August 11, 2006
Flag Pins Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:00 PM EST Josh Zeitz concluded a post (“All the Way With Bill McKay”) with a passage in apparent praise of American-flag lapel pins. I could not tell whether this passage was inflected with ironies, which I suspect is my fault, not Josh’s. My problem is that I do not know quite what I think about American flag lapel pins. Josh noted that Nixon began the vogue for these pins after noticing one in a movie poster for The Candidate. That may be part of my problem. In the Nixon days, the pin seemed to be an implied accusation of a want of patriotism, the subtext being that if you weren’t wearing the flag, you were probably burning it. This is a political tactic about which Josh was notably astringent in an earlier post, when he quoted Pete Hamill on Korean War-era red-baiting of Truman and Acheson. You ought not to have to conspicuously display your patriotism as the price of not having that patriotism doubted, and people who propose the contrary are contemptible. So for some years I was a bit irritated by people who displayed the flag: It seemed less a gesture of love of country than of suspicion of fellow citizens. After the passions of the Vietnam War died down, this was much less obviously the case, and in 2001 I became markedly less sure about the meaning of flag display. At a campus public meeting in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, a colleague very much on the left deplored hostility on the left to the flag. He mused that the right’s usurpation of the flag back in 1968 had been a political disaster for the left, and he pleaded with his colleagues and students “not to let the right take the flag away.” They did not cheer him. There’s one rub: in a small portion of the left, it is (metaphorically speaking) still the fashion to spell America with a k, sometimes with three ks. On a different although still small portion of the left, it is the fashion to deprecate the notion that the nation-state embodies a legitimate political community; it is better to be transnational than national, better to work in an NGO than in a government, at least one’s own government. Maybe this attitude is most common on the academic left, where after 2001 it produced an odd piece of evidence about attitudes toward the flag. There were a lot of flag stickers on cars in the parking lot, but they seemed invariably to be adorning the cars owned by kitchen workers and grounds crew, in whose name some flagless academics spoke with remarkable confidence. In immigrant neighborhoods you also saw a lot of flags. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when I pointed this out to a colleague, I heard the ingenious speculation that those flags were attempts to avoid lynching. Maybe, but I was and remain skeptical. Being attacked from without tends to make people more patriotic. If the shards of my German can be relied upon, the economical word Burgfrieden means the peace within the walls of a besieged town. In any case, I did not feel accused of lacking patriotism when I saw those flags, or flag decals or flag pins. I did not buy one, but I did not disapprove of them. Then my father made a joke that reminded of me of my first response. Near the end of his life, in the immediate aftermath of the Swift boat baiting of John Kerry, my sister, who works in government, won an award. My father went to the ceremony. At that point in his life, on those rare occasions when he wore a sport jacket, he had recently taken to wearing a miniature combat infantry badge as a lapel pin. One interesting thing about wearing a miniature combat infantry badge in your lapel is that if anyone knows what it means, that person is unlikely to be annoyed by it, and anyone likely to be annoyed by it is extremely unlikely to know what it means. A former police detective, now an investigator, noticed it, and commented approvingly. My sister told me that my father grinned in reply and remarked that having never served in the Texas Air National Guard, he’d feared he had no right to wear the flag. So that’s another part of the problem: The flag is again being used to impugn the patriotism of political enemies. Phrases like “the last refuge of a scoundrel” again come to mind, but now we know what that left colleague of mine almost tearfully proclaimed: If you are on the left, you are a fool or worse if you let the right make love of country their unique possession. I am pretty sure my colleague was speaking out of more than narrow tactical calculation. And I remember, alas, that he was met with incomprehension.
|
