Old times here are not forgotten.

We South Carolinians just can't agree on what we aren't forgetting about old times - and their symbols.

That opinion gap was freshly exposed by University of South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier, fittingly enough for our unluckily past-haunted state, on Friday the 13th. Known for his trick plays, "The Ol' Ball Coach" sprang this surprise while accepting a citizenship award from the Columbia volunteer group City Year:

"I realize I'm not supposed to get in the political arena as a football coach, but if anybody were ever to ask me about that damn Confederate flag, I would say we need to get rid of it."

Maybe Spurrier, after getting a $500,000 raise to $1.75 million a year, feels a need to expand his duties beyond trying to top last season's 3-5 league record (OK, so he was 8-5 overall). More likely, he feels a need to let potential recruits know he's a flag foe.

Regardless, he riled up lots of people (see Saturday's letters to the editor).

Not that the Confederate flag in front of the Statehouse is going anywhere any time soon. Overturning the General Assembly's 2000 compromise that subtracted a Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome and added one by the Confederate Soldiers' Monument would require two-thirds margins in both House and Senate. That's a legislative mission impossible - for now.

Still, Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, D-Orangeburg, while acknowledging political reality, offered this response to Spurrier joining the flag-foe team:

"Go Gamecocks."

The best case for keeping that flag in place: A deal is a deal.

As Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, told our reporter in the wake of what he perceives as Spurrier's interference (or was it unnecessary roughness?): "How in the world will we ever be able to get compromises in the future on the issues if they are just going to be sealed in political quicksand?"

And how much further must renunciation of all things associated with the Confederacy go? The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond is now considering not just leaving that former Confederate capital city, but leaving the term "Confederacy" out of its name to avoid offense.

Then again, a lousy deal is a lousy deal.

Go to Columbia. See for yourself. The flag is even more conspicuous down by the street than it was up on the dome.

That's not just a lousy deal for flag foes. It's a lousy deal for flag supporters. It's also a lousy deal for the many S.C. residents trying to stay out of this fight.

And it's a lousy deal for the more than 260,000 Southern soldiers who died during the Civil War, including the more than 20,000 from South Carolina and my great-great grandfather from Georgia, fatally wounded at First Manassas.

Linking that flag to those brave men inevitably links them to the Ku Klux Klan, which long ago twisted that former symbol of battlefield gallantry against daunting odds into a debased symbol of bigotry-based terror. Prominently displaying the KKK's fear-striking symbol on Statehouse grounds feeds not just the myth that South Carolina is a hotbed of 2007 racism, but the myth that virtually every Confederate soldier's primary, personal, driving force for fighting was the perpetuation of slavery.

Sure, most white folks, including this one, now regard the Klan as a disgusting laughingstock, a few hooded, hateful kooks who shouldn't be taken seriously.

Yet most black folks understandably can't laugh off the KKK. They have "not forgotten" that though U.S. slavery ended in 1865, Jim Crow isn't as easily filed under "old times."

Advocating that flag's removal doesn't necessarily mean you've gone over to the dark-blue side. It could merely mean that you respect black South Carolinians' painfully ingrained flag phobia enough to spare them such an "in your face" affront - and/or that you respect our state's Confederate heroes enough to save them from the Klan.

We who rightly respect Robert E. Lee respect his wise decision to surrender once he saw that the Confederacy's cause was lost.

Can't you see that the flag cause is lost, too?

The relentless influx of newcomers to our state, few of them Confederacy fans, inexorably swells the flag foes' ranks. Meanwhile, the relentless march of time inexorably thins the flag supporters' ranks because the younger you are, the more likely you are to favor its exit.

It's no longer a question of if the flag will be removed. It's a question of when.

So furl that banner.

That way, one of our relative newcomers, Coach Spurrier, can worry less about the flag and more about his players' troubling tendency to run afoul of the law.

That way, all S.C. residents, no matter where they're from, can worry less about our state's past and more about its future.

Frank Wooten is associate editor of The Post and Courier. His e-mail is wooten@postandcourier.com.