Rebels on the Hudson.(Hudson, New York; Confederate battle flag on car bumper prompts reflection)

I WAS pumping gas when in behind me pulled a pickup. Big, high built, lots of chrome. Volunteer fireman's plate on the front bumper. As I went into the PX to pay, I got a look at the back bumper: various stickerage, including a Confederate battle flag.

Now the pickup wasn't passing through, because it had New York plates, and the sticker wasn't a pure fluke, because I've seen other battle flags in the area. If this were the Old South, or a border state, or even the border of a border state, like my wife's hometown, Cincinnati (which has a big Kentucky diaspora), then the battle flag would be one thing: a regional connection, perhaps familial. It could be a connection to Robert E. Lee, or to the first Klan, but it would be one kind of connection: I live here, it flew here, my people flew it, so do I.

Where I live it has to be something else. I am a noticer of cemeteries, especially small, forgotten, forlorn ones: family plots, cemeteries of towns that have vanished, cemeteries from colonial times (Dutch colonial times). There are four within ten minutes of my house. One is still taking customers; another is a handful of crooked gravestones like busted teeth in a bum's mouth. You could look a long time in the cemeteries of the eastern Catskills and not find a veteran of the Army of Northern Virginia. You might well find veterans of the 120th New York Volunteers. Recruited from Ulster and Greene counties, they served from Fredericksburg to Appomattox. Their worst day was July 2, 1863, Day 2 of Gettysburg, when they sustained 203 casualties out of 383 engaged. So why would people in the neighborhood fly the flag of the people who killed their long-lost neighbors, and whom their long-lost neighbors killed? I thought of eight possible reasons.

Agreement. "The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically.... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural and normal condition."--Alexander Stephens, Vice President, Confederate States of America, Savannah, Ga., March 21, 1861. The published text notes that this paragraph was greeted with "Applause." One hopes this is not the reason.

Agreement with James Webb. Just kidding, senator. You're a great writer, you know what you mean.

Admiring Bob Dylan. Dylan fans have been in a flutter since one of them discovered that several phrases on his latest album, Modern Times, were adapted from the poems of Henry Timrod (1828-67), a.k.a. the "poet laureate of the Confederacy." We know from the first volume of Dylan's memoirs, Chronicles, that when he came to Greenwich Village among his miscellaneous reading was a biography of ...