Earlier this month, while I was keeping an eye on all the commentary for the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, someone brought another commemoration to my attention.

April is Confederate History Month.

Confederate. History. Month. I hung my head when I heard it. Every time I dare to wonder at the outward signs of prejudice and hatred that King stared down, every time I try to imagine the huge leaps between what was made available to him and what's been made available to me, something stretches out to remind me that I had better not get ahead of myself.

Sonny Perdue, the governor of Georgia, was the one who signed the proclamation declaring this special time of year. Georgia, despite its emergence as a prosperous, economically diverse emblem of the "new South," has been ground zero for Confederate History organizational efforts. Last year, a popular state senator named Jeff Mullins carried legislation to make Confederate History Month permanent.

I called Perdue's office twice hoping to chat with someone about the proclamation. No response. So I called Mullins' office and, eventually, got to talk to Jeremy Arieh, a Senate spokesman.

He explained that, "Senator Mullins is from a part of Georgia where Civil War history runs deep, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. But there wasn't consensus in the legislature as a whole, and he let it drop."

Was there anyone in particular who didn't support it?

"There were a few Atlanta lawmakers," he replied.

Atlanta lawmakers tend to be African American - a fact that neither Arieh nor I mentioned - so this surely couldn't have been a shock. I kept quiet while Arieh went on, "It was a big deal last year because there was another front-burner issue at the time."

Would that be the apologize-for-slavery legislation?

"Yes," he said.

That legislation, which failed to pass the Georgia Legislature, called on the state to apologize for its role in slavery and segregation.

"There wasn't consensus behind the slavery apology issue either," he said.

I quietly took my notes. Perhaps I was quiet for too long, because Arieh said, "You're not going to write one of those stories that says the South is stuck in the past, are you?"

I paused for a minute, and took a deep breath. "No," I said. "But I do wonder why the state of Georgia feels the need to carve out a special month for Confederate veterans. If you want to honor your war dead, why don't you honor them on Veterans Day?"

"That's a reasonable question to ask," he said. "By the way, I'd rather not be quoted for this article."

Why not? If Georgia's leadership is so "proud" of the Confederacy as to declare a whole month in honor of it, why wouldn't they want to talk about it? Why won't the governor's office return phone calls about it? What's the problem here?

As it happens, I don't think that those who would believe the Confederacy is something to "celebrate" or take "pride" in are bad people. They simply don't believe that the Confederacy stood for what it actually stood for. And they wouldn't believe that those ancestors they're so proud of really did the horrible things that they did.

This happens all the time. People who do awful things really don't believe that they did what they did. It's not because they're "in denial" or afflicted by some other pop-psychological disorder. It's because they simply can't believe that they could be that vicious, or that cruel, or that hateful. They don't believe in their own capacity for evil.

Such people are the most dangerous, of course, but I don't want this column to turn into a piece about them. They exist in large numbers and attach themselves to every dubious issue. It's more interesting to me why we live in a country where such persistent, destructive myths about our own history are allowed - no, encouraged - to flourish. Could you see a state in South Africa holding an Apartheid Remembrance Day? Or, for that matter, could you see the city of Berlin deciding it was time for Nazi History Appreciation Month?

In the countries I mentioned, there is enough of a national sense of shame to prevent those who would celebrate such things from getting out of pocket. There is enough national understanding that the unredeemable chapters of their history are just that - unredeemable - and while they should be studied and understood, there's no "debate" about what really happened and why it shouldn't be viewed as heroic or "misunderstood." The fact that we clearly haven't reached this consensus in America says less about our history and more about us.

I suppose that's why the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder feels especially poignant to me. Here was a man who dared to challenge our country's most enduring and beloved myth - the myth that we are innocent, that we are forever a "city on a hill" for others to look up to. Here was a man who showed us that the way out of this delusion is to behave toward others with love, nonviolence, and human charity. It's still the most radical message I can imagine. Far more radical than being so outraged by the idea that all human beings are equal that the only response you can think of is to join an army and break away from your own country.

Caille Millner is a Chronicle editorial writer. You can e-mail her at cmillner@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/14/EDKC103E1U.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 4 of the San Francisco Chronicle