The Copperhead Corner: War and Peace in Backwater Maine: Dixie Flags and Don’t Say Ain’t!

Gadsden flags and Dixie flags. There’s a curious ratio for how you see them displayed and related here – in Southern Maine, as opposed to Central or Northern Maine. In the City (Portland) you see a few Dixie flags, they’re called ‘Rebel’ flags. I can’t think of a single Gadsden Flag I’ve seen inside the city proper.

Why does this matter, Saxo?

I’ll get to it. The short story is: the Civil War made it impossible to avoid, because as with every state sponsored fratricide, there are no winners and afterwards is superhuman effort from the Apparatus to keep you picking all the wrong sides. We’re gonna hafta circle back.

Why else it matters is because geography impacts opinion. The closer to Portland you are, the more sanitized the experience. Outside in the suburbs, there arise more natural inclinations. Further out? Even moreso. The Southern Mainer is more closely related to Old Stock Yankees of Massachusetts, and little known to most, came from another part of England than the Yankees in Central and Northern Maine. I’d have to check their lot number. I forget what county the rest of Maine comes from, but my kin came from Suffolk on East Anglia which had been in perpetual rebellion since the Plantagenets. Which I suppose explains my inborne crippling love/hate relationship with authority.

Anyway. The signal flag of Portland Area is the “Original Maine” Flag. (Whatever.) While salty bastards like myself fly the Maine State Seal. If anyone cares – ask, and I’ll answer. You can never know what the message behind “OG ME” is, but whatever. The Dixie flag here really isn’t any less ambiguous, until it is. It sends a message – “no thank you.” Same with Gadsden. They fly to make the Urbanites uncomfortable. But go far enough North and you just don’t need them anymore to make a message. But, there are isolated incidences where they do. And it’s glorious, I’m not ashamed to say. Is it appropriation? Probably. But it also works.

I digress.

For my part, for the record; choosing sides is the categorically objectively wrong side. That’s not a value judgement. A man can act in accordance with his conscience doing something wrong if he has no reason to believe it is anything other than right. The enemies of nature know and exploit this. Why, for example, was one of the first acts of Congress to strip our flag of our Cross and give everybody else their stars? The Congress voted us out of our Ethnostate. The English Colonies. The Yankee, the ironic nickname for New England’s founding racial stock, became property of the Everyman. I became a universal solvent. Ain’t we a peach? America was always meant to be for somebody else, never you. And, I say that full well knowing “you” could be anybody. You might be an Anglo like me. You might belong to one of the potato races. Or hell, I know I get black readers now and again. Not for you. Think about that. A thing that is everything at once but exclusively denies having solid origins isn’t a thing at all, it is a nothing.

Anyway – we don’t see objective truth but for the rearview mirror somedays. And objective reality is for educated horses like me. You know who didn’t need it? The country boys. Hillbillies and rednecks. Hicks, if you’re a rude little bastard. You know who flies Dixie flags? Country boys. Why? Because the they know.

On the inside.

Sure. There’s sociological reasons we can implore for help. Reverse psychology. Negro fatigue. Plain and simple recognition that the Dixie flag is like crack for shitlibs, whom you can pwn liek n00bz with facts and logic an sheeeit.

But there’s another thing to note, that your books and television shows won’t tell you. How we were raised by the school system is unnatural. You were taught proper fiction – as defined by Away. We used to be able to tell each other apart from the way each town carried a twang. It was on its way out in the suburbs, but the country boys had it good.

Proper children do not say ain’t.

There is a more respectable way of speaking. This was combined with a curious blend of propping up abolitionist (hereafter foreshortened to abo) New England. And nothing else of local flavour. We beat the British to fight the Rebels. Never thought to question the irony.

Neither did the country boys. Didn’t need to. Their parents had the twang. Their grandparents had more. Great Uncle Meddybemps requires a translator to tell Cousin Mary the dinner bell is ringing. Sad, but true. They had peculiarities, of which the kindly teacher from Away taught them is wrong. And don’t say ain’t. I can’t tell you how often I heard that. People will think you’re some kind of inbred Southerner. (What?) There are respectable opinions and ways of talking. None of them yours.

Weak willed parents wishing to fit in with the fancy people crowd reinforced the school’s cultural degradation. But not all.

Why, we wonder, was this so important? Now we come to a crux. Maine has a long and barely hidden history of rabble rousing. Of absolute unimpressment with authority. This manifested itself in some real resistance to the Civil War – and others.

One, we have to remember: both Yankee and Dixian would maybe still be writing to kinfolk in England. The War of 1812 wasn’t that long ago, and Maine was a contested territory between Massachusetts and Canada which was then and now far friendlier to the interests of British Americans than the 13 Colonies whose pecuniary interests outweighed the ethnic concerns of their constituents. Again – then as now.

So, it should surprise none that in Maine there was a division. But not along lines you’d think. Among the enlightened was a snobbery regarding what the Everyman among us called “our southern brethren.” The attitude was not rooted in moral enterprise along abo lines – that wholly artificial line was invented by the newspapers later. Before the media onslaught was the idea that the Southern Government was lazy and degenerate because it had allowed its citizens the dangerous opportunity of mixing with negros. This idea of the egalitarian North is a late revision.

This shall be the subject of another blogpost, but Maine had a tremendous Copperhead presence. For the unaware, that’s Anti-War which was made to be Pro-Southern. Doughboys, they were sometimes called.

These influences don’t just vanish because Big Gubmint don’t like ’em. That’s some bullshit, right out straight. So, what do you get when you send the country boys, who never gave a damn in their life, let alone the genepool, to school to get schooled by folks that snob knob their culture? You get reactionary Southern Sympathisers.

Yes, then and now it’s a small subset, percentage wise. But consider this: willingness to physically rebel implies a much larger contingent of silent approval. So it was with those in New England seeking racial unity from the start, who were tarred and feathered by the tolerant. So it was with the Copperheads who were tarred and feathered by the tolerant. The crushing irony is that the appropriated Dixie flag has little to do with anything South of Portland. It’s more to do with the reactionary Yankee refusing to give up the ship. But all of our symbols and legacies have been robbed of us, and so thoroughly subverted by the Federal Government (whose origin is about as Yankee-ish as Robert Edward Lee, for irony’s sake.) So it’s almost easier to whistle Dixie than explain to a fellow New Englander that he has a perfectly good lot of flags in descending order. So, raise the Stars and Bars I guess.

Ironically the Dixie-Yanks are voting with their feet and taking NNE back from their childhood memories of foreign hegemony. Without much thinking about it. And they take flak, like the Copperheads before us. And…

Where are we now?

You know where. Still in somebody else’s America.