I was away most of the day today, so posting will be light this evening.

I’ve got a good excuse, though: I was one of the Rebels manning a booth for the Sons of Confederate Veterans at the Heart of Virginia Festival in Farmville. All in all it was a successful day, with pleasant weather, good conversations with the attendees at the festival, and plenty of politically incorrect Confederate merchandise sold.

The SCV had reserved two spaces for the occasion, one for the booth, and one next door for a “living history” tableau featuring uniformed Confederates, muskets, a sword, and other odds and ends of Civil War paraphernalia.

Unlike the last time I did the Heart of Virginia gig, none of the visitors wanted to argue with me about the Confederates being “traitors”. The people who stopped to talk were uniformly pleasant and friendly. Most of them were Confederate sympathizers, of course, but some were just interested in history. A few passersby glared at us, but those were all white women. Interestingly enough, black people didn’t seem to have any issue with our being there. Some stopped to talk to us, and even bought some of the merch. So you never can tell.

The Confederate sympathizers among the visitors were generally well aware of the significance of the Confederate Battle Flag in today’s larger culture war: it stands for resistance to tyranny. They know the current tyranny emanates from Washington D.C., just as it did in 1861. And the Stars and Bars still represent the collective defiance expressed by the Sovereign Commonwealth of Virginia in the face of that tyranny.

Deo Vindice!