've got to work with.

(On the other hand, Dean may have missed the point entirely: the relevant symbol by far is not the Confederate flag, but that fish-thing on the back of the car or the "W.W.J.D." bumper-sticker. While I think many Southern Christian fundamentalists are probably unreconstructed racists, that probably misses the point, since the masters of the American theocracy movement are genuinely all-too-happy to accept anyone into the fold, blacks and whites alike. Especially blacks, in fact. Maybe that's what we should be more concerned about: the Christianist movement in the U.S. is seeking to transcend race divisions entirely--but not exactly in the way I would hope for, to say the least.)

To sum up: there's a big problem in the South (yeah, newsflash!) and I'm aware that smart Southerners know a lot more about it than I do, and would probably consider my analysis superficial and misguided. So sue me: I live in Brooklyn.

But Clark--to come back to one of Zorro's points--clearly has that crucial ability to connect and communicate that Dean doesn't. Don't get me wrong, he's no Clinton. And with that black form-fitting mock-turtleneck and black pants and large, mesmerizing eyes, and hands frozen in karate-chop-type movements, he looked (I'm talking about Tuesday night) awfully like a kind of space alien or futuristic Star-Trek-type dweller. But the fact remains, he knows what he's doing out there. And best yet, when some "journalist" suggests that his position on some issue has been complicated or cloudy, the first thing he says is "No, I've been perfectly clear. My position is perfectly clear." This tells me the man understands "message" better than the others. Don't play the game, don't fall into the traps: just say the thing that you want to be communicated. And with conviction. Next.