Our Flag Was Still There

Francis Scott Key Surveys Fort McHenry (Examiner.com)

“Our Flag Was Still There”

    I recently had cause to reflect on the subject of flag desecration, and the circumstances were anything but sacred. I was threatened with a “curb-stomping,” “beatings,” and other assorted threats of violence by members of the Armed Forces and at least one state prison guard over social media. My perceived offense was defending the Supreme Court’s ruling on flag burning, Texas v. Johnson (1989), which held that the desecration of the flag is protected by the 1st Amendment of the American Constitution.

      The Facebook post that I responded to was written by a lance corporal in the USMC. It read: 

       “Let me catch you trampling the flag…”

     This individual, someone with whom I have had plenty of disagreements but whose friendship I used to value,  threatened me yesterday over Facebook for my expressed views on the crisis in Baltimore. To his most recent post I replied with more honesty than tact (and without thinking to modify my language to clarify that those soldiers' sacrifices were in the name of American ideals, not flag-burning per se, which would surely have been abhorrent to perhaps all of our servicemen and women and was only made legal in 48 states after Texas v. Johnson):

      “If you catch someone doing that, then I hope that you'll remember the sacrifice of the men and women who fought and died for this country to guarantee that it would remain the kind of nation in which people are free to defile its flag without the fear of being arrested, battered, or killed. America is and always will be so much more than a flag, and if you don't understand that, then you need to reconsider the oath you swore to it."

       His reply:

      “You are a communist piece of shit Gilmer … It is a symbol of a beautiful country Do not disrespect what so many have sacrificed for.”

     This was followed closely by another individual (also a soldier) posting:

      “Gilmer you’re a sad little girl.”

     At this point I was blocked and unfriended (just days after I wrote a post about the danger of politically-motivated unfriending). The rest of the conversation continued without me, and I learned of its content from friends, the same people who defended my position upon seeing the “discussion” and for whom I'm always thankful.

     After I was called a “sad little girl,” the conversation rapidly devolved and concluded with threats of violence against both me specifically and more generally against any American citizens who would burn a flag (i.e many people, but not me). "Sad little girl" is not a particularly effective insult against someone who believes that the saddest thing about being a girl in America is that so many of them grow up with fathers, brothers, and eventually boyfriends and husbands who think of their sex as an insult and a handicap, boys and men who treat both girls and women as inferiors.

     I'll spare y’all the rest of the exchange here. I will, however, eventually make them public as a warning about a pernicious sort of violence that lurks just beneath the surface in certain individuals, even those we have thought of as friends and those who sometimes work as public servants.

     Again, I don’t want to talk about those individuals, thugs who would use violence against those who do not believe as they do. They disgrace their offices and the country they claim to serve.  Tonight I want to talk about flags.

      When I was 13 years old, I read James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers. The book is a vital and justly acclaimed account of the Marines who raised flags (there were indeed two) over Mt. Suribachi---even as Imperial Japanese defenders of Iwo Jima continued to resist fanatically from bunkers, caves, spider holes, and the few remaining trees left on the sulfurous island where 6,821 servicemen would die. Indeed, many more would suffer grievous wounds, and more still endured often permanent psychological trauma. Corpsmen died shielding the wounded, sergeants died leading charges against Japanese fortifications, and thousands of others died performing feats of courage seen and unseen, each of which distinguished the conduct of American boys and men on Iwo Jima (from the very act of boarding the open-topped LVT’s to acts of heroism “above and beyond the call of duty”).

      Those men were my heroes, and they always will be. I memorized the names of the flag raisers and would test myself under my breath while walking around summer camp:

John Bradley (James’ father)
Ira Hayes
Harlon Block
Rene Gagnon
Mike Strank 
Franklin Sousley

     Their names could have been many other names, but theirs I chose to memorize (my list grows as I age). As is true of all these men, they would deny their heroism out of hand: “I was doing it for my buddies. I didn’t want them to die, and I didn’t want to fail them” they might have said, something other men did indeed did say. (See: Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War Two, The Good War)

    The flags that they raised over Mt. Suribachi have become emblems of American bravery, tenacity, and resilience in the face of suffering and death. We fittingly memorialize the Raising and the flag(s) that was (were) raised. The bolts of fabric unfurled there were far, far more than woven fibers and dye. They stood for the nation whose men, women, labor, and principles would, alongside those of other Allied nations, free the Pacific from Imperial Japan and Western Europe from Nazi Germany (though the flag flown over the Reichstag must always remind us of the nation whose people paid, by far, the greatest cost for that victory).

     Flags, the objects in themselves, matter. They always have. They always will. They are a physical reminder of identity, nation, and purpose. We hang them from tens of thousands of poles outside of homes, offices, and parks. They fly from the White House to our soon-to-be reopened embassy in Cuba.  We emblazon the Stars and Stripes on uniforms, vehicles, t-shirts, bandannas, album covers, and countless other places including our skin and our gravestones. I own a single American flag, a small one I bought in France, a nation I've grown to love, and a nation whose often mocked flag does not bear red, white, and blue by coincidence. Their flag, despite a host of counter-factual jokes and “anecdotes,” has often been defended with the same blood and sacrifice as the American flag. My previous post was on Verdun and worth the read for those who do not know the name.

     I wore that little flag as an armband/cape when I  played rugby for the first time, in France, and on a co-ed team. Our squad was composed of Frenchwomen, an Englishman (Will Heslop, I miss you dearly) , an Irishman (Jim, our co-captain), an American man (me), and an American woman (Rachel Williams, I miss you dearly). We played against mostly male teams, and we lost far more than we won, but we fought on for several hours. I scored my first 3 tries (and Rachel hers), and I made sure to never let that flag touch the ground. After 6 matches, I was exhausted and furious at a well-trained men’s team that both mocked us and ran up the score in a final match. My friends, however, reminded me of what finally counted, them, that moment, and, for me, the flag on my arm. My friends reminded me that I was loved and had loved in turn, and the flag reminded me of the country I represented.  "American boys hate to lose," Jason Isbell correctly notes in "Dress Blues," perhaps the most important song to come from the Iraq War (a ballad that memorializes the fallen Cpl. Matthew Conley, a father, husband, son, and Marine). We're also supposed to be loyal allies and faithful friends in victory and defeat. 

     I still have that flag hanging in my room, and I look at it when I wake up the morning in a country whose freedoms, though imperfectly embodied and expressed, allow me to lead a life by my own lights and free from private violence and government coercion. Police officers and soldiers protect those rights, and our governing documents secure them (though not without failures and abuses, as we've seen over and over again in our nation’s storied, but deeply flawed history).

     One day that flag will deteriorate. In fact, its colors are already fading, and I’ll never know for sure if it was made by a small child’s calloused hands in a sweatshop. The object is as imperfect as they come. Thousands of flags with more respectable provenance and made of sturdier materials will last and have lasted for centuries. Still, all flags will eventually fall apart. Moths, warfare, fires (accidental or intentional), or mere entropy will see to that in the fullness of time.

     Flags have been obliterated from and along with the patches of our soldiers: paratroopers, rangers, infantrymen, marines, medics, and sailors, on American battlefields and battlefields around the world. The merciless work of shrapnel, bullets, explosive shells, incendiaries, and grenades has seen to that. American flags have surely sunk beneath oil-slick waves flapping from the superstructure or sterns of burning warships, and they have sunk invisibly with submariners drowned or crushed hundreds of feet beneath the Pacific Ocean. I do not know how many flags were destroyed during the September 11th Terror Attacks, but I do know that the flags we raised in their place testified to something indestructible in American culture, something far more important than the objects themselves.

         

      In America, we are allowed to desecrate American flags that we own. We may trample them, shred them in art displays, or subject them to any number of abuses and do so legally. I hate seeing those things---that's certainly not how I would choose to protest, and it's not what I'm about----but I would defend and have defended the Freedom that those expressions represent with all that I am. The sacred personal freedoms upon which The United States of America were founded cannot be burned, torn, or trampled. They can, however, be embodied or abandoned.

       Anyone who would threaten another American with violence for their choice to exercise a 1st Amendment Freedom is a disgrace to the flag that they claim to be protecting. Soldiers, police officers, and oath-bound servants who would do, do so not only to the disgrace of their country (and their own dishonor), they also do so in open defiance of the vow they swore by law and on their honor. I cite the oath sworn by all members of our Armed Forces:

      "I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God."    
          
        Our Constitution protects its citizens’ freedoms, and our Supreme Court has declared that flag desecration is one such protected speech act; it declared as much even as American flags flew over and stood inside of it chambers. Therefore, anyone who abridges, restricts, or attacks the free exercise of that right has violated the Constitution and demonstrated a willingness to betray the very foundations of our country’s lawful governance. When that individual is a soldier or police officer, such an offense  is not only a civil liberties violation, it’s treason. It’s an affront to the Constitution and consequently to the courage and sacrifice of those men who died on Iwo Jima and a thousand other hells, often alone and in agony, and it should be understood as such. Soldiers who would beat, maim, or kill a flag-burner are the very "domestic enemies" against whom they swore to protect us. 

       To be sure, burning a flag is an extraordinarily disrespectful act, and those who do so undoubtedly give great offense, often to individuals who have served the country loyally or whose loved ones died in its service. Still, it is sometimes an understandable one. Flag-burnings are often a manifestation of civil rage at governmental injustice, sometimes governmental disregard for the Constitution. Indeed, our governments, state and federal, too often fail to serve their citizens, particularly those disadvantaged by their skin color, income, sexual identity, or a dozen other traits that should never provoke discrimination at all, much less institutionalized discrimination. Our governments have, at many points throughout history, flown the flag over atrocity: Native American "reeducation" schools, Slave ships, Japanese internment camps, the medical offices of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments,  Abu-Ghraib,  and so many more, many of which will remain unrecorded in history. Still, whatever their motivation for burning the flag, to threaten a flag-burner with imprisonment, death, or any other form of judicial punishment or extrajudicial violence is a criminal act, and something objectionable on another order of magnitude altogether; flag-burning and violence against flag-burners are hardly comparable.

     The first act merely destroys an object and offends our sensibilities, but the second perverts the object itself and undermines our ideals. Before we raise a finger to chastise (or condemn) a flag-burner, we should look first to those who would use flag-burning as an excuse to carry out violence (often racially targeted) against “offenders.” Flag-burning  is usually a sign of governmental abuse and a symptom of the resultant unrest, but violence (threatened or real) against flag-burners and their defenders warns of something far more menacing, tyranny sanctioned under the auspices of “patriotism.” 

     I’m not writing this because I was called a little girl or because Marines threatened to "curb-stomp" me. I’m writing this because I'm so worried for this nation, its children, and the America that they will inherit that I must write. I can no longer remain silent, and I hope that you’ll join me when you see it in your own lives, too.

       Springsteen sings in his wildly popular "We Take Care of Our Own" that  “wherever this flag is flown, we take care of our own.” The song is less a hymn to American success and more a rallying cry for a return to truly American ideals on the level of the individual, all the way to the highest offices ("from the shotgun shack to the Superdome"), a call to recommit ourselves to liberty and to look at those who disagree with us (even those who burn flags) as fellow American rather than enemies, to respect the rights of others.The "flags" that we bear in our actions are beacons that glow more brightly than the flag that flew over Fort McHenry, illuminated by British rockets and waving in defiance of reconquest. When Francis Scott Key, a prisoner (and a lawyer) aboard a British prison ship saw that flag, he enshrined it in our anthem. We’d do well to enshrine it in our hearts, far beyond the reach of flame, where the Freedom that it represents can be seen unfurled in our words and deeds, including the defense of flag-burning.

     Our flag is and always will be there if we value its principles more than its fabric.

       I love a number of songs that feature flags prominently, but I only know of one with a little girl: Caroline Herring’s account of her and her daughter's trip to see Obama's inauguration, “Maiden Voyage.” 

       Herring, equal parts courage and grace, sings: 

“My girl cried for a flag, something she could understand, and we marched in the street as I held her hand.”

      Her daughter will not remember the miniature flag just because of its colors or its synthetic fabric,  but because her loving mother taught her that the flag stands for the best things in this world: freedom, justice, and hope. 

      Herring’s chorus (a proud echo of Woody Guthrie's):

      “It goes like this, Honey, you take your hand, you lift it up, and you put it on your heart, and there you stand singing ‘this land is your land, this land is my land.'” 

      We must not let anyone take that sacred hope from us. We must stand up and speak out when the violent come screaming about “liberty” and “patriotism,” baying for blood, and waving their flags. When they come (they're already here), we must unfurl our own, and ours, we know, is made of sterner, nobler stuff than fabric.   


May this land always be your land and mine, no matter how different we may be,

Gilmer, an American