I want my flag back, and so does Richard Stanz

by David Benjamin

“I shuddered to think that while we wanted that flag dragged into the mud and sullied beyond repair, we also wanted it pristine, its white stripes, summer cloud white. Watching it wave in the breeze of a distance made us nearly choke with emotion. It lifted us up with its promise and broke our hearts with its denial.”

— Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes

 

MADISON, Wis.—In my formative days at St. Mary’s School, I began each morning, among peers who were friend and foe, with two acts of unifying reverence. The first was eight o’clock Mass. The second, when we were all re-gathered in class, was the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and the republic for Richard Stanz—a guy we all had to assume was U.S. history’s greatest patriot, else why mention him, and only him, in our most solemn of civic prayers.

In that parochial hothouse, I came to believe with equal reverence in two objects of quotidian holiness: Jesus and Old Glory. Sacred in widely different spheres, Jesus and the flag were bonded in my conscience. Jesus was a peacemaker who reconciled people to one another despite vastly disparate positions in society, assuring them that, in the eyes of God, they were equally loved blessed and worthy. The flag, to which I pledged between Mass and catechism class, served the same role as a secular symbol—of equality, solidarity and acceptance in the melting pot of democracy.

Under the flag, we are free together just as, in the grace of Jesus, we are united as children of God.

So I thought, when I was a kid.

I know this sounds corny and utopian nowadays. But I’m stuck with a few clingy values, instilled in childhood, that warp my perspective, mitigate the hard lessons of reality and arrest my grinding progress toward total cynicism.

Of course, I’ve long since ceased to attend Mass, nor am I loyal any more to the tendentious dogma of my former Church. But I think I’ve mostly retained the moral core that I selectively gleaned from the gentler lessons of the New Testament. Indeed, although I think the meek blessed, I’m not going to hold my breath expecting them to inherit their rich uncle’s Cadillac, much less the earth.

Likewise, I no longer see a logical concord between the indivisibility touted in  the Pledge of Allegiance and the reality of a nation rooted in human bondage, soaked in blood, dazzled by demagoguery and torn by divisions that too many Americans cherish more fiercely than the meek dream of a more perfect union.

But, regardless of the troubled times in which we bicker, I want my flag back. I want restored to its dignity the sacred, lofty symbol to which I pledged every morning in Mrs. Ducklow’s fourth-grade classroom at St. Mary’s. Few remember this but, in those days, there were serious rules about how you should treat the flag. They differed little from the rules about silence at Mass, the sequence of the Rosary, killing, stealing, coveting and using the name of the Lord, my God in vain.

For example, until the reign of Ronald Reagan (who, after all, started out in Hollywood), it was unusual—it seemed sacrilegious—for a politician to use a wall of flags as a campaign backdrop. Before the Gipper, a president might address the nation with a flagpole behind him, in the corner, its stars and stripes furled and still. But the wretched excess of a fifty-foot flag towering behind the pol (a la George C. Scott in Patton) was totemic overkill that would have offended many voters.

Since then, of course, the wall of flags, or a colossal Old Glory scrim stretching and looming from proscenium to proscenium, simultaneously shrinking and glorifying the blowhard at the rostrum, has become obligatory stagecraft. The final insult was the moment Donald Trump entered stage right and proceeded to hug one of the dozen-odd flags that had become the trademark of his every bloviation (and that, by now, of every other politician).

We’ve diminished our flag, demeaned and desecrated it by overexposure. Rather than treating it as sacrament, exclusive to remembrances and celebrations—inaugurations, holidays, memorials and war—we’ve shrunk it to a prop, a retail product, a motif of degenerate fashion and, worst, a prod to  provocation.

Even before the aborted January putsch, we were literally beating one another with the flag of our Fathers and stabbing strangers with the eagle atop the shaft.

To which I object. I want my flag back.

I’m loath to see Ron DeSantis or Joe Biden at a podium in front of twenty cunningly folded Old Glories. I want no flags at all at political events. If partisans want to wave flags, their banner should bespeak the party—not America. For the Republicans, perhaps a flag full of stars adorned with the silhouette of an AR-15, or the accusatory photo of a dead fetus. For the Democrats, a bleeding heart on a field of green stripes, or perhaps a clenched fist on a rainbow background.

Once upon a century, it was bad form to wear the flag. Let’s first agree on that. No more flag fashion at all. No flags sewed to the ass of your blue jeans, and no flag pins on your lapel. No stars-and-stripes ballcaps and t-shirts, or halter tops, prom dresses, cowboy hats, baseball caps, football helmets windbreakers or headbands. No Uncle Sam lingerie. And no flaggish arm patches, not on Boy Scouts, baseball players or forest rangers, not even on soldiers and definitely not on cops—at least until they stop yanking people out of cars and beating them to death.

Also, no more draping the flag around your shoulders and dragging it around the track after winning a footrace—especially at the Olympics, where nationalism was supposed to be unseemly. Remember?

And no more football fields covered in one huge flag. No gigantic Old Glory draped over the Green Monster at Fenway Park, no flag hanging from Abe Lincoln’s beard on Mount Rushmore. And let’s stop using the flag to sell cars and pillows, rubber goods and power tools.

Even if we adopt these unlikely restrictions, there will remain opportunities for patriots to offer allegiance to what so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming. Flags would still wave over public buildings and military bases. There must be one on every grave at Arlington, and all our national cemeteries, as well as the heartbreaking row upon row of white crosses at Normandy and Luxembourg.

I feel a thrill every time I see the windblown circle of flags that surround the Washington Monument. Let’s keep them flying. There should be a flag jutting from every porch on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and a little flag in every kid’s hand at the Fourth of July parade.

I wouldn’t mind flagpoles and porch flags fluttering every day on every block in America, as long as people understand that you don’t fly it after Taps. You raise it all over again at dawn. That’s the rule.

I’m tempted to suggest a veritable code of flag etiquette. But who would obey?

Suffice, however, to note that—like the tabernacle at St. Mary’s, which I dared not pass without genuflecting—the flag of our nation should give pause to everyone who beholds it. In the words of Anthony Liccione, “when she unfolds her hand, and shows her frayed fingers, where we see the stretch of red-blood lines of men that fought for this land,” we should feel proud for the ideals expressed by Old Glory’s creators and ambiguous about the cruelties committed by its zealots. We should regard it with exultation and with fear, as a symbol distant and holy, as fragile as the Eucharist host, as drenched in history and tinged with mystery as the resurrected Savior.