Tourism is the backbone of Charleston's economy and doesn't hurt South Carolina as a whole, either. One of that little coastal state's trump cards has always been its controversial role in igniting the bloodiest war in U.S. history, the rebellion against the nation in defense of slavery. So a lot of people are making money off the Confederate flag and off of the Civil War history angle, because it brings people to travel to S.C. and buy knick-knacks, such as the pewter 4" replica of Robert E. Lee that I bought at Fort Sumter's gift shop in 1980. All I knew then about Robert E. Lee was what my grandmother had told me, which was he was a fine gentleman, and what our history books had told me, which was he was a good general. And that is what a lot of people think they know.

So any attempt to scale back on the Confederate porn industry meets with resistance not only from the "true-believers" who don't understand history but the people who do understand, but want to keep the cash-cow intact, because they are busy fleecing the know-nothings who think the Civil War was about Southern pride or chitlins or deer-hunting or chewing tobacco or the song "Dixie". The reason the South seceded is they wanted slavery extended to the new territories out West, and Lincoln and his Republican party opposed that. The hotheads down South thought that intolerable, so they turned traitor. Today we continue to venerate these traitors with monuments, dedications and whatnot, which is very confusing to some people who think history begins and ends with dates and names.

I think that many streets in Charleston should be renamed, beginning with Calhoun Street, because Calhoun was no sort of a good person. Rename Calhoun Street "Rosa Parks Street," and I think that would be a better reflection of history and of who really mattered. I don't know that Germany has any streets named after Goebbels, Roehm or Hitler, and we shouldn't have anything named after slavery-evangelists that wanted to spread slavery all over the Western Hemisphere. The statues of worthless scumbags like Calhoun need to be placed in the furnace and recycled just like Saddam Hussein's statues.

Eventually all these things will come to pass, too.