This is what happens when people who lack common sense or even a sense of proportion try to stay current with the latest PC hysteria. The cultural surfers at Apple were having trouble catching a wave in the wake of the cowardly shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC.
There was no obvious alternative lifestyle angle, so a hot letter from CEO Tim Cook threatening to prohibit Apple employees from attending gun shows and reenactments was out. And then came the gift: The state’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the state capital grounds.
This discussion gave some pencil-neck at Apple an opportunity. The company ostentatiously announced a ban of all Civil War games in the Apple Store that used the image of the battle flag. Which would be every last one of them.
In a computer game the battle flag is an accurate historical representation of how units identified themselves. Quite by accident this exhibitionist edict will temporarily increase the accuracy of the games, because at the small icon size the official CSA flag is so similar to the US flag players, like generals in 1861, will have trouble telling the units apart.
A better question is what difference does it make? There may be game players whose goal is to succeed where Robert E. Lee failed. Thereby preserving slavery and the CSA in his imaginary White supremacist fantasy. But like viewing pornography, this revisionism takes place in the privacy of their own home. The only people damaged are the delusional player and his immediate family.
Apple’s self-serving explanation for the ban was “apps containing references or commentary about a religious, cultural or ethnic group that are defamatory, offensive, mean-spirited or likely to expose the targeted group to harm or violence will be rejected.” Which proves the ban was bogus because Civil War apps did none of that.
If Apple is declaring war on offensiveness, what about the farm simulations in the Apple store? Unless it’s Mrs. McDonald being milked, instead of the cows, vegans are going to be offended.
And where does it stop? Will Apple ban the Twitter app, since only 49 of it’s roughly 3,000 employees are black?
The outrage is selective and hypocritical. Case in point: If the United Daughters of the Confederacy attempted to open a meeting hall across the street from the Emanuel Church where nine blacks were murdered, the outrage would be instantaneous. It would be the largest simultaneous influx of Northern invaders since Gen. Sherman crossed the border.
The organizations would be attacked. The members would be attacked. The realtor would be attacked. There would be calls for an investigation. Demonstrators protesting the site would be heroes. While the worst possible motives would be ascribed to the individual behind the proposal.
No one on the left would warn that only 10 percent of the Daughters are also members of the Klan. The New York Times wouldn’t run a series on redneckophobia. And you wouldn’t see profiles of a Daughter oozing sympathy as her trip to Piggly Wiggly wearing a hoop skirt prompted strange looks from other shoppers.
Yet when plans were announced for the Ground Zero Mosque - a stone’s throw from a site where 2,606 Americans lost their lives at the hands of Islamic jihadists - the left attacked conservatives and patriots that were trying to block this example of Moslem thumb-in-your-eye triumphalism.
Pamela Geller, one of the principle opposition organizers, was and is vilified by the MSM and the left. She’s known as an “anti-Islamic” writer and bigot, instead a patriot and a defender of free speech.
Banning the battle flag was right and proper. South Carolina was the first state to secede and was called “the cockpit of revolution” during the Civil War. Keeping a flag that represented the preservation of slavery on government land never made sense in a state that’s 29 percent black.
For that matter, it’s time to change the name of every U.S. military base named after Confederate generals who earned their fame killing United States soldiers. I can’t think of another nation that has honored men dedicated to killing its troops by naming government facilities after the traitors.
There are plenty of honorable soldiers who fought in defense of the Union whose names can adorn those bases.
In their way the cultural commissars at Apple and the battle flag flagellators on the left are as bad as Major Gen. Jubal Early. His “Lost Cause” mythology scrubbed away the slavery from the Civil War and distorted American history instruction for 150 years. And now Cupertino and the rest of the PC police want to scrub away Jubal.
Michael Shannon is a commentator and public relations consultant, and is the author of “A Conservative Christian’s Guidebook for Living in Secular Times.” He can be reached at mandate.mmpr@gmail.com