The red-and-white blues (and yellow fringe)

The red-and-white blues (and yellow fringe)
by David Benjamin

“Speech doesn’t just mean written words or oral words. It could be semaphore. And burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea…”
— Justice Antonin Scalia

MADISON, Wis. — The Stars and Stripes is easily the most battered and beleaguered flag in anybody’s history. Most recently, Old Glory was dissed by a backup quarterback who prefers to stay seated during “The Star-Spangled Banner” — a custom that is, after a fashion, another form of flag abuse. I mean, every game?

As most of us remember, all this flag fuss started in grade school. At St. Mary’s every morning, I had to pledge my allegiance to some guy named Richard Stanz. Later, in my Cub Scout flag-etiquette tutorial, I learned that you put hand on heart for the pledge, but you only have to take off your hat for the anthem. And saluting? That’s only allowed for people in uniform (firemen, Marines, Brownies, the Klan, etc.).

So, it rankles when I scan the ballpark and see all these patriots with their hands on their hearts… and their adjust-o-band logo caps glued to their gourds.

During the bloodbath in Vietnam, I mounted a small half-burned American flag on my college dorm room wall. My point was that when a free nation goes astray — as America has too often done — it desecrates its most cherished emblems, specifically the Stars and Stripes.

I know. Didactic and metaphorical. But this was college, OK?

Nobody but my roomie ever saw my toasted flag ’til Christmas break, when the campus police searched my room — thereby violating the my Fourth Amendment rights. Soon after, the college president himself wrote to Mom exposing me as an Enemy of the State. I wrote back, telling John to mind his own beeswax and stay the hell out of my room.

Looking back, I decided that President Howard had a practical — albeit unconstitutional — point. Trying to use the Stars and Stripes for sophisticated symbolism is one of the hobgoblins of little minds. This was doubly true in the Sixties, when an innocent red-white-and-blue painter’s cap, or a pair of Old Glory pants pockets could get you beat up by stevedores and rousted by cops with flag patches on their sleeves (another flag-etiquette no-no, but who’s gonna argue?).

Later in life, in Japan, I found a fresh perspective on flag idolatry. Ashamed of its decades of misuse by the fascists who crushed all dissent, attacked Pearl Harbor, enslaved East Asia and launched a disastrous war, the Japanese people today tend to shun their own flag. Flag display is seen as a sign of militarist delusion, reactionary zeal and misplaced ostentation. Japan’s World War II battle flag, with the cool red rays sticking out of the Rising Sun, is virtually forbidden.

In Tokyo, you could burn a flag, but nobody would come. Here in the Land of the Hypersensitive, flag arson is still guerrilla theater for the unimaginative, catnip for news crews, grist for demagogues, and a millstone around the neck of the Supreme Court. Worst, it steals attention from more insidious forms of flag abuse.

For instance, why can’t the Cowboys, Seahawks and Patriots settle, modestly, for a standard-issue Old Glory flapping above the grandstand? Where is it written in NFL bylaws that every game has to feature a hundred-yard flag spread over the whole field, while F-35s fly over and giant speakers roar John Philip Sousa so loud that it damages eardrums and traumatizes toddlers?

Nowadays at almost every game, fans are compelled to honor “sacrifices” with which 98 percent of Americans no longer associate. In Old Glory’s name, we’ve mustered a vast (ironically underpaid) mercenary army to do the dirty, bloody work of empire while the rest of us watch games. We delegate our official bloodshed to a handful of PTSD-ravaged “volunteers,” then soothe our conscience by clapping hand over heart and shrouding a carpet of fake grass — named after a multinational corporation — with a crudely colossal version of the flag beneath which we’ve laid to rest the 3,000 Union dead at Gettysburg, the 9,387 buried above Omaha Beach and the 60,000 kids whose names are etched in Maya Lin’s heartbreaking wall. Not to mention all those loyal shnooks whose number finally came up on their eighth or ninth tour in Afghanistan.

After the mega-flag and before the anthem, we roll out a few vets in wheelchairs — a perfect moment to hit the concourse for another $10 light beer.

This is the milieu of mock patriotism wherein Colin Kaepernick inexplicably discovered his civil rights and recoiled at the flag. Before he “spoke up,” I didn’t like him much. This was based on how he played football (arrogantly and imprecisely). His lame effort to protest his people’s “oppression,” by snubbing the national anthem before a desultory exhibition game, didn’t capture many imaginations or advance any cause I could discern.

After all, the kid’s real “people” are overpaid jocks. I reach for my union card whenever I hear a millionaire empathizing with the peanut gallery, whether he’s a jock who’s been pampered ever since he was discovered playing PeeWee ball, or a silver-spoon tycoon professing brotherhood with farmers and miners whose hands are too dirty for him to shake.

Kaepernick’s problem isn’t his beliefs or his difficulty articulating them. It’s not even his inability to read an NFL defense. It’s getting mixed up with the flag. Whether you burn it or wear it, the flag is going to overwhelm you with everybody else’s symbolism, and no one will listen to what you think you’re saying.

Don’t wave it. Don’t torch it. Don’t stitch it to your ass and don’t wear a flag-motif windbreaker (or Bermudas, or halter top, or Cat-in-the-Hat hat). Salute it when they run it up the pole, but don’t try to express yourself with it. Leave Old Glory to the pandering pols, the conventioneers, the nativists and yahoos, the Eagle Scouts, the Fourth of July concerts and all those used-car lots on Route One.

George M. Cohan once said, “Many a bum show has been saved by the flag.” But that was before we had the NFL.