This Is Not a Flag
Writing off for your FBI file was kind of a fad in the late '70s, and to my shock, I really, really had one. With quite a few pages. Most of the pages were... not blank, but every single line, or almost, crossed out with a black felt pen. Except for one thing.
The first page was an editorial I had written for the school newspaper where I defended burning the flag as not the same as destroying a country. Being young and new to sociology, I identified the confusion of flag and country as "reification." The entire editorial had been cut out and filed. In an FBI dossier. On me. I wasn't sure whether to be flattered or horrified, and settled for both.
My views probably weren't affected so much by the fact that my social and political life was full of leftists at the moment, as that I'd been a Girl Scout who was honored at Camp by being the one chosen to burn our American flag. All the other girl scouts stood around, and I put it on the fire. In fact, I got to start the fire, showing off camp-acquired skills at fire starting.
Long years later, I began research into what people thought a flag was, and what constituted desecration of it. After 9/11, there were U.S. flags everywhere, and most of them were displayed in ways which violated flag protocol. There were U.S. flags on t-shirts, printed as an insert in the newspaper, stuck in across lawns. Everywhere you might imagine a flag could be put, it was. Even I was tempted to buy one for our flagpole, and I've never like the flag aesthetically. (The flagpole came with the house.)
I had no question that this proliferation of flag fashion was unpatriotic. And yet, not long before, the Supreme Court had decided that dishonoring a flag counted as protected speech.
I chose "desecrating" because most people use the word "burning" to describe showing contempt for a flag. Few of us were Scouts, apparently, or honor-guard trained, since we're supposed to know basic flag etiquette. If you check the flag protocols, the flag is not supposed to touch the ground, be worn as a garment, or be buried; when a flag has had these things happen to it, it should be burned:
The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning. (CSR Report on Flag Law, 2008)
Despite this fairly clear requirement in the code for how flags should be properly eliminated -- and that they should never touch the ground or pool or merchandise below them, or be used to sell anything, or printed on cocktail napkins, etc. (see the above site for reference) -- the flag protocols are violated right and left, most often by people claiming to be patriotic.
I idly asked someone who had posted the full-page newspaper printout of the flag how she was going to dispose of it when it got tattered. I never did find out, but she was frantically reviewing what one was supposed to do for days after.
That was one of the triggers for a research study only an ethnographic rhetorician could love: what, exactly, constitutes a flag? If burning a flag as a sign of disrespect should be against the law, and burning a flag as an honor is part of a code, apparently the people making the law want the act to be judged by its intention. I'm no lawyer, but I've known enough to be quite certain that arguing intention rather than act is the sign of a tangled case.
The same is even more true for wearing the flag. Only certain people are allowed to wear flag badges, according to code -- and who, and where, are written into the code quite precisely. As for lapel pins, "who is avoided but "where" is clear: Over or near the heart.
But if intention were not to be the basis of prosecution -- or at any rate, judgment -- the question becomes, what constitutes a flag? I collected a box of items flag-related -- from a deck of playing cards to a denim bag with an American-flag functioning as a large pocket -- and began showing it to any Iowan I could persuade to talk to me.
The research unfortunately coincided with a major medical breakdown in my life, and didn't go on long enough for me to come to a safe conclusion. However, a pattern had begun to emerge.
Things which looked like a flag, but weren't on a little stick (ie a "standard" in congress-talk) simply weren't a flag, so it wasn't desecration. Unless, of course, it was.
On a certain Hallowe'en in the 70s, during the Vietnam War, a friend had worn a "costume" of an American flag and got shouted at by the white working class printers of our newspaper. Now there were women wearing them as skirts, modified slightly by darts and a waistband, who were identified as "ultra-patriotic" by more than one informant. The flag stamped on the back of a t-shirt, was a "picture of a flag," but the flag flying above the Perkins restaurant, about four times the size of a usual American flag, was definitely a flag; opinions varied as to whether the small flags used for parade flag-waving and sticking into flower beds counted as flags, depending which location they were. All agreed that the friend I described should not have been wearing a flag; because it was made as a flag, it definitely was.
In short, as near as I could tell, except for the kind of flag always presented by an honor guard or hoisted on a flagpole, the meaning of a flag varied by intention and location. Good luck passing a law which wouldn't punish patriotic people for displaying a flag, and would guarantee unpatriotic people got fined or imprisoned.
A cleaner unfortunately threw my flag collection away, including the ice bucket with American flags stamped all over it which housed it. My notes are... somewhere. Some day, I may feel like doing more research. But I suspect that will simply confirm, though quite possibly complicate, my observations so far.
I started remembering my flag studies when I saw, flashed across the nets this week, a confederate flag at a White House protest. So my next entry will be Part Two: Spitting on a Flag.
(BTW) Just to use a bit below the fold, voting with the majority in Texas v. Johnson, the case where the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 that burning a flag was protected speech, were Scalia and Kennedy. Yep, the Scalia and Kennedy still on the bench. Losing side included O'Connor, Stevens, and White, not usually viewed as all that conservative. Possibly "conservative" in those days meant something?
*ducks*