The Flags of Our Neighbors
At first glance, I thought my eyes were playing tricks, so I called to my dog, Pepper, and made my way down the block. Winter had arrived…
We can’t have a national conversation semaphore
At first glance, I thought my eyes were playing tricks, so I called to my dog, Pepper, and made my way down the block. Winter had arrived for real here on the Southern Delaware/Maryland border, and I pulled up the collar of my robe against the wind.
I’d just brought her out to pee when I noticed the flag. The wind pulled my neighbor’s American Flag tight, as if to give me a better look and save me a couple of steps on my trip. It was flying upside down.
I thought at it was a mistake, and half-chuckled, thinking some overenthusiastic adolescent demanded he be allowed to raise the flag and got it wrong in his haste.
In fact, four years ago I would have known it was a mistake and left a note (it was too late to knock). I only got to live in that world for a few seconds before it occurred to me that it wasn’t a mistake, but rather a statement.
A Google search confirmed a spate of inverted flags, and even a few tiffs between neighbors over them. There were clarifications by town or HOA officials letting people know that, while it was a dick move, it was not, in fact, illegal to fly the American Flag upside down.
A New Fear of Conflict
There was a 10-minute period where I considered leaving a note anyway, or even better, knocking on the door to let him know. I imagined double-masking, knocking on the door, and stepping down to the walk. He’d open the door maskless and ask what I wanted.
“Oh, your flag’s upside down,” I’d say and then have the pleasure of recounting the ensuing conversation for the rest of my life.
I don’t know this neighbor well enough to pick him out of a police lineup, but I’m positive he’d know I didn’t believe he hung his flag upsidedown in error from the second he saw me. He’d get that I was needling him. The idea of introducing myself with a political jab didn’t bother me as much as the surety that we couldn’t have a civil conversation about it.
That, and the fear that he’d infect me.
I also discarded the leave-a-note idea as vicious and combative. This is the latest incident in a lifetime of having no clue about how real patriots treated the flag versus the way that America-haters do.
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Flags were a big deal when I was growing up in New Jersey in the 1980s. Sometimes Americans would burn them in protests, harkening back to the 60s (as I understood it then) when it was a popular sign of protest.
The ideological fathers of the mooks who stormed the Capital were, by the 1990s, making their livings pushing for a Flag-Desecration Amendment. Cowards trying to justify their worth to the still-very-powerful Moral Majority thought people should be prosecuted based on their state of mind when they burned the flag.
That is, it was still OK to burn flags as part of a solemn flag retirement ceremony, but if you wanted to show anger at the government, burning the flag wasn’t the way to do it. The point for me was that conservatives had a flag fetish and that I was less proud to be an American because I didn’t want to jail people over flag desecration.
Flags Have Become Fraught
I realized I wasn’t patriotic or religious enough for them, and when a Democratic president was the one who paid off the national debt, fighting Republicans all the way, I began to wonder whether they were as fiscally responsible as they claimed.
When I moved here to the south in the mid-90s (the Mason-Dixon Marker is about a quarter-mile north) there were fewer Confederate Flags than I’d expected. Certainly a lot fewer than there are now. After 9/11 there were a lot of American Flags flying.
Mine was among the only houses without one. I wasn’t being contrarian, but neither did I want to participate in a patriotism fad. That’s how it felt, like a patriotism contest.
Why I regret not burning my neighbor’s Confederate Flag when I had the chance
I didn’t notice the pink rag that once had been a Confederate Flag hanging from a cobbled-together pole until this…bytonyrusso.medium.com
It was as if I missed the memo. One day I woke up and everyone else had gone to the flag store. They bought one for the house and smaller ones for their cars, the latter sometimes so ratty that I wondered whether neglect would have counted as desecration if that law passed (Congress trotted it out every year until 2006).
The ratty flags, the porch flags flying unlit all night, and this general idea that the having of the flag made a patriot wore on me. I really loved my country, I still do, but “flag-waving” has always had a negative connotation for me, and as the divide between me and God-fearing, love-it-or-leave-it Americans widened, “patriotism” dissolved into meaninglessness.
I saw more Confederate Flags in New Jersey during Barack Obama’s first term than I ever had seen living in the South before that. My brother Michael, who had relocated to Raleigh, commented on it when we were home visiting for the holidays.
I remember when seeing Confederate Flags on cars and trucks was disconcerting instead of pitiable. But nothing chilled me more than the rise of the “Thin Blue Line” flag.
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Much as with the American flags after 9/11, I thought I had missed a memo. One day there were black and white flags with a single blue bar everywhere. If I wrote a dystopian fiction with that imagery it would be panned as too hacky, and this made me judge the flag-wavers all the more. While mostly I pity people who hang this low-rent Stars and Bars out, I’m also angry.
I had to stop being a patriot because I was too ambivalent about promoting and protecting a very specific view of what the American Flag is, and what should be done to promote and protect it.
I’m confident that if you knocked on any door over which flew the ol’ Black, White, and Blue and asked them to sign a petition in support of a flag desecration bill, they would sign and probably donate to the cause.
I’m also confident that I’m going to anger people by calling the blue flag dumb and wrongheaded. Imagine if the rainbow flag started out as a multicolored American flag (not that it took the flag making community too long to sew some up). I feel like people with the police flag believe in their hearts that the gay one is disrespectful.
Acknowledging this anger gets at the real flag problem for me. These alt-flags aren’t flying in pride, they’re flying in aggression. They’re flying at me. They’re shorthand, letting me know not only that is discussion about how to best be Americans together off the table, but also that the flyer is easily offended and immovable in their outlook.
I would love to be able to support the police. I have a brother who is a police detective and I am so proud of him. I would also like to be able to criticize the police and to have a conversation about whether it makes sense to ignore the systematic problems in policing that have gone too long unchecked.
I would love to be able to support my country, to fly a proper American Flag proudly. I tear up at patriotic movies and have real and great hopes for what we could do as a more equitable, diverse society. But I also have to recognize that the dimwitted and the vicious are more likely to think I’m on their side if I do.
One door closer to me than the upsidedown flag guy lives a virulent Trump supporter. It wouldn’t shock or bother me to discover that Trump carried my neighborhood with 99.99% of the vote. The Trump neighbor is a former cop, but he’s not flying a cop flag.
He had a Trump sign in his yard, lately removed, but still flies a regular American Flag, right side up and everything. I wonder whether the two of them get along.
I’m curious to know if the right-side-up flag guy understands what would drive a person to go out, buy an American Flag, and fly it upside down better than I do, or whether he’s disappointed.
Mostly I wonder how long this passive-aggressive flag nonsense will go on because how to live with one another isn’t a conversation we can have in semaphore.
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Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.