Hello, Tom.

We are both contrarians at heart, aren't we? I don't know how on Earth you can stand living in the Bay Area, hotbed of liberals, and here I sit in a part of Pennsylvania in which a local paper reported that the residents of a neighborhood called the police because "a black man was seen in the area". (A woman I know cut out the article and took it to work to explain to coworkers why she was going to move.) We both seem to thrive on telling the majority to go pound sand.

Imagine, if you will, that there are people out there who make a distinction between the symbol and the entity it represents. It is perfectly possible for such people to love and revere their country, and to be very proud of America, for all its imperfections, and yet be put off by a sea of red and white stripes and white stars on blue fields. This is because the nation is a complex entity that one can love as one loves another person, but the flag is a simple symbol that has been misused many times, in the recent and the distant past. What flag flew over Custer's columns as they committed genocide? What flag flew outside of New York harbor as shiploads of Jewish refugees were turned back to the gentle mercies of Nazi Europe? What flag flew outside the government building as the BATF was given its orders to assault the Branch Davidian complex? And this doesn't even count the evil people like McVeigh who believe they too honor the flag.

It is used to stir a populace whose attention span is already too short for history to mean much into a frenzy of kickassism. It is used by extremists to give the patina of respectibility to their politics. It is used, at least twice a year, to sell refrigerators, gas grills, towels and porch furniture. It has become a tool of merchandizing. Sometimes the product is America, but many times it's only Americana, a depiction of an America that never was.

I feel about this the way I feel when Madonna wears a large crucifix that dangles down into her cleavage. The symbol is worthy. Its uses have not always been.

The American flag is very beautiful, aesthetically, even apart from the many heroic deeds and words with which it is associated. So I suppose it was inevitable that it would be co-opted and debased in this way. But I don't have to like it, and I don't have to co-operate.

The present use, to commemorate the fallen, is likewise worthy. But when I read about its use as a shield from the missles of bigotry, and as a weapon to force conformity, I become very angry. Is this the symbolism that this wonderful banner has sunk to? What do Americans think, or do they, when they place more value on the symbol than on the freedom it represents?

There is an apocryphal story about King Christian XII of Denmark, who, already an old man when the Nazis invaded his kingdom, wore a yellow Star of David patch to show solidarity with the Danish Jews. (He in fact never did, but defied the Nazis and provided a focal point for Danish national pride such that the Nazis put the old man under house arrest for the duration of the war.) The Star of David, a venerable symbol of the Jewish people, was used to isolate them. The American flag can be used that way too, in the "what's wrong with you where's your flag" mode.

Sometimes people won't get on the bandwagon because they'd rather walk. This doesn't give the passengers on the wagon the right to jeer or throw things. And their perceptions of the pedestrians may be all wrong. Some people prefer to walk to the beat of their own drummer, however measured or far away.

Regards--
Mary Anne