This is why I wish progressives would grow up a little and stop with the phony outrage every time some yahoo nursing the old eternal Dixie grudge shows up at a rally wrapping his cause in the standard of Johnny Reb—as though they’d never before borne witness to mouth-breather trailer wrath and are at a loss to explain why it’s such a powerful agent of dissent.

It’s also why I wish rage-a-holic righties would grow up a lot, resist the intoxicating rush of their weekly pre-adolescent temper tantrums and govern themselves with logic and whatever portion of New Testament charity they apparently missed on their first 9,000 readings of The Bible. (Just kidding on that last one, I know y’all don’t actually read that book.)

Gallantly streaming

Like it or not, the Confederate flag is part of a national heritage shared by us all. For anyone who imagines its legacy is confined to the South—or that there’s anything even remotely new about the manner in which it’s presently being used as a symbol of antipathy and defiance—here’s a quick review of the muddy declension of events that brought the Confederate standard to Obama’s doorstep.

The rebel flag first resurfaced in an official capacity after the Civil War when the state of Georgia adopted a version of the Confederacy’s original Stars and Bars (not the “Confederate flag” as it’s commonly known today) as its state flag in 1879. In the 1890s, Mississippi and Alabama fashioned state flags based on the St. Andrew’s cross battle flag, the one we now see rendered on everything from trucker caps to the contemporary Mississippi flag. These state flags “served notice that Reconstruction was over and that white Democrats were now once again in control,” writes University of Georgia history professor and former president of the Southern Historical Association, James C. Cobb, in Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.