Marlette: Lord, we know not what we salute

Lord, forgive us, we know not what we do.

And by "us," I mean all my fellow white Southerners who are still putting up a futile, foolish and feckless fight on behalf of the Confederate flag.

I generally stay detached from social media reactions to my editorial cartoons. There's not time enough in the day to keep up with it. And besides, it's best to let the cartoons speak for themselves. Show, not tell. Whatever debate or dialogue comes afterward, great. That's the point of this gig.

But some of the reaction to a cartoon I drew in response to the Charleston massacre gave pause. The cartoon ran last Wednesday. It showed 3 men — an Al Qaeda terrorist, an ISIS fighter and Dylann Roof — each upholding their banner of choice. Roof's, of course, was the Confederate flag. The caption read simply: "Terrorists and their flags." Pretty straight forward.

The cartoon spread quickly on social media. By Friday it had been shared more than 6,000 times on Facebook. And the illuminating dialogue flowed forth:

"Junk"

"Garbage"

"Socialist Lib. Propaganda"

"Stupid liberals"

"Race baiting"

"Asinine"

"Huge liberal moron"

"The Confederate flag is not terrorist or racist."

"This slam at Southern pride is extremely offensive."

"The 13 stars on the flag... represent the 13 top members of the Illuminati."

"Lmao"

And of course, "PNJ SUCKS!!"

Fortunately, our newsroom's resident holy man, Brother Troy Moon, injected his encyclopedic rock-knowledge to guide the discussion back to its intended, philosophical trajectory when he posted a link to The Bottle Rockets' song "Wave That Flag."

"Those good ole boys are waving the Stars & Bars,

It's a red, white and blue flag, but it ain't ours!"

All of my fellow freedom-loving Southerners ought to give it a listen. And maybe they will — as soon as they're done painting a wobbly rendition of the banner on graffiti bridge.

Lord, forgive us....

Take it from a cartoonist, symbolism matters. It's powerful, omnipresent stuff — like gravity. But unlike the force that keeps us all grounded to this big, spinning Earth, symbolism is something science has yet to get a grasp of. For all our iPhones, apps and Google-fueled modernity, there's not a scientist in the world that can calculate, quantify or classify the forces of symbolism that are swirling through the universe.

But we all feel them, don't we?

Look at last week. A symbol fell. It had to — because we felt the force of it. When Americans saw photographs of a Confederate flag toting monster who slaughtered 9 praying Christians — because they were black — folks felt the full, brutal force of the symbol.

That's the power of an image: Whatever you thought or claimed that flag represented before, Dylann Roof defined it once and for all. The monster is the message. So it had to fall.

The swift collapse of that flag was an iconically American moment of free expression. The flag was not banned. It was not made illegal. It was not censored or retracted in a concession of "white guilt." It was simply exposed, laid bare, broadcast and therefore, shown naked and disgusting. So it fell.

Law did not dictate that. Our collective spirit as fundamentally good human beings did.

Science has yet to grasp the force of symbolism. But it did not take a scientist to get it. In the rotten face of Dylann Roof, most folks understand that the tainted flag flying in his world, doesn't have a place in ours.

Such is the death sentence for sad, sorry symbols like the Confederate flag. It's not by decree of one human. It's by the consent of humanity.

Most of humanity. Lord, forgive the rest of us. We know not what we salute.