Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Today is Flag Day, an occasion to reflect on just how much political and emotional ground Old Glory is able to cover.
By SUSAN ASCHOFF
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 14, 2001
There is a picture in my mind from childhood. I am standing with five other girls at the base of a metal pole, the wind clanking the chain. We are Girl Scouts at summer camp. It is the daily ceremony to lower the flag.
"Don't let it touch the ground. Don't let it touch the ground," I silently admonish.
The flag is convulsing in the breeze, heading slowly downward. Grab the stripes before they fall. Got it. Glory be.
We carefully fold the banner, pulling it taut, lengthwise, then in alternating angles until it is a blue, star-studded triangle.
After a day of splashing in a muddy lake and braiding lanyards and dissecting food in the dining hall, we were, for a few minutes, solemn. And part of something bigger.
I have since become a mother who must remind her sons to remove their sweaty ball caps for the presentation of the colors. I tell them today is National Flag Day. Look. It's on the calendar.
That star-spangled banner is 223 years old.
And these days, America loves the flag like we love the Nike swoosh. We put its picture on everything from boxer shorts to artificial nails. We imprint it on paper plates and toilet seats.
Ralph Lauren appropriated the flag as his personal trademark and told everyone what to wear for American style and conspicuous consumption.
Car dealerships fly behemoths or plant dozens around their lots. The cynical would say it is a way around sign ordinances. I find it fitting: Be an American. Buy a car.
Flag Day is about something more. June 14 is designated to honor our national symbol. It is also reserved for the ceremonial retirement of worn or tattered flags. American Legion posts across the country collect those flags from the public for burning.
At ceremonies throughout the Tampa Bay area, the flag will be saluted. A tribute sponsored by veterans organizations and Pinellas County government will be held in St. Petersburg at 7 p.m. at Allendale Methodist Church, Haines Road and 38th Avenue N.
"The flag stands for freedom. We need to teach that importance to our children," said David C. Miller, president of the Pinellas County Veterans Liaison Council, which represents many of the almost 180,000 vets in the county.
Miller fought as a Marine in Vietnam. When he returned to the United States in 1968, he kissed the ground and then saw the flag.
"It meant I was home,"' he said.
When I was a teenager, the older brothers of my friends went to Vietnam. If they came home, they hung the flag as curtains in their ratty apartments or sewed it on their tattered jeans. Abbie Hoffman shocked a TV nation when he wore the stars and stripes as a shirt. On-screen in 1969, Peter Fonda was impudently nonchalant riding easy with the flag painted on his motorcycle gas tank and emblazoned on his jacket. His name was Captain America. He's no patriot, harrumphed the parents.
The flag became a weapon of protest. And inevitably, since this is America, a piece of commerce.
In 1907, some businessmen in Nebraska put an image of the flag on a bottle of beer and ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court arguing free speech. They'd been convicted of breaking a state law prohibiting use of the flag to sell products. Half the states had similar statutes.
The court upheld the guilty verdict, finding it is "not repugnant to the Constitution" to bar use of the flag for advertising merchandise.
"To every true American," the opinion stated, "the flag is the symbol of the nation's power, the emblem of freedom in its truest, best sense. . . . A duty rests upon each state in every legal way to encourage its people to love the Union."
Artist Kate Millett knew love need not be blind. She draped the flag into a toilet for a work titled American Dream Goes to Pot. Debuted at an exhibit in New York in 1970, Millett's art shut down the show when the district attorney arrested and convicted its organizers of flag desecration.
When artist Dread Scott laid the flag on the floor in Chicago and called it What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?, then-President George Bush called for a constitutional amendment to outlaw such disrespect.
The two works were again part of an exhibit in the 1990s called "Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art." A flag with a bleeding baby painted on it and another overlaid with the image of a Ku Klux Klan member in sheets also were included. When the show came to Phoenix in 1996, it was stormed by outraged citizens. One protester pulled Millett's flag from the toilet and wrestled a museum guard for the banner. Another picked Scott's flag up from the floor and hung it on the wall. People watching cheered.
What the brawl epitomized was the increasing politicization of the flag.
A naked Madonna draped herself in an American flag and seductively urged teenagers to vote in a public service ad that aired on MTV.
Rage Against the Machine was kicked off Saturday Night Live when, appearing with host Steve Forbes, Republican presidential candidate and billionaire, the band hung flags upside down from its amplifiers as counterpoint. Seconds before they were to perform, stagehands pulled down the flags.
"America's freedom of expression is inverted (like the flags) when you're free to say anything you want to say until it upsets a corporate sponsor," guitarist Tom Morello was quoted as saying in Internet reports.
I was a witness to flag history and did not know it. As a reporter for the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram when the 1984 Republican Convention came to Dallas, I had the "protester beat" outside while political writers covered the air-conditioned coronation of Ronald Reagan. Banished to the wretched summer heat, I would dash from interviews with scrungy flower children in vans reeking of marijuana to pristine rallies for the American family, where even the children wore red, white and blue and joined in hymns.
At a protest march through downtown Dallas, a group of about 100 chanted, broke some windows and staged "die-ins" to show the consequences of nuclear war. When they reached City Hall plaza, a man named Gregory Johnson doused a flag with kerosene and set it ablaze. "America, the red, white and blue, we spit on you," chanted the group.
Johnson was convicted of desecration of a venerated object in violation of Texas law and sentenced to one year in prison and fined $2,000. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1989 found Johnson's act protected by the First Amendment:
"The government may not prohibit the verbal or non-verbal expression of an idea merely because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable, even where the flag is involved."
In years before and since, the court has heard cases on attaching a peace sign to the flag, refusing to salute the flag, displaying a miscolored flag and whether the flag is treated "contemptuously" when it is sewn on the seat of someone's pants.
Invariably, the court says that if you're ticked off at your government, you can take it out on its flag.
Still, some want a constitutional amendment to criminalize disrespect. In May, a House subcommittee approved an amendment prohibiting desecration of the flag. The same amendment, in varying forms, has been introduced for 12 years.
"By making the American flag untouchable, Congress would be sending the message that approval of our nation is an obligation, not a choice," said Marvin Johnson, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, in opposing the most recent bill.
Another image from Texas stays with me. At a citizenship ceremony at the federal courthouse on the Fourth of July, more than 100 adults and children from two dozen countries pledged loyalty to the United States. One tiny boy from Cambodia wore cowboy boots and clutched a small American flag. I also remember the man who, after watching Johnson set the flag ablaze on the plaza, gathered the scorched remnants to bury in his back yard.
The flag I love blankets the casket of a war hero and unfurls the anger of a dissident.
O'er the land of the free, wave on.