Sounded like she was channeling Benedict Anderson with the imagined communities and Ernest Renan with national memory: "...the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things."

I always enjoy when she's on the show, such a smarty :D

I watched this segment last night on your show, and I was appalled at his lack of understanding about this issue. I also live in the South – in Knoxville, Tennessee – and I can attest to the fact that a considerable sum of people has that romantic notion of the Confederacy. I have never been able to wrap my mind around it. I guess one of the reasons is that I am not racist and find the idea of slavery disgusting in every way. Not a day passes that I do not see a truck roll by with a confederate flag pasted to the back or flying high from its antennae. I find nothing romantic about Americans dying on the battlefield to retain the right to enslave an entire race of people.

Every time someone refers to the Civil War as The War of Northern Regression, I have no problem deciding what type of person they are. Racism is such a large issue that hangs like a dark cloud over our great country. I feel like the good things about the South are ignored because of the small minded and racist individuals who seem to set the tone of what most people in other parts of the country think of us.

That’s just my opinion. Love your show, Rachel. Keep it up!

In my humble opinion, when you want to pay tribute to any part of American History, it's usually to promote the good things that came out of that history; even when that history is dark and horrible.

We know that The Civil War produced advances in weapons technology, stories of heroism and bravery, as well as important battlefield tactics. But Governor McDonnell's proclaimation is not honoring The Civil War. He's honoring The Confederacy. A renegade government that seceded from The United States mainly because they refused to give up the practice of owning slaves.

So I'm left to wonder: What "good things" does Governor McDonnell want us to remember about The Confederacy?

MHL is a great guest with great insight.

I agree there is a romanticism going on here, but am not so sure it is always or typically or even predominately grounded in a desire to "have a sort of vision of white supremacy, a vision of this kind of romantic moment in American history where black people knew their place and women knew their place and laborers knew their place." Maybe for some diehards, but I tend to think it comes from this need for a tangible, visible (and as you note, commodifiable) heritage.

What is strange about that need is how it has to be a "reduced" heritage for white people. What's wrong with all the heritage that is America as one's heritage? White people did all kinds of great and historic things over the last 400 years here (and some cruddy ones as well). Seems these folks could have an expansive vision of heritage and need need such a truncated (and polluted) one.

But that's the rub. Some people need simple, black and white (no pun intended), not gray. So the conjuring of a reductive white past is appealing (while ahistorical and ethically dubious).

And let me also say this about honoring The Confederacy:

The 11 Confederate states that did secede from The United States are still in existence today. Virginia is still Virginia, North Carolina is still North Carolina, Texas is still Texas (and so on). Not one Confederate state lost it's right to exist after they lost The Civil War. So I ask again: What, exactly, are we honoring about The Confederacy?

Didn't they LOSE the war? Do we celebrate "Great losses in American history?"

Virginia Gov. Bob McConnell showed that he is willing to keep pandering to the far-right in the Republican Party by declaring April as Confederacy Month. His apology for omitting slavery came only after he was slammed by many sides.

That said, we as a country need to remember that we're ALL "real Americans," as Sarah Palin might say. As much as we hate to admit it, that includes Southerners and teabaggers, even as we scratch our heads and shake our fists at what we consider the delusion of their beliefs.

I am a Northerner who lived in Mississippi as a young adult. I used to joke to my friends back home that it was like living in a foreign culture. Yet the people I met there were warm and welcoming, and proud of their heritage. Yes, it's still the "War Between the States" or the "War of Northern Aggression." Yes, it's still got a racist overtone.

But it's also a place where a relative stranger once let me bum a cigarette after I had run out, telling me, "Honey, you're in the South now, and down here we share everything. Everything 'cept men and whiskey."

Is the South any more racist than whites in northern cities to refused to allow blacks to be bused into their schools, or who fled those public schools for private ones? Or white Northerners who still refuse to ride public transportation because "too many of those people" ride it? I wonder. The answer may be yes. But even so, tarring them all with a broad brush is as bad as racism.

History is rich and complex. It needs to be studied and taught that way, along with all of its nuances, and with different points of view.

I am from Virginia. Since Gov. McDonnell was elected it has been so embarrassing.

The slaves were the original "illegal aliens". The slaves were low paid (if paid at all) to do the work the white man didn't want to do.

The people that supported slavery are now the most vocal against the newer version of "illegal alien". Those being mostly from Mexico. Why is that?? The new "illegal aliens" also do the work that the white man doesn't want to do and are also low paid.

So shouldn't the "Confederates" also be supporting the newer slave instead of wanting to round them up and send them home...or worse??

I will never understand encouraged hate. I just think they are all a bunch of rednecks, and it is passed down through the generations.

We were run out of a small town in North Carolina when stopping at a restaurant a few years ago coming home from vacation. We started getting dirty looks from people when we sat down and didn't know why. It was then the trucks with the large Rebel flags pulled in and surrounded our truck outside. We are Irish/Scottish very white people not there typical targets. They let us get in our truck and referred to us as f-ing yankees. Ohio plates. They followed us out of town. We were really scared and knew it would do no good to call the police.

I'm just still amazed that it exists like that today, and pricks like McDonnell im assuming also Irish are encouraging it. What do they get out of it? I just don't get it. Racist rednecks thats my only conclusion, and they are finding a new home in the tea party.

Gov. McDonnell,

It is literally breaking my heart to watch your administration to lead Virginia back into the dark ages of discrimination, intolerance, and cheer-leading for an era when slavery was the norm and people of color were tortured and denied the most basic of human rights based solely on their color or national origin. To celebrate the Confederacy is to celebrate an attempt to rip the country apart, to celebrate the destruction of families, the brutal slaying of a nation's innocence, the butchering of a generation of beautiful young men, the slaying of the dreams of a generation of young women who wanted to marry those young men, to celebrate the placing of economic gain and cultural pride above patriotism and human life. The Civil War happened. It should be studied, but not glorified, learned from, but not celebrated. Wept for, but never, never cheered. Please, Gov, McDonnell, let us let the dead lie in peace and the living honor them somberly. Let us honor the dead by not celebrating their death.

I am currently proud to call myself a Virginian, knowing that despite the iniquities of the past, our beautiful state is now a melting pot in which we strive to treat all people fairly and we have learned from the past, rather than glorying in it's mistakes.

Please retract this ill-conceived “Confederate History Month” immediately!

As a Virginian, a Northern Virginian, it is so irritating that this great state and great country cannot overcome the racist, nonproductive fearful thinking that produces so called "leaders" like the current gov. Rather than recrafting history to appeal to those that believe all the lies and fear instilling retoric, a leader should uplift and help all live more productive happy lives. Someone like, oh, say, Obama??!! Wake up and don't be duped by the fringe elements and those in congress that condone all this crap just for their own political purposes. We are a great state and a great country..we all need to act like it.

Is the South any more racist than whites in northern cities to refused to allow blacks to be bused into their schools

I will never forget moving up north when I was 16. Invariably someone would comment on my accent and say something racist, with an air of "you and me know how it is." I couldn't figure out why the people whose ancestors had freed slaves sounded worse than any southerner I knew. After I lost my accent, the racist comments stopped. Those northerners had been assuming that since I was from the south, I shared their bigotry.

Please remember that this subsection of confederate flag bearing southerners does not represent the whole population. And if you meet someone with a charming southern accent, ask about that person's views before jumping to conclusions!

post-script:

They let us get in our truck and referred to us as f-ing yankees. Ohio plates.

I vividly remember a Denny's in Ohio, circa 1990, that was very uncomfortable with a mixed race (asian-white) couple dining with them. Admittedly we didn't get run out of town, but I've never been back to your state.

As a community organizer since 2008, I have noticed that the tea party has given confidence to hatriots who feel they have a "right" to dehumanize, abuse and perpetrate violence against women, minorities, and the LGBT community. Just yesterday, a man who declared himself "a proud tea partier" threatened me, followed me, exposed himself to me, and then hurled racial epithets at my partner (who came over to protect me) as we were going door-to-door asking people to join our organization. (We fight for economic justice- good jobs, corporate accountability, health care, education and secure retirement.) I have canvassed some of the WORST neighborhoods in northeast Ohio, places where crime is the most pressing issue of the day, and I have NEVER had a single problem in "da hood." But lately, when I go into affluent suburbs, there is always at least ONE incident where a (wealthy, white, male) teabagger feels he has a right to intimidate and threaten me. The worst part is, the police who responded to my call KNEW the man who exposed himself, and told me, "It's your word against his." Thank God my father is an attorney, and I have the power of the country's largest labor union behind me. I WILL see that man prosecuted, or I will make sure the world knows about the corruption of that local police force.

It's very tempting and very easy to over-simplify the Civil War and the lingering romantic notion of the Confederacy, but that isn't fair to anyone involved. In a sense, it really doesn't have to do with slavery - not to many Southern folk, anyway. There is something about outlaws who are ultimately defeated that feeds a sort of mythology engine, leading to figures such as Robin Hood, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the defenders of the Alamo.

The truth is not hard to find on any of these figures, if you're willing to read a book or two, or even spend a few minutes among the internets. That does nothing to arrest the progress of myth, however. In much the same way as Sarah Palin cannot be troubled to know the facts about an issue she passionately opines upon, our culture generally tends to reduce complicated historical events to the point where you have nothing left but a slogan and a warm fuzzy feeling.

Bonnie Prince Charlie is venerated in Scotland as a way to console the Scots for the fact that England gets to tell them what to do. Robin Hood served a similar purpose for the Saxon and Anglo-Celtic British yeomen as they resented Norman nobility. In the largely agricultural South after the Civil War, people consoled themselves by imagining that "The South shall rise again!" during lean times. The industrialized North, with its tycoons and barons, became a largely fictionalized scapegoat for every difficulty of life in the South.

It's easy to ascribe racist motivation to Confederate romanticists, and unfortunately it is often fair. Certainly the South has an appalling amount of just about every kind of *ism that can feed off the ignorance that is not only tolerated, but institutionalized down here. I'm lookin' at you, Oral Roberts "University" grads. The truth, however, is that there is a lot of Southern sentiment that lauds virtues of the Antebellum South without racism or hatred. Perhaps it is precisely the fact that this culture was almost utterly destroyed that encourages this - like King Arthur's Camelot, you can imagine social life in the Old South in whatever way suits you.

I've lived in the South for almost 40 years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that most of those who laud the Confederacy associate it with a time and culture wherein a man's word was his bond, and honesty, integrity, courtesy, and gentility were more important than life. They imagine an army of common farm boys who were willing to fight to the death to resist abandonment of those virtues. On some level, they understand that this is mythology and no more accurate than round-table chivalry, but that doesn't matter. Like the myth of the First Thanksgiving, it serves as an ideal.

It is as sad as it is true that the Kook Kloset Klan wraps their invective and vitriol in a thin veil of the mythology of the Confederacy, but the cloud might ultimately have a silver lining. As our nation becomes increasingly divided and sectarian, the overt *isms of the hatemongers may cause Southerners of good character to let the scales of myth fall from their eyes, and learn from the true history of the Confederacy before we doom ourselves to repeat it.

Sorry for rambling on.

Ya know, I'm so old I remember when anyone who dared criticize President Bush was labled a "traitor," someone who was a "terrorist sympathizer" and who should "love America or leave it!"

Now that Democrats are in charge (and **gasp** a black Democrat), it's apaparently okay to celebrate and honor actual acts of sedition.

The right's total lack of self awareness is something sociologists will probably be studying centuries from now ...

Let us not forget how craven is his appeal is for tourism dollars based on this romantic notion of the confederacy...its all about dragging racists into the poorer sections of Virginia (like Richmond) with Civil War trails and historical markers of the civil war to spend tourism dollars. After all what else does Virginia have to offer- the its for lovers slogan really doesn't cut it..

Having grown up in a city which was renamed for President Lincoln, I can't say I understand much of the romanticism that surrounds the Southern cause. Some of it, perhaps. The "Robin Hood" syndrome, cheering on the little guy who fights back against the big, powerful guy.

But what symbolizes the Civil War the most for me is the fact that it was a group of states deciding to abrogate the pact that all states would honor the result of a presidential election, no matter who got elected. In essence, it was an attempt to say, "we lost? No, we quit. You can have your stupid election, we're taking our representatives and going home."

Leaving aside the concept of a loyal opposition and other such aspects central to American politics, the secession was, in a very real way, an example of bad sportsmanship. It was a group of states quitting the republic because they'd lost, and they didn't feel like they could win in the future either, so they just pulled out and tried to go their own way.

We can argue forever about how justified they were in doing so, but that's how it seems to me.

I grew up in the 'South'. However, my father and sister were born in the 'North'. My mother and brother were also 'Southerners'. I have a rich heritage of relatives from the deep south, growing up in the hills of Louisiana without electricy or running water. I also have a rich heritage of relatives growing up in Detroit, MI.

At the dinner table, we would tease eachother about how our family was divided -about being 'Yankees and Rebels". We would joke about the 'South will rise again" and being Texans, how Texas should succeed from the Union.

I am sometimes embarrassed about the 'redneckness' of my heritage, but, it is my heritage and I am proud of and love all the brave souls who came before me and are a part of my 'roots'.

Perhaps because my people were the 'poor whites', when I or others crack jokes about 'the south shall rise again' the underlying thought process is that we are poking fun at ourselves. However, by the simple passage of time and non connectedness to slavery, (by non connectedness I mean some of us have always been taught slavery was wrong and have no relations who every owned any) I shudder just typing the phrase 'owned any'. How can you own a human being?

I guess what I am trying to say is that I agree, I think some people do have a romanticized notion of the Confederacy, but I also think educated people in the 21st century simply by being so far removed from the actual practice of slavery, don't consider it when they think about the past in relation to themselves. Deeper reflection, however, does of course does bring it back to the forefront.

When people think about and revere the Bible, they are not thinking about the blood sacrifices practiced and condoned and other practices we would not dream of doing today. By the passage of time, they are "personally non connected" to the horrors of the past, although aware that such things are sadly a part of everyone's History.

Just trying to put some perspective into the issue-not all white southerners have a personal connection to slavery and truly do not think about it as a part of their own personal past, but definitley think about it as a 'group past' if that makes sense???

McDonnell is clearly a member in good standing of the RepubliKLAN Party.

If you HATE black people, if you HATE brown people, if you HATE all people of color, if you HATE immigrants, if you HATE poor people, if you HATE gays and lesbians, if you HATE liberals, if you HATE progressives, if you HATE Hollywood, if you HATE France and the French, if you HATE the United Nations, if you HATE science, if you HATE family planning and reproductive freedom, if you HATE multiculturalism, if you HATE intellectuals and the educated class, if you HATE Social Security and Medicare and FDR and The New Deal, if you HATE the mainstream media, especially if you HATE The New York Times, if you HATE the separation of church and state, if you HATE the federal courts, if you HATE the Federal Reserve, if you HATE the IRS and the SEC and the EPA, if you just simply HATE the federal government, if you HATE non-Christians, if you HATE Darwin, if you HATE Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and Ed Schultz and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and the leader of the free world, Barak Obama, if you are filled with HATE, but you love Jesus, then join Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and be sure to vote...RepubliKLAN.

Ever notice how these rebel flag waving hate group never seem to find their way into Watts California? Now that would be reality TV a group of confederate flag wavers taking their case to the streets of Watts. MSNBC that will be reality TV to watch.

excellent expression of your views...

I agree with your points for the most part... even so, I have always been open to social view points that differ from mine because of different experiences and customs... I believe that "we are all one" stuff... my daughter is biracial... from raising her and hanging out with non-WASP friends socially, I get some small sense of how routinely people react in a biased manner, to the detriment of those they feel are in a group they deem "different" in, for them, for whatever reason, a non-pleasing way...

unfortunately, I have also found that even those of us who have no desire to be "less than open" to all humans discover biases we have had to un-learn, biases we are surprised to find we even have... biases we never even thought of as harmful... after all... none of those folks were around... right then...

but school, work, life, technology... this has become a small world...the elbows are rubbing away, like it or not... we're all here together now... what will we do?...

encourage positive and not negative I hope... we all know the difference in our hearts...

Could be there is a show brewing about confederate-flag-waving rednecks (?, does calling a Republican a rascist or a redneck insult the redneck more, or the racist?) who conduct themselves along the lines of the characters in "Jersey Shore"...uh, what would we call that? Perhaps those who want to view the Civil War through the lenses of this dimwit are simply angry we let anyone remotely dark skinned come into the country. P.S.: Today's addition to the statue of liberty would read: Bring us your poor, your tired, your hungry, and we'll deny you healthcare and ownership of any major corporation... unless you're white or named after a cat and play one hell of 18 holes (We can forgive you for that - after all, we're all human, right?). And these social woes have financial relatives. One can only go bankrupt Chapter 7 once every seven years, but one can do Chapter 13s in perpetuity as long as one can pay? I think we've metaphorically done a 13 with China as our # 1 creditor. How long before the case is dismissed?

A PhD history proff. at UWF in Pensacola, was up in arms because he was not allowed to fly a confederate flag on campus. He defended his position with a cultural history argument. His granpappy was so and so etc. He gave no thought to the meaning of that flag politically or even nationally. When it was pointed out to him that the flag had a distinctly different meaning to people of African descent, he shrugged it off and argued for his bigotry. The obtuse nature of southern folk around the issue of racial sensitivity hasn't changed much in 140 years.