Capturing the flag

During the Bush years, I hardly ever flew an American flag from my home. Only for a period in 2001, did I hang it from my front porch as a gesture of national solidarity, but as it was during the Vietnam era, the flag became, after 2003, an emblem of support for war for war's sake. Don't get me wrong, I'm an emotional sap who gets tears in his eyes at war memorials, even those the public has largely forgotten, but today, I'm putting up the flag again and it's message is clear. It's veteran's day.

Capture the flag

Paul Slansky makes a modest proposal today in the Huffington Post. He suggests that we fight them on their own lapels so that we don't have to fight them here. Quoting the popular political philosopher, Doctor Suess, Slansky suggests that we all begin to wear lapel pins, thus castrating one of their favorite shibboleths.

"We're exactly like you! You can't tell us apart.

We're all just the same, now, you snooty old smarties!

And now we can go to your frankfurter parties."

Coincidentally, that's just what I did last night at my annual yacht club barbecue; a tawdry, rhinestone studded lapel pin at that. And it worked. No one had and doubts that I would snicker right along with the Michelle slurs, the hand on heart nonsense, the Wesley Clark gambit or any of the other wilful suspensions of honesty that characterize the political commentary of the reflexive Right. I wore red, white and blue clothing and I would have run "old glory" up the mast save for the violent thunderstorm. Some were quite surprised by my replies.

It's time we took back what was once a proud symbol of secular democracy, justice and the inalienability of certain human rights - amongst other things. The flag that flies today on the Moon somehow, during the same period, became the symbol of support for our war in Viet Nam and the Nixonian contempt for law and loyal dissent. It has been a Republican symbol of militarism and right wing politics ever since.

As Slansky says, the lapel may be the only remaining venue in which they have that home field advantage, but it would be easy and cheap to take it away from them. Wear the pin.

"The right is reeling, they can't find a single thing to point to that's better than it was before Bush, so while they're busy dealing with issues of basic survival, let's just slip in there and take back the damn flag. Take it back from the war criminals and their apologists and enablers that have wrapped themselves in it even as they've been methodically destroying the republic for which it stands."

Let's run it up the flagpole. It's an idea I can salute.

The People's flag

I haven't flown the flag since George Bush invaded Iraq and it's been my intention not to do so while he and his jackals were in Washington; but lying half awake and half asleep this morning I half decided that on this, George Bush's last Independence Day as president, I might relent. It's not because of some degenerative disease or no-bid contract persuading me to like him -- or an epiphany of any kind. I had been thinking of Ivan Denisovich. The protagonist of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel who having been sent to a Siberian work camp in his shirtsleeves and given the job of building a brick wall in subzero temperatures, decided to throw himself into the task as an act of patriotism, but a patriotism meant to be a slap in the government's face; a salute to the country itself rather than to it's rulers. Powerless to oppose, by treating his sentence as an opportunity to build his country, he could, at least in this mind, rise above the injustice.

Of course that's a pretty grandiose excuse for putting up a flag on the 4th of July and I risk being scolded for hypocrisy, but that's what I'm telling myself today. Why should I allow this villain to alienate me from my country? No, I'm not going to pledge, swear or solemnly affirm that the united States of America is a country under God - anybody's God -- because it isn't and I am willing to fight to keep it from being made so. The flag hanging from my mast is my flag and it stands for the country I was born in and that country isn't George's or God's or Jesus' or Zeus'. It's different from the flag that flies over Guantanamo or over the Capitol or the Pentagon. It doesn't fly to signify allegiance to Bush or to his wars or to his assault on the constitution. It flies as it so often has, in defiance of power.

If I fly it again next independence day, I hope it will be in a nation independent of Halliburton, war profiteers, corporate fascists and the radical right.