This one has flown over more than a few atrocities, too.

Under this flag, Rush Limbaugh would cite “phony soldiers” like Patrick Murphy, John Murtha and Jim Webb, the VA would house returning combat vets in mold-ridden buildings, and Michelle Malkin would say that internment camps could be justified again. This is the flag the KKK flies today, and the flag the city fathers of Jena raise every morning.

It wasn’t the Iranian flag on the sleeves of Lynndie England and her cohorts running Abu Ghraib.

It wasn’t the Iraqi flag on the sleeves of the guards at Guantanamo Bay, or the Saudi flag flying over the buildings when Congress caved on the FISA, habeas corpus, or Patriot Acts.

It wasn’t a Confederate flag or a Texas flag in the corner behind W when he announced the invasion of Iraq, or painted on the airplanes, tanks, helicopters and battleships delivering “Shock and Awe.”

Nor was it any other one of the six flags that have flown over Texas our patriots honored the day John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. Just so y’all don’t forget.

This is the actual Confederate national flag. The Stars and Bars. We all know what it stood for. We all know what evils have been attributed to its champions since its fall at Appomattox in 1865. We all know that the men and women who followed this flag, like those who follow the one that vanquished it, are imperfect, flawed, capable of incredible cruelty — and gifted, loving, and capable of incredible kindness. The nation for which this flag stood barely lasted five years. The ideals for which more than 618,000 lives ended — in blood and smoke, in pain and fire, in mud and horror, in cold and starvation, in prison and under torture on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line — may have triumphed; but looking at what the US has done since then — genocidal campaigns against the black, brown, red, yellow and some varieties of white residents of this great land, I cannot but doubt that Lincoln’s victory held.

This flag is our State flag, and flies in our skies still. Before that it was the flag of our Republic — a nation separate, independent, and if not of outstanding purity, surely of equal promise with any other nascent dream of self-government spreading across the continent at the time.

Yes, the flag of Mexico used to fly over Texas; it was part of one of the states — “Coahuila y Texas”, the Mexican government styled it — before 1836.

Surprise! Yeah, that’s a flag from France. Which owned Mexico, for a while, back in the day. The Mexican revolution against France preceded — and really probably precipitated — the settlement and revolt of Caucasian in-migrants from the fledgling USA (people still had a war fever after 1812). One of Mexico’s revolutions succeeded, and freed her from the French.

And that’s what began it all. Coronado, Vasquez, de Vaca, LaSalle … hunting gold. Planting flags, killing natives.
So much of the history of the Conquistadores, moved a little North of Mexico, far East of California, a little South from Santa Fe.

If I wanted I could pick uncountable tales of heroes from either side of the flagpoles — or no flagpoles at all, as, arguably, the Cherokee and the Chiricahua and the Comanche and the Southern Cheyenne swept their forebears off the lands now known as Texas. History’s full of changes, and wars, and politics. History’s not over yet.
But we don’t have to remember it always through rose-colored, and dishonest, glasses.