Let's all get to work on finding four principles or themes that define Arkansas well. It might prove instructive, even healthy.
This is about the state flag and those four stars standing for Spain, France, the Confederacy and the United States, all providing jurisdiction for a time over our little piece of earth.
State Rep. Charles Blake of Little Rock proposed unsuccessfully in the recent session to have the flag's Confederate-commemorating star redesignated in statute to commemorate instead the Native Americans who inhabited the state when the Europeans came through.
Republican legislators on a House committee balked out of seeming allegiance to slavery and rebellion. Maybe they merely were slow on the uptake.
A couple of them--Rep. Andy Davis of Little Rock, for one--calculate that they might come back in the next legislative session and address the issue more comprehensively and, thus, less bitterly.
Why a simple stand-alone rejection of slavery-protecting rebellion was not a snap ... well, there's nothing to be gained at this point from assailing the modern-day Johnny Rebs for whom it somehow wasn't.
Let's move on in a spirit of cooperation.
It took two sessions to separate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday observance from Robert E. Lee's. It will now take at least two to separate the state flag's symbolism from 1861, as well as 1919, year of the Elaine race massacre and era of lynching, Jim Crow laws, KKK-rampaging and the obviously racist addition of the Confederate star.
Davis suggests redefining all four stars to make them loftily representative of elements of the state's spirit, essence and character.
He told me he envisioned an elementary class in, say, Illinois. Students are assigned reports on the various state flags. He said he'd prefer that the student assigned the Arkansas flag learn something about the state other than the identities of the nations variously exercising dominion over it.
With little notice, he filed a nonbinding resolution the next-to-last day of the session nominating, as those four defining characteristics, the following: opportunity, nature, innovation and heritage.
So, what do you think?
I tried the nominations out on several people, a few of whom wanted to honor instead four-headed combinations of Johnny Cash, Mary Steenburgen, Scottie Pippen, Glen Campbell, Levon Helm, Douglas MacArthur and Billy Bob Thornton.
Really? People? Entertainers and athletes from one generation extolled in a state flag for all generations? Would we want to teach subsequent generations that the state flag celebrates a very good guard-forward for the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s?
Surely they jest.
I'll tell you what I think of Davis' resolution. It's that I embrace the concept but lament the specifics. I seek to amend.
We've too long lacked economic opportunity for too many of our children, particularly in the Delta.
And I don't know what's natural about man-made lakes and an economy based on altering the land.
And the only innovation I can recall in Arkansas is the Wildcat Formation that the Razorbacks ran with Darren McFadden. And that was an adaptation of the old single-wing.
Still, personally, I'd let "opportunity" and "nature" stand. They existed already in state mottoes by which we were professed to be the "land of opportunity" and "the natural state."
Something bogus is made to seem less so by a history of bogusness.
But "innovation" needs to go. It's not at all who we are or have ever been. To assert as much is to engage in a hollow marketing promotion, not honor the state's essence.
That leaves "heritage," which my liberal followers on social media rejected as a "dog whistle," or code, for the Confederacy.
Indeed, much of the state's heritage is shameful. But not all of it. And people tend to see the concept differently.
When I think of Arkansas heritage, I don't think of the Civil War but the Depression-era tenant dirt farmers--possessed of a net worth amounting to a mule--from whom I come.
"We're descended from hardscrabble royalty as far as I'm concerned," is how I put it in a recent eulogy for a beloved uncle.
I'm wondering, then, if we might salvage "heritage," but mitigate its connotation for those clinging to the Confederacy.
I nominate "reconciliation," which is forming new friendships to replace old alienations, such as those of race. Reconciliation was the theme of the 40-year anniversary in 1997 of the Little Rock Central High integration crisis.
The stars thus would represent opportunity, nature, heritage and reconciliation.
Surely no Republican state legislator would vote against reconciliation.
Would one?
If this Solomonic solution should bog down, there was a woman's other suggestion on Twitter. It was simply to let the stars serve as decorations, symbolizing nothing.
Interesting. The stars would stand for nothing because the state couldn't decide what, if anything, it stood for.
There'd be some poetic logic to that.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/21/2019