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In today’s “about damn time” news, t he commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, who apparently is almost as tired of seeing Confederate flags as my black ass is, has decided to remove them from Marine installations entirely.


Eager to earn a conditional invitation to t he Cookout—which will remain segregated, but we appreciate your efforts anyway—Gen. David Berger has mandated that while all Confederate-related symbols ain’t gotta go home, they gotta get the hell up out of our Marine bases.

From USA Today:

The top brass of the U.S. Marine Corps has ordered that all Confederate-related items be removed from Marines service bases worldwide, Military.com reports. David Berger, Commandant General of the Marines, prioritized for “immediate execution” the banishment of objects representing the Confederacy in response to a congressional hearing on the rise of extremism in the military, according to Military.com.


With white supremacist and racist ideologies on the rise in Trump’s military, I’m not saying every Confederate flag-hugging Marine is racist; I’m just saying Berger might be onto something. And being a military vet myself, I wasn’t exactly surprised to hear about Lance Cpl. Vasillios G. Pistolis getting booted out of the Marines for attending 2017’s infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Berger’s mandate was part of a larger memo that also called for assigning more combat roles to women, extending parental leave policies to same-sex couples, and presenting year-long maternity leave as an option for new mothers.

I offer an enthusiastic round of applause to all of the above, and Richard Kohn, a military history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, does too.

“We have the need within the country to try and create as much unity as possible and to suppress white nationalism and racism within the ranks of the military because, every once in a while, it crops up and causes an issue,” Kohn told Military.com.


But while Berger’s directive is all well and good, what about those ten Army bases named after Confederate generals and a former Ku Klux Klan leader?

“I think the Army would worry about alienating the local population,” Kohn said “Most of the people joining the military are from areas where these bases are [...] so the recruiting people might say, ‘You know, you really don’t want to do that.’”




Whatever.



Now if we can only rid ourselves of that human Confederate flag that lives in the White House.