What Flags Mean | The American Conservative

We ought to ask ourselves what’s represented by the symbols we so proudly hail.

In the agricultural Midwest the place I stay, the sight of an American flag flapping gently within the breeze on Memorial Day can seem chic, giving rise to transcendent and, I daresay, even quasi-religious emotions. While I don’t precisely share these feelings, I believe I can nearly inhabit the psychological area of those that do, particularly older Americans of my acquaintance, together with one who known as me simply after the vacation to complain a few defacement of what he referred to with absolute sincerity as “this beautiful symbol of our country.”

What my pal objected to particularly was a neighbor who was flying a flag (if that’s the proper phrase for the logo, nearly actually of Chinese manufacture, which I had observed earlier than myself) with a hoist facet emblazoned with the acquainted canton of blue with white stars and discipline of alternating pink and white stripes, however with the fly given over to the Stars and Bars.

I go away sure questions occasioned by the looks of this chimera (how does one go about folding it, for instance?) to vexillologists, however for sure the machine is in unhealthy style. (It can be, in deepest blue Union Country, the place each park has its monument to the native Civil War lifeless—these courageous new males of the frontier who gave their lives not in protection of the unthreatened soil however in assist of the beliefs that will be embodied within the Gettysburg Address—and each proud little city has its Grant and Lincoln and Sherman and Douglas Streets, incomprehensible as a logo of something besides racial hatred or some much more deep-seated antinomianism.) It ought to come as no shock to anybody who has frolicked with culturally conservative Midwesterners of a sure age to be taught that the perceived offense was so grave that the distressed gentleman who telephoned me wished to contain the sheriff’s division, citing some mid-century statute which he believed prohibited the show. I suggested him to go away it alone and take into account having a dialog with the neighbor, which, oddly sufficient, is the recommendation he might need given me if I had come to him about nearly another dispute.

I share this anecdote as a result of it helps for instance a query I’ve discovered myself asking for years now: What, precisely, does the American flag stand for, and what (or who) is on the receiving finish of homage after we regard it with the solemn awe enjoined by my thousands and thousands of my fellow residents, my pal amongst them, and evidently certified by my pal’s neighbor with the addendum of one other image?

Nearly 20 years in the past, as a teen who refused to face for the Pledge of Allegiance when its recitation in public colleges grew to become commonplace once more through the Bush administration, I thought-about deference to the flag a de facto endorsement of the follies of our leaders. (Does anybody else bear in mind when Barack Obama of all folks made this level with nice cogency in 2007?) Since then, my causes for remaining seated have multiplied, and I’ve additionally taken to kneeling on the uncommon events after I discover the National Anthem being performed, together with in my very own lounge throughout broadcasts of athletic occasions. While it could be absurd to counsel {that a} willful contrarian streak in my very own character doesn’t contribute to this determination (my very own father felt the identical manner about yellow ribbon stickers circa 2004), I wish to assume that even readers inclined to disagree will perceive why I refuse to pledge unqualified allegiance to any nation that yearly permits the slaughter of some 600,000 infants.

Some may counsel that I’m fallacious to determine the abortion genocide with the flag, which (they may argue) transcends the enormities of the final half century each bit as a lot because it does the legacy of chattel slavery and the slaughter of American Indians and our conflict crimes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that, if nothing else, I ought to actually be keen to acknowledge in it a monument to our esteemed conflict lifeless and to these serving us in uniform now. On this query I’m inclined to defer to the armed forces themselves, which as I write this are debating whether or not to reverse an order made by the earlier administration barring the show of any flags save Old Glory at American navy bases. It appears very seemingly that within the months to come back the so-called “pride” flag (with its curious appropriation of what was as soon as a logo of God’s omnibenevolence even within the face of man’s abject wickedness) will fly beneath the identical emblem earlier than which I refuse to face.

If the Pentagon itself decrees that the Paphian values of the rainbow flag are synonymous with these of the one beneath which they serve, who am I to disagree? If nothing else, it’s a good reminder that beneath all of the alternating pomp and cloying sentimentality attendant upon any point out of “our brave men and women in uniform” is the sordid actuality of one other federal company run by feckless Ivy League bureaucrats, whose literacy past the confines of Microsoft PowerPoint could be very a lot an open query. Their worldviews are precisely the identical as these of their colleagues at any NGO, company, or college. Half a century in the past we bombed Cambodia in hope of containing Soviet tyranny; now we permit Yemeni youngsters to be murdered within the identify of combatting cissexism. As Tammy Duckworth, herself an honored veteran, has assured the American folks, LGBTQ pleasure has “made us a more effective fighting force.”

The acquiescence of the navy industrial complicated with all of that is unsurprising. But it ought to give us pause. When we make sweeping statements concerning the flag and the “American values” it represents, we now not imply the outdated latitudinarian civic Protestantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, nor even what the late Justice Kennedy known as “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” however the quasi-revealed dogma of woke faith. Its adherents have rederived the outdated Aristotelian conception of freedom because the absence of impediments to at least one’s pursuit of the nice.

Their definition of the nice is the liberty the flag stands for.

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp journal and a contributing editor at The American Conservative.