WHERE'S YOUR FLAG?

I just found out that yesterday, June 14th, was Flag Day in the United States: the anniversary of the adoption of the Stars and Stripes by the Second Continental Congress in 1777. For me, this minor holiday seems particularly apropos, since I've been wondering how to respond to the big, waving US flag that a conservative friend recently sent me to upload onto my sidebar. Even though this was surely meant less as a favor than a challenge, I feel obliged to explain why I won't be displaying the image any time soon, and Flag Day gives me an excuse to present my explanation in the form of a tardy blog post.

Vague proclamations are all the rage, but I have no fondness for them. When a person says to me, “I'm very spiritual” or “I support the troops,” they could just as well say it in Cantonese, because they've communicated nothing at all. Flying a flag is similarly problematic—I guess the message it's commonly meant to invoke is “I'm proud to be an American.” The problem is, I'm not proud to be an American. I'm lucky to be an American, but I've done nothing to deserve the privileges of my citizenship. My father has the right to some pride in his citizenship, since getting it involved some actual work from him; all I had to do was be born here. Nationalistic chest-thumping is one thing if you're Lithuanian or Gambian, but when you're a member of the most privileged and powerful group on Earth, it's more than a little unseemly. I would no sooner don a t-shirt that read “Proud to be an American” than I would one that proclaimed “Proud to be a White Man.”

Another problem with ambiguous declarations is the many ways they can be misinterpreted. The American flag symbolizes so many disparate things. If it fit it in my sidebar, I could get behind the idea of posting the US Constitution there. No way to misread that. A flag, on the other hand, could be taken (for instance) as a signal of approval for an arrogant, knuckleheaded administration that mouths the rhetoric of democracy while consolidating power into an ever-finer focus. I simply can't allow that.

My sidebar is in sore need of a spring clean. I've been meaning to delete that stupid gematriculator thing for ages, and add to my blogroll, and eventually I'll do all of that. But Old Glory stays in my inbox.