A raggedy gaggle of mostly dudes, some in black shirts bearing KKK insignias, is walking down a street in your town. They’re waving a bunch of Confederate flags.
You see them. What do you do?
Do you yell at them? Give them the finger? Turn your back to them? Point and laugh? All of the above?
No. They’re expecting that. The members of such a sorry parade would love a confrontation. They seek a reaction and the angrier you get, the better. It’s the language they understand. Rage is the sustenance of hate and ignorance.
When confronted with this situation last weekend, one South Carolina man came up with a much better plan.
He deployed his sousaphone.
That’s right. He answered bigotry with bass notes.
Matt Buck saw the group coming out of a garage, according to the Charleston City Paper. When he saw the Confederate flag, he wanted to do something and grabbed his sousaphone. “I didn’t really know how to show my opposition, so that was my way of doing it.”
The video of Buck’s impromptu performance features the perfect soundtrack to accompany a meandering group of racists walking the wrong way down a one-way street in Charleston, on its way to join a pro-Confederate flag demonstration at the Statehouse. They proudly waved the Confederate flag, the banner of losers.
When the KKK and other white power groups carry the Confederate flag as their colors and show up to protest its removal, there’s no pretending it’s not a racist symbol.
Buck’s musical selection included “Ride of the Valkyeries,” by anti-Semite composer Richard Wagner. You may recognize it from the Nazi car chase scene in “The Blues Brothers” movie, which is why he chose it, he said. It’s also the melody for Elmer Fudd singing “Kill the Wabbit” in that Looney Tunes classic.
Poking fun as a political act has a long history. It’s an art form, and effective. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” skewered Hitler as a warning to the country even before the U.S. had entered the war. The nascent American press was full of barbs, caricatures and impersonations from the likes of Mercy Otis Warren, Ben Franklin and many more. The tradition crosses cultures and eras.
Turning the repugnant into a punch line appeals to the human need to understand — and you must understand the ridiculousness of the target to understand the humor.
This is why the sousaphone serenade is so striking. People put on KKK gear, get swastika tattoos, wear paramilitary uniforms with the big black boots and wave Confederate flags to make their hatred visible.
They want the rest of us to be afraid. They’re trying to project power and strength and unity. They want us to cower. They’re using their American right to free speech — which they’re entitled to, there’s no caveat that only intelligent speech is protected — to try to intimidate us.
So when the sousaphone kicks in, with its doh-dee-doh-dee-doh melody matching the walking rhythm of the racists, it instantly renders the marchers impotent and ridiculous.
Yet we can’t forget that bigoted hate and ignorance breeds violence. On Wednesday, authorities announced they have charged the racist young white man who shot and killed nine black congregants in a Charleston church earlier this month with hate crimes.
It took the murders of these nine people to finally, after decades of white violence against black people, get the Confederate flag taken down from the South Carolina Statehouse. This is what the racist flag-wavers were on their way to protest. There’s nothing funny about that.
The sousaphone player was brave in that moment. He confronted very visible hatred by stripping from the marchers any semblance of power or force those racists were trying so hard to project.
“A few people had a few things to say, but nobody really confronted me or anything,” Buck said. “My goal was to embarrass them, and I think I did a little bit.”
Good.
