Sports Night on Huckabee and the Confederate Flag
Over at Slate, Christopher Hitchens asks why the press is ignoring Mike Huckabee's shocking statement about the Confederate flag. While the media were quick to highlight Huckabee's shameless pandering to South Carolina's far right, the press generally preferred to avoid any discussion of Huckabee's blatantly racist appeal to the Palmetto State's antebellum boosters. Sadly, for the clearest analysis of Huckabee's message, one should turn not to the news, but to the 1990's primetime TV show, Sports Night.
In South Carolina last Thursday, the former Arkansas Governor and Baptist minister used a surprising scatological reference in making his unsurprising appeal to the neo-Confederate crowd:
"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do."
But Huckabee's message was no paean to states' rights or the oft-praised proudly independent South Carolina. The impact of his words is more sinister and simply unmistakable.
That was one lesson from Sports Night, a comedic drama by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin which portrayed the team behind a nightly national sports program akin to ESPN Sportscenter (and loosely based on Keith Olbermann and his then on-air partner Dan Patrick.) In an episode titled "The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee," the show's executive manager Isaac Jaffe delivered a special on-air editorial regarding a group of college football players who refused to take the field as long as their school continued to use the Confederate battle flag as its symbol. What Jaffe (played by Robert Guillaume) said may be the most succinct and powerful argument I've heard (video here) against the display of the Confederate flag by public institutions:
"This afternoon, an extraordinary young man named Roland Shepard made what had to have been an excruciating decision. He said he wasn't playing football under a Confederate flag. Six of his teammates then chose not to let Shepard stand alone. And I choose to join them at this moment.
In the history of the South, there's much to celebrate. And that flag is a desecration of all of it. It's a banner of hatred and separation. It's a banner of ignorance and violence and a war that pitted brother against brother, and to ask young black men and women, young Jewish men and women, Asians, Native Americans, to ask Americans to walk beneath its shadow is a humiliation of irreducible proportions. And we all know it."
For all of its coverage of the 2008 presidential horse race, the American media never approached this painfully honest assessment of the supposed "issue" of the Confederate flag. To find an eloquent, elegant and simple examination, Americans instead needed to view an old primetime TV show about sports.
For its part, ABC dropped Sports Night after two seasons. Hopefully, Mike Huckabee's political career will be cancelled before he reaches the White House.
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Dude, two Sports Night references in one day? How about something that's been on the air within the last decade...
Posted by Chris on January 22, 2008 1:34 PMChris: it was a really cool quote, though. Jon, thanks for the post.
(Please proofread, though. "antebellum" is generally rendered as one word. "excruciating" is mis-spelled.)
Posted by PO8 on January 22, 2008 7:26 PMPO8,
Thanks for the catches on spelling. Post has been updated.
Thanks!
Posted by Perrspective on January 22, 2008 9:41 PM