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Don't Put Out More Flags
I don’t generally display my country’s flag, even on the 4th of July. I don’t have a proper place to display or store it; and it almost always rains on the 4th where I live nowadays. (Not that I think it’s due to Global Warming, having been assured otherwise). I also don’t have proper illumination for it if I were to fly it at night. I see little point in patriotic gestures if you can’t take the trouble to do them properly and, you know, respectfully.
In the last several years, I've seen multiple instances of people who like flags and own them simultaneously engaged in flag-waving and flag-disrespecting. It's a metaphor in action. It's an object lesson with flags.
I’m thinking about this today because my mom recently had a battle with the post office in my hometown over the sorry, shabby state of their flag. It was not only faded, but it was faded around the edges, virtually torn into fringes. Mom called last week to tell them that they should be ashamed of themselves on the eve of our “patriotic holiday” and the flag was replaced by the next day. Good for her! She’s not young, my mom, in fact she’s elderly, and she doesn’t generally bother these days with causes. “Men”—she’s in her late seventies, okay?—“are dying for that flag,” she said.
After 9-11, there were flags going up all over my city. One local business owner painted every commercial building he owned red, white, and blue, and put patriotic slogans in every window. People put them on their cars, outside their houses, outside buildings where there’d never been flags before.
But having affirmed their passionate patriotism, that seemed to be it. The same flags are still there---I mean the very same flags. An English friend asked me in genuine puzzlement a few weeks back, “What flag looks like the American flag, but has yellow stripes instead of red ones? Is that some state flag?” You see them everywhere, flapping sadly in this summer’s seemingly endless rains. At night the American flags hang as limply as rags. At one of the local clubs, someone put out a whole row of those little ‘personal’ flags a couple of weeks ago to celebrate a local event. They’re still there: dirty, limp, filthy, and frayed.
It’s not that I am one of those people who get exercised about flags. I don’t have the feeling for it that my dad did. When I was growing up in my house along a certain riverfront in a different state from this one, he used to put up dozens flags every July 4th. Big ones and tiny ones, they were everywhere---hanging from the balconies, flapping in the breeze on our dock and on the boathouse roof; waving merrily from the flagpole he’d had installed on the terrace.
He was strict about the display and care of flags; except for the one on the flagpole, which was properly illuminated, the others had to come down at nightfall and be put away properly. They could not appear---and remember, this was the sixties---incorporated in the design of your jeans or handbag, or as part of anything that wasn’t actually a flag. He refused to do business with a particular store that had on display outside a gigantic American flag because he felt that the outsized flag was being used as a substitute for a billboard to call attention to the business. He was just that strict.
I grew up in a part of the country where people often confuse the symbol with the thing it symbolizes. During the days of flag-burnings by American citizens, my dad used to go purple with fury at the very thought. If you didn’t love and respect the flag he and others had fought for, you didn’t deserve to call an American! We once got into an argument over whether the first amendment freedoms that the flag, among other things, supposedly symbolizes are in fact more important than the symbol itself. I did not persuade him that it was.
I don’t even think he understood my point, except as a personal attack on him and on my country. He lived in fear, I guess, that I would suddenly decide to be a hippie and start demonstrating against the Vietnam War and maybe hitchhike to California or get shot by the National Guard on my college campus. Or something. I actually never understood him any better than he understood me.
In the Girl Scout Handbook---yes, I was forced to be a Girl Scout; kids back in the seventies could quite easily be forced to do things their parents wanted them to do because we didn’t exactly have any recourse against them---I remember a whole chapter on displaying flags, taking them down, folding them properly, and storing them. There is a right way and a wrong way to do that, actually. Do people not know that nowadays?
There are right ways and wrong ways to show your patriotism. It’s---really, really, really--- not enough just to stick up a few flags, all “I am considerably more patriotic than you are,” and then just leave them there to take care of themselves. Just announcing yourself as “American!” isn’t enough to show you’re also a patriot. If you love your country, you are diligent in monitoring its state of moral credibility and the welfare of all citizens, even those who are not you. You can’t just vote for the candidate of your choice and leave him and his minions to wreak havoc without taking any notice of what’s happening.
The Presidency seems to have replaced the flag as the symbol that you can’t mock or defame. Somehow, certain people have allowed themselves to be persuaded that the man now temporarily occupying the White House is the symbol of our country, so that anyone who dares show personal disrespect for the man himself (as opposed to the office) is somehow failing in the citizen’s duty of loyalty for the country.
That's not so, though. My father---who was wrong about a lot of things, but not this---used to say, “You give your respect to the Office, not the man [because it’s always been a man, people!] holding it.” And I am duly respectful of our system and structure of government and of the Office of the Presidency.
But that does not mean I have to like George Bush, approve of his ethics or his actions, or submerge the very real fear and foreboding for the future of America that he and people like Karl Rove engender in my very patriotic soul. I resent the way he and his fellow Republicans (including, by the way, most of my family) have managed to wrap themselves in the American flag, as though they, the flag, and the freedoms that it symbolizes were all a single entity. (The fact that I am nervous about posting this rather mild rant at an anonymous website makes me frightened).
They’re not the sole custodians of America's honor. I love my country, I fear for it, and I’m horrified that Americans after all we’ve been through just in my lifetime, and with access to information unparalleled in human history, are content to blindly follow the current Administration down the path we're now on. I'm entirely appalled that people who call themselves patriots are content to do watch complacently while those in power slowly but surely disassemble policies and programs designed to protect the poor, the oppressed, the elderly, the disabled, and the environment. I'm horrified that self-styled flag-waving patriots care more for the welfare of Bush's cronies and for the 'instant gratification' of a promised savings in tax than they do about the destruction of the environment. I'm aghast that they are so indifferent to the reputation and honor of this country in the opinion of all the rest of the world. I love my country; I can't stand to see anyone dishonor it in the eyes of the world, especially people who are waving the flag while they destroy the very things it stands for.
Putting a flag outside to show your national pride.....it’s not enough, people. Just putting up a flag and leaving it there till the threads rot, it’s covered with stains, and the red has faded to a cowardly yellow? It’s not enough. So don’t wave your ‘patriotism’ in my face. Patriotism is a virtue if it means that you want your country to be respected and honored, but it can also be, to quote Samuel Johnson, ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel.’
As Bill Maher has said, flying a flag is really the least you can do.
Image drawn by Mr Tenniel; painted by Damozel.
12:50:47 AM 
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