Pledging Allegiance in Delmar
Why do town contractors despise the American flag?
Authors note: I absolutely am bragging when I say that up and down my street, there are multiple standard, unadulterated American flags and not one Trump one. There are also many tasteful decorative flags.
In my last Delmar story, I joked about waiting for the water to be poisoned as a result of civic incompetence. Then I saw this photo on the sewer workers’ truck. I keep circling around an idea about flags. I’m not quite obsessed, but I am intrigued beyond reason because I don’t know what it’s like to be a flag person.
For example, flags aren’t so appealing to me that I’ll install a flagpole, but if the house came with a flagpole I’d fly an American flag on it. I don’t think there’s much of a choice for me, because I’d have to fly something and I couldn’t fly something else.
The only political statements my flag pole would advertise would be, “Empty flagpoles are depressing” and “This is America.” I feel like anything else would stereotype me in Pidgin Semaphore.
I know there have to be some of you out there with a non-American flag flying in front of your house. Just looking up and down my block, I figure it’s got to be at least a third of you. What if I asked you why you flew your (non-American) flag? You might list aesthetic or political reasons, but (unless you lost a bet) there’s some point where you went from not having a flag to having a flag.
That’s all I can think about when I see one flying at a home. There was a day that started flagless but didn’t end that way. Something compelled you to think, “This house needs a flag for these reasons.”
“This year I’m going to celebrate the change of seasons with a flag” is a feeling a lot of people have. Same with, “It’s football season,” or “It’s THIS Holiday.”
But what is the feeling, “I want an adulterated American flag?”
I don’t wanna sound too fascist-y, but we used to just salute the one flag. That was the cool part about it. The only thing you could tell about a person from the flag flying in front of their house was that they owned a flag.
These adulterated flags project a persona now, like, “I’m X and I Vote” but with flags. Either the blue police flag, the red fireman flag, the gay pride flag, any American flag that isn’t red, white, and blue is what I call an adulterated flag. Somewhere, there’s an analogy here about the American flag being turned into a brand or a sports franchise, with different colors and constituent designs to appeal to every fashion sense and move more merch.
Christ, that’s depressing, but I’ll write that some other time.
For now, the point it took me too long to make is I probably overthink flags. I see adulterated American flags as having a specific intention to convey a message rather than an aesthetic choice completely separate from the flag’s content.
I’ve written before about how absurd it is to fly a flag at someone, and no flag is more often flown at people than a Trump flag, which is why I got such a kick out of the town contractors flying it.
One thing you need to know about Delmar (if you haven’t gleaned it), is the only genuine surprise is that the town fathers haven’t hoisted a Trump flag instead of an American flag in front of town hall. The proliferation of “FUCK BIDEN AND FUCK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM” flags flying in front of people’s homes here is also something that I’ve written about before.
At the sight of my tax dollars at work, funding all these laborers scurrying around under a Trump 2020 flag, I imagined painting the scene like a WPA poster, or maybe a Chairman Mao poster with Trump smiling beatifically from above. It’s chilling in a way I am terrified we have become quite comfortable with.
This was the first time I’d seen a Trump flag where an American flag typically ought to have been at a construction site. I wonder at the person who takes government money and refuses to fly an American flag, preferring an old Trump one. I mean, that is such an extra layer of spite—Thanks for the million-dollar contract, now fuck Biden and fuck you for voting for him.
Ordering workers to fly the Trump flag instead of the American flag is one thing. Providing them with an old flag is something else entirely. The new flags, or at least the ones I’ve seen driving my grandson home from school, say “Trump 2024 The Rules Have Changed.”
Yikes.
It’s important to say that forcing your non-union workers to fly a flag that doesn’t recognize the current government and paying them with government money is as Delmar a thing to do as I’ve ever heard.
The contract belongs to Teal Construction, here in Delmar. It could be thrift rather than an anti-government statement, advance notice that this company cuts corners. After all, YOU CAN BUY A TRUMP 2024 FLAG for $6. Talk about watching every dime!
The Teal Construction website says that, Charles W. Reed, III and Jeffrey Wark bought the company in August, so it’s possible they haven’t had the time yet to order new Trump flags for their company construction sites. Maybe they’re saving up to replace them all with American flags. One that’s not obviously cheap is gonna run something more like $20, so they probably couldn’t splash out all at once.
On the company website, it says Reed and Wark were long-term employees, so one would imagine they’re familiar with the company’s preference for Trump flags over American ones. It also could be a simple marketing ploy. Perhaps they realized that the best way to continue to get projects in Delmar was to throw away their American flags and embrace the town’s pervasive anti-American flag sentiment.