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Politics & Media
Jul 10, 2015, 09:50AM

Woman Cries, Flag Comes Down

And if that's what it takes, okay.

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“No woman wants to cry,” Rep. Jenny Horne told a reporter. “I didn’t want to cry, but I couldn’t help it.” Her four-minute speech before her colleagues has been described as fiery, emotional, and pivotal. The second adjective is true for sure; the others are debatable. At any rate, what she said will be remembered.

Rep. Horne wanted South Carolina's House of Representatives to cut the crap and vote for the Stars and Bars to come down. About five hours after she spoke, the crap was finally cut and the vote held. It was a landslide for sending the flag where President Obama says it ought to go—a museum, in this case the city of Columbia's Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum.

Getting to the vote meant wading through almost 60 amendments. If any of them had been approved, weeks could’ve gone by while House and Senate conferees dickered over the change. Presumably that was the main idea. The final vote (94 to 20) indicates that defiance was a political dead end. But dead-enders tend to be bloody-minded. The state rep behind most of the amendments let it be known that he took out his hearing aids when South Carolina's governor, and his fellow Republican, met with GOP lawmakers to tell them why the Confederate battle flag could no longer fly in the state's name.

Jenny Horne, also a Republican, is convinced that the amendments were simply meant to gum up the works. “I thought the stall tactics were childish,” she said after the vote. “It turned into an endurance contest and we spent I don’t know how many hours doing something that the Senate did in a fraction of the time and I, quite frankly, was insulted. We had spent an entire day trying to slow this bill down and bog it down and force it to conference committee and drag this debate out for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I had just decided that it was time that somebody stood up and said what was the real issue here.”

She did so about 10 hours into the debate. She'd had half a sandwich to eat, and she'd spent a considerable amount of time listening to representatives give speeches about themselves. She says she didn't know what she was going to say when she stood up. What came out wasn't really a great speech, but it was a hell of a moment. She didn't make any new points, or phrase her points especially well. “I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful, such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday,” she said, which is fair enough but standard. She managed to work in the economic angle: “there is an economic development prospect in Dorchester County that is in jeopardy because we refuse to act.” Which is valid but parochial (Dorchester being the district she represents). Really, the big thing she did was cry. She wailed. She spoke through tears and raised her voice as she did so, and she kept speaking even as her voice tore apart.

Did her speech make a difference? News accounts suggest as much, but maybe they're wrong. Amendments were still being put forward minutes before the final vote. The articles praising her haven't cited any stubborn lawmakers who stepped forward to say her four minutes turned them around. But her speech certainly mattered another way. She said what a lot of people have been thinking, and she said it with the same rush of outrage with which they've been thinking it. She was the voice of white America coming to grips with what the Confederate flag means to black America. (I would say she was coming to grips with what the flag means, period, but that's not the line she takes, and I bet most of white America agrees with her position, not mine.)

Afterwards, she explained what set the words going. “The only thing I could see in my mind was Mrs. Pinckney and those two precious little girls at that funeral,” she said. She meant the family of the late Senator Clementa Pinckney, one of the people killed by the white racist Dylann Roof. She was talking about emotion, but emotion rules either side of the flag debate. Logically, the flag is just cloth with a pattern. The flag, like any, becomes more because of the feelings that its history causes people to attach to it. White America was jolted by the sight of nine innocent, wholesome, law-abiding people killed because of their race. Once jolted, white America then considered the sight of the slaveholders' flag as it flew from a pole that the victims had helped pay for. A lot may be said after a moment like that, but it will all come down to the same few things: basically, “heritage” versus “how can you do that to those poor people.”

Rep. Horne wailed the latter point and the public had its YouTube moment. Conceivably a man might have roared the point. Tired of pettifogging delay, he might have gone red-faced. He might have shouted, “Those little girls don't have a daddy and now they have to see his killer's flag flying in the air.” Something like that—manly anger. Once upon a time, a woman who carried on like Rep. Horne would have been treated as an embarrassment, whereas the man would have gotten away with his bellowing (as opposed to her wailing). So the Horne incident demonstrates another change in our rules of life. Gays can marry, white Americans disdain the Confederate flag, and an emotional speech can be soggy instead of fiery. A woman can get up and be womanish in a stereotypical way, and people may still listen. The first two changes strike me as just fine, the last as so-so. But what the hell, I'll take the package.

—Follow C.T. May on Twitter: CTMay3

Discussion
  • I think it skipped to Chicago where it killed,iirc, ten black people.

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  • what skipped to Chicago?

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  • This should be good....

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  • C.T. That devilish, murderous, rayciss, vicious Confederate battle flag.

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  • Oh. Okay. The thing is, nobody says the flag caused the killing. You're confused again.

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  • C.T. I'm being snarky about the hysterical characterizations of the flag. Without it, Roof would have...attacked a college. Or gone to dental school. It has been slathered with more sins than the scapegoat. Particularly racist violence. Like the Knoxville Horror. Or....no....wait. But, anyway, it's bad. Now everything will be just dandy in South Carolina.

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  • No, no one's saying the flag made Roof do what he did. You're still attacking the same straw man.

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  • By the way, only racists think "rayciss" is funny.

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  • C.T., Dude. You have GOT to get yourself on the right mailing lists. The accusation of racism as a functioning manipulative scam wore out years and years ago. You are so far behind. The Confederate battle flag wouldn't have been sucking up all the oxygen if it weren't powerful beyond imagining. It overshadowed...Iran and the bomb...the Chicago murder rate...ISIS.... You mean to tell me it has no mana, no malign influence wherever it goes? Then WTF was the fuss about but some self-congratulatory posturing? Pick one.

  • I hate the Irish.

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  • "Rayciss" is a usage commonly found on Stormfront and other similarly-oriented websites, just in case there was any misunderstanding as to its connotation and the people who use it.

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  • If the only way a flag can matter is if it directly causes physical real-world consequences, then I guess you don't mind when people burn the American flag. After all, no famines result. No floods. So you're cool with it. And you're cool with the Confederate flag coming down. Except you aren't.

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  • As for being called racist, I'm sure you're sick of hearing it. This is a common complaint among the ... "rayciss" ... community.

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  • C. T. I'm sick of having to tell people that calling others "racist" as a censoring/shaming technique wore out long ago. It means they're...not quite caught up. Did I mention I spent two summers in MS in the Sixties doing civil rights work? Could have sworn I did. As to flags, people can put what meaning they want into them. I never thought much about the Confederate battle flag until the SJW wimps started whining about it. Now I'm seeing it like the Gadsden flag. As in.....what Kid Rock said. Just because I don't like SJW whining. Thtat's my meaning.

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  • It's not easy to be "caught up" on your avant-garde level, Dick, but don't forget about the black wimps.

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  • C.T. Don't know about black wimps. I'd think of them as opportunists. They've been voting something like 90% for the party which put the flag up and kept it up. NOW, they have a problem....

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  • It's OK if you think I'm CT, Dick, we know you get confused.

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  • sub . I can see you're doing the best you can. Hang in there.

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  • You're doing better too. You figured out I'm not CT.

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  • For purposes of this or various other discussions, the difference is relevant because...?

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  • We're two different people. And a key factor in your exchanges is that you're frequently confused.

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  • Nice that once you weren't a ... "rayciss." Seems that you're pretty childish though. Saying blacks are "opportunists" because they're against the Confederate flag ... my, my, my.

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  • Dick - Was your civil rights work in the sixties done for the White Citizens Council? Did you get to hang out with Byron De La Beckwith?

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  • subb. Did you piss your pants at the thought of going south of Cincinnati? ;'cause you talk big about race and the struggle just like those who, challenged, went looking for their Depends. Student Education Project out of East Lansing/Mich State ran a Summer Study Skills Institute at Rust College in Holly Springs, MS. Six weeks of math, communication skills (reading for content and expository composition) plus electives in anything any of us had a background in. I did subSaharan Africa. Field trips to Shiloh, Ole Miss, and a few other places where we drew attention but, fortunately, no violence. They did that for, iirc, 65-68 or 69. I participated 67 and 68. I know, sub, I know. When you've jacksquatall to go on, cry race. Seen it for decades. You'd think the practitioners would have figured something else...but apparently not.

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  • Oops. My other elective was scientific dirty fighting for the women in our staff. At our reunion in '07, two of them mentioned that, even before mentioning it was good do see me and I had put on weight.

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  • Was it remedial communication skills you were studying? I don't recall "talking big" about race.

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  • sub. Two things. Our students were incoming freshmen. Talking big means, among other things, calling race when you have jacksquatallelse to go on and know it. It also includes ostentatiously self-congratulatory finding evil in the mundane, such as the flag struggle. Not all mundane,of course. Some mundane is more important than others. Heaven Sutton (aka "who?") is still a nobody. Jameil Shaw, despite not being ennobled by being killed by a white guy, might,on the other hand,, become somebody. Bu it would be against odds.

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  • Per usual,I can only decipher a portion of this. The only point I made is you use "rayciss," which is a word I see on white supremacist websites. So I have that to "go on." People can draw their own conclusions about someone who uses such language. As for my finding evil in the flag struggle, I haven't mentioned the flag at all. Perhaps you are confused once again.

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  • What the fuck, man? Why don't you just try to write for Splice Today? You sure have a lot to say; not all of it's coherent, but whatever.

  • sub. I know, I know. You call a guy racist and...it just bounces off. It doesn't work any longer. Why weren't you told? As to the word "rayciss", it's used to make fun of people who are forever finding racism wherever convenient. That's not white supremacist sites. That's anybody with a clue. Sourpuss. Of course you can't get it. Heaven Sutton is a nobody to you. Ditto Jameil Shaw. Which is sort of my point. Sourpuss. I'll give you some info. Heaven Sutton was a little black girl, just a bit older than my granddaughter. Shot in the back fleeing a gunfight among black gangbangers in Chicago. She and her mother were trying to run a FUCKING LEMONADE STAND. And nobody gave a fuck. Nobody Certainly not the Semi Professionally Exceptionally Wonderful (SPEW) who are forever claiming the moral high ground over the morons and subhumans like the rest of us. May they and the gangbangers end up in the same place.

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  • I'd be interested to take a look at an Aubrey piece, and I bet I'm not alone.

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  • Okay, marymac. You have a couple of subjects?

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  • I suggest an exploration of why he uses the word "rayciss" to mean "racist" even though he was a civil rights activist in the 60s in the deep south.

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  • Another good one would be the "opportunism" of blacks in their recent opposition to the Confederate flag. That would be a dandy.

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