At Large and At Small (16 page)

In 1904, an article about John Sharp was published in
the monthly magazine of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. It pointed out that had Sharp stayed in Scotland, he might
never have left the coal pits. His life, noted the anonymous author, “teaches the lesson that to succeed one must struggle with circumstance, and overcome by faith and toil; that change, evolution, and action, secure mental and material progress; while, on the contrary, traveling self-satisfied in ruts, seeking sameness, and courting inaction, are conditions to be avoided.”

hen we bought an old farmhouse last summer in a small New England town, the elderly couple who had lived there for many years left us a set of plastic lawn chairs, a garbage can, a tool bench, a wheelbarrow, and an American flag. On September 13, two days after the attacks, we raised
it, with our children’s help, to half staff. Our six-year-old son enjoyed pulling the halyard; on its way up the peeling white-painted pole, next to the big maple tree in the front yard, the flag made an interesting and satisfying sound, partway between a squeak and a ring. We’d read up on halfmasting protocol, which dictates raising the flag briskly to the peak and then slowly bringing it halfway
down. George said, “This flag is lowered now, but it will rise again, just as our country will.” It is useful to have children around at such times: they authorize clichés that their parents deeply believe but might otherwise hesitate to voice.

Neither George nor I had ever owned a flag, not even
a little one to wave on the Fourth of July. The closest George had come was the pair of stars-and-stripes
bell-bottoms he had worn in the sixties (in violation of section 176d of the United States Flag Code: “The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery”). The closest I had come was the handkerchief-sized Whole Earth banner that I had knotted to the aerial of my brother’s car in the fall of 1970, before we drove from our home in California to college in Massachusetts.
We took the whole earth idea seriously: what a provincial notion, I remember thinking, to fly a flag that implied one was a citizen of only
part
of the earth!

If you had asked me then what it meant to be a flag owner—or, as I would have called it, a flag-waver, as if holding a flag in one’s hand was inherently more ridiculous than stringing it up a pole—I would have said “Vietnam.” (Silly question;
everyone knew what it meant.) But my answer would have been false. My disdain for the flag wasn’t political; it was social. When I burrow back into my seventeen-year-old self as thoroughly as the intervening decades allow, here’s what I fear she was thinking: If you were a flag-waver, you lived in a split-level house with vinyl siding in a suburb of Omaha. You had a crew cut. Your children
belonged to the 4-H Club and had a dog that, without irony—there was no irony within a five-hundred-mile radius of Omaha—they had named Fido. You read
Reader’s Digest
and listened to Andy Williams. You ate tuna casserole and frozen peas for dinner, followed by lime Jell-O with little pieces of banana suspended in it. You had never traveled east of Wichita
(or maybe west; I had never been to either
Omaha or Wichita, and knew only that they were both somewhere in the amorphous middle of things). You had never heard of Herman Hesse.

“Sept. 11 made it safe for liberals to be patriots,” the critic George Packer has written. Like me, Packer once considered flag-waving an embarrassing display of bad taste, though he associated it more with the working class than with the Cleaveresque middle class.
Either way, it wasn’t the sort of thing our families indulged in. When people like Packer and me were teenagers, we had little interest in the socioeconomic tiers that separated the upper middle class, to which we belonged, from what we might have called the “underprivileged class,” a group with which we professed heartfelt solidarity, whether or not we’d ever met any of its members. And in
those days, in those circles (which pretended to be egalitarian but were in fact unthinkingly, unapologetically, unbelievably snobbish), America was itself déclassé, a simpleminded concatenation of Uncle Sam and log cabins and Smokey the Bear. I mean, really: if you wanted a stimulating dinner companion, would you pick Betsy Ross or Jean-Paul Sartre?

In March of 1918, a year after the United
States entered World War I, a mob surrounded a Montana man named E. V. Starr and tried to force him to kiss an American flag. Starr refused, saying, “What is this thing anyway? Nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it and some
other marks in the corner there. I will not kiss that thing. It might be covered with microbes.”

The previous month, Montana had enacted a flag-desecration
statute that became the model for the 1918 federal Sedition Act, outlawing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government or its flag. Starr was charged with sedition, fined $500, and sent to the state penitentiary for ten to twenty years of hard labor. Ruling on Starr’s appeal, the federal district court judge who heard the appeal wrote:

In the matter
of his offense and sentence, obviously petitioner was more sinned against than sinning.… [The mob’s] unlawful and disorderly conduct, not his just resistance, nor the trivial and innocuous retort into which they goaded him, was calculated to degrade the sacred banner and to bring it into contempt. Its members, not he, should have been punished.

Although he called the court that had sentenced
Starr “stark, staring, raving mad”—no penalty that severe had ever been meted out, or would ever be meted out again, in a United States flag desecration case—the judge ruled that the state law was nonetheless constitutional and that he had no other choice than to uphold the conviction.

The unfortunate Starr’s only bit of luck was that the Montana mob did not assault him, unlike the automobile
workers in Lansing, Michigan, who, the same winter, after a fellow employee wiped his hands on a flag, had chopped a hole in the ice that covered the Grand River, tied a clothesline to the man’s foot, and submerged him
until he apologized; or the saloon patrons in Thermopolis, Wyoming, who, the previous year, had lynched a man for shouting “Hoch lebe der Kaiser.” (In the latter case, the victim
was cut down in the nick of time by the city marshal. The
Chicago Tribune
reported: “Revived with cold water, he was forced to kneel and kiss the American flag. He then was warned to get out of town. He did.”)

I read about these cases—they are collected in a fascinating and disturbing book called
Desecrating the American Flag: Key Documents of the Controversy from the Civil War to 1995
, edited
by Robert Justin Goldstein— while I was attending a conference in Colonial Williamsburg, the omphalos of Americana. It felt strange to underline E. V. Starr’s question in a hotel room crammed with hooked rugs and embroidered samplers. What
is
this thing, anyway? I thought. Is it just a piece of cotton? Is it, as Katha Pollitt put it, explaining why she had refused her daughter’s request to hang
a flag in their window, a symbol of “jingoism and vengeance and war”? Or is it, as a group of New York women wrote in the dedication of a silk flag they had sewn for Union soldiers in 1861, “the emblem of all you have sworn to defend: / Of freedom and progress, with order combined, / The cause of the
Nation
, of
God
, and
Mankind
”?

In the weeks after September 11, I saw for the first time that
the flag—along with all its red, white, and blue collateral relations—is what a semiotician would call “polysemous”: it has multiple meanings. The flag held aloft by the pair of disheveled hitchhikers who squatted next to their backpacks on Route 116, a mile from our
home, meant
We will not rape or murder you
. The red, white, and blue turban worn by the Sikh umbrella vendor a friend walked past
in Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, meant
Looking like someone and thinking like him are not the same thing
. The flag on the lapel of a Massachusetts attorney mentioned in our local paper—on seeing it, his opposing counsel had whispered to a colleague, “I’m so screwed, do you have a flag pin I can borrow?”—meant
I am morally superior
. The flags brandished by two cowboy-hatted singers
at a country fair we attended on the day the first bombs fell on Afghanistan meant
Let’s kill the bastards
. The Old Glory bandanna around the neck of the well-groomed golden retriever I saw on a trip to Manhattan meant
Even if I have a Prada bag and my dog has a pedigree, I’m still a New Yorker and I have lost something
. The flag in our front yard meant
We are sad. And we’re sorry we’ve never
done this before
.

Newspapers printed full-page color flags for flagless readers to tape on their windows. NBC put stars and stripes on its peacock. The Macdougal Street Tattoo Company in Greenwich Village gave pro bono patriotic tattoos—something new under the sun—to nearly five hundred World Trade Center rescue workers. A Pennsylvania man had a flag shaved into his buzz cut. A New York restaurant
called The Tonic introduced a dessert called Stars and Stripes: white mascarpone panna cotta encircled by red and blue pomegranate-and grape
flavored stars. The design of a new 34-cent flag stamp, captioned united we stand, was rushed through several layers of U.S. Postal Service red tape in record time so that a billion stamps could be available by November 1. The space shuttle
Endeavor
carried
more than six thousand flags to the International Space Station and brought them back for distribution to the families of those killed on September 11. Our son made a flag from a leaf and a twig to mark the final days of his vegetable garden and asked if he should fly it at half staff.

When I visited my mother in Florida, I paused at the window of the gift shop in the Fort Myers airport. Outside,
a National Guardsman with an M-16 patrolled the corridor. Inside, on a bed of gold-flecked gauze, reposed the largest collection of red, white, and blue objects I had ever seen: flags, streamers, key chains, pens, fans, T-shirts, baseball caps, figurines, coffee mugs, beer steins, shot glasses, menorahs, postcards with photographs of flags surrounded by oranges and flamingos, bumper stickers
that said
THESE COLORS NEVER RUN
, starfish that said
GOD BLESS AMERICA
. The meaning of these objects had nothing to do with terrorism; the flag was a “theme,” like the “Underwater Theme” we’d chosen for our high school senior prom. (“Japan?” “Too hard to draw all those geishas.” “Outer Space?” “Too much black and white.” “Underwater?” “Now there’s an idea.”) I had recently seen a coffee-table
book of flag-oriented antiques, each beautifully photographed and embellished with little airbrushed shadows, arranged on the pages like jewels in a Tiffany vitrine.
Patriotic Shield
Pin Box. Uncle Sam Hat Brooch. Presidential Cigar Band. Admiral Perry Whiskey Flask. Wheatlet Trading Card
. They all looked incredibly expensive, but what they had gained in value over the years they had lost in meaning:
they were no longer about patriotism in wartime, they were about being collectible. The Fort Myers gift shop window was indistinguishable from a page in that book. It was already meaningless. All it needed was a caption: “Americana—Assorted Ephemera & Folk Art, 2001.”

But just because most of the flag paraphernalia was dreck didn’t mean that all of it was. I was caught short by the reproduction
of Edward P. Moran’s flag-filled 1886 painting
Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World
, placed in
The New York Times
by the Museum of the City of New York, accompanied by a quotation from Le Corbusier: “New York is not a completed city.… It is a city in the process of becoming. Today it belongs to the world. Without anyone expecting it, it has became the jewel in the crown of universal cities.…
New York is a great diamond, hard and dry, sparkling, triumphant!” Just typing those words, nearly three months later, brings on the peculiar feeling of congestion I still feel every morning when I read the obituaries in the
Times
and start thinking about the widow who gave birth to twins on September 15 or the woman who lost both a husband and a son. I had lived in New York for twenty-five years,
twenty-two of them within walking distance of the World Trade Center. The trauma center nearest the site was the hospital where our daughter was born; Engine 24/Ladder 5,
where Mayor Giuliani, covered in ash, set up his temporary command post, was our corner firehouse. I felt ashamed when I caught myself thinking of this as a neighborhood tragedy rather than a global one; it was the solipsistic
fallacy of believing that the telephone pole you’re closest to is taller than all the rest, just because it
looks
taller. Our Massachusetts friends said to us, “You must be so relieved to have moved!” And though we did feel relief, our feelings were complicated and contradictory. We loved New York all the more because of what had been done to it. George said it was like the upwelling of tenderness
one might feel upon hearing that an old lover had been grievously injured. I knew, though it seemed like a shamefully trivial emotion, that one of the reasons Moran and Le Corbusier affected me was homesickness.