From the issue dated October 26, 2001
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The Stars and Stripes, American ChameleonBy KARAL ANN MARLINGMy newspaper came this morning with a big, sticky, reusable Post-it note affixed to the front page, obscuring the headline.
At the ballpark, it's no longer enough to pretend to sing the unsingable national anthem before the game starts. Now there are honor guards, yards of bunting dangling from the upper-deck seats, and flag garments reaching all the way from home plate to that dark corner out near third base. Old Ralph Lauren U.S.-flag sweaters, dug out of mothballs. Tommy Hilfiger T-shirts from a couple seasons back, bearing faint traces of mustard. New sweatshirts. Homemade pins, loops of ribbon in the colors of the flag to replace the pink loops for breast-cancer research that we all wore last month. "Oh, say, can you see ... ?" Yes, indeed. The great American flagorama of 2001 is hard to miss. A cynic might be forgiven for thinking that flags are another fashion trend, the latest conspiracy on the part of capitalism to separate honest Americans from their dollars. A subtle way of creating a link between patriotism and the company name. Or the opening wedge, perhaps, in less subtle efforts to sell the tragedy away. That's not a new phenomenon, of course. During the Civil War, Thomas Nast, the cartoonist, was hired by Harper's Weekly to comment on the conflict in pictures. One of his first and finest reports, published in January 1863, showed Santa Claus delivering presents to a Union camp somewhere in the South. The roly-poly little Santa, dressed in a furry, two-piece suit with red-and-white-striped trousers and a blue jacket decorated with stars, was one of the earliest representations of what would become the tall, goateed Uncle Sam, the ultimate personification of the flag. Santa-cum-Sam started life as a jovial messenger of commerce and industry, a bearer of pipes and books and Christmas presents galore. Santa has become just plain Santa in the years since, wearing a plain red suit and standing for American material abundance and seasonal generosity. Uncle Sam, meanwhile, has been all but forgotten, except for cameo appearances as a symbol for the nation in editorial cartoons. Sam's heyday came during World War I: a patriarchal, intimidating Uncle Sam, pointing directly out of the cover of Leslie's Weekly and accusing the reader of being unprepared for war. More than four million Sams pointed at the youth of America from posters that read, "I WANT YOU." It was as if the flag were speaking sternly to passersby, calling them to serve the nation -- or else. Today's flag is less demanding. And it feels a little like we've gotten our seasons mixed up. Jell-O, noted one startled journalist recently, was suddenly promoting molds in the shape of flags, usually unveiled only on the Fourth of July. Many retailers, however, found themselves embarrassed by their inability to display that sort of midsummer merchandise during the back-to-school and pre-Christmas seasons. Most of the flags and the other festive, tricolor regalia are manufactured in Taiwan and China and can't get here overnight. The calendar of symbols that defines the business cycle -- our American Book of Days -- is ill equipped to handle acts of terrorism. Manufacturers -- and buyers -- have tended to be content to schedule their patriotism. After September 11, that didn't work. In Minneapolis, people were actually begging store clerks for flag tchotchkes of any description -- for any wearable, foldable sign that they, too, felt the pain of their fellow Americans "out East." They weren't being swayed by clever ads or sneaky marketers. They were demanding patriotic stuff, even in the face of hand-printed signs that read, "No more flags here!!!!" When the stores failed to deliver, American ingenuity saved the day. The October 8 edition of People magazine carried a picture spread on do-it-yourself flags: the Pennsylvania man who had a flag shaved into the hair on his head; the Florida woman who painted her horse, Captain, in stars and stripes. Flags on baby diapers. Balloons. Umbrellas. "People want to show they are united," said the director of the National Flag Foundation. In North Miami, where a professional flag-and-banner company is struggling to keep up with orders, most of the seamstresses are Cuban refugees, proud to play the role of modern-day Betsy Rosses. Betsy Ross, as some of us may remember, was the Philadelphia lady who made the original flag for George Washington on or about June 1, 1776, but Betsy is no longer the Founding Mother-figure she used to be. In the 19th century, she was an exemplar of all the female virtues, including excellent skills with the needle and the ability to subordinate her own wishes to Washington's quirky insistence on five-pointed stars. During the 1876 Centennial Exposition, celebrated in Philadelphia, she was an appropriate heroine for girls expected to marry (Betsy was a widow) and stick to their sewing. Today, she is an anachronism -- rarely mentioned -- in a year when the American forces hurriedly sent to fight terrorism in Afghanistan include a full complement of women soldiers. We are also shying away from memories of the discord stirred by our flag. We're not talking about the various Constitutional amendments to prevent flag desecration that were discussed in the 1980s and '90s, with the bout of legislative hysteria that came in the wake of the Gulf War, when dissenting students (and even a professor) burned the flag as a gesture of protest. Nor about the Vietnam War, when hard hats clashed with hippies in the streets of New York, because the latter claimed the flag as a legitimate sign of dissent. We also forget, sometimes, that the very abstraction of the flag -- its flatness, its geometry, its mute inability to say precisely what the totemic colors signify -- has attached it to moments we do not wish to remember. The government tanks that stormed the Branch Davidian compound in Waco in 1993 were flying the flag on masts that shuddered violently every time the vehicles rammed the flimsy building. According to Timothy McVeigh, the road from Waco to Oklahoma City was mapped out that day under the banner of America. The anthem of the hour is Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." Taken in conjunction with the news media's images of waving flags, the deity and the Stars and Stripes are merged in an aura of secular religion. But in between the invocations of the "land that I love," the networks occasionally play snatches of Lee Greenwood's old c-and-w hit, "God Bless the USA." Written in another time of national crisis -- marines in Lebanon and Grenada -- the Greenwood song became the battle hymn of the Gulf War era. Like Berlin, Greenwood invoked God as an American ally, but he was more explicit about linking the deity to an abstract idea of freedom: "The flag still stands for freedom," says the refrain, "and they can't take that away!" The GI's of the '40s fought for Mom, home, and apple pie, all concrete manifestations of the country. The modern equivalents are the lofty -- and sometimes more-difficult-to-grasp -- imponderables of heaven, flag, and freedom. At the same time, we sometimes seem to be fighting for the freedom to treat our flag like a beach towel or a superhero's cape. Victorious Olympic hockey players swaddle themselves in the flag, and lady superstars of track-and-field events paint little flags on their two-inch fingernails. Of course, when Representative Patricia Schroeder was photographed for a magazine cover draped in Old Glory, the howls of outrage from defenders of that sacred emblem reverberated across the land, fueled by the audacity of an impious liberal adopting the flag for her own uses. Clearly, the debate over who can and cannot wear flags as shirts, sweaters, socks, bathing suits, and pantyhose (those two latter items available this week at the flag-swaddled Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minn.) has shifted its ground. Now, anything goes, as long as the flag is out there, endorsed by the Gap and Casual Corner. It is community property again, or rather, a sign of a vast longing for community now tapped not by consumption but by tragedy. But the question still remains. What does the flag mean? What does a flag mean when it drapes the coffin of a patriot, starts a ball game, stands wired to a little pole on the surface of the moon, and sparkles in rhinestones on the shoulder of my new coat? What do flags mean when we see them hanging in the Whitney Museum, hanging in frames because they are paintings of flags by Jasper Johns -- and since both are flat and red and white and blue, what is the difference between a Jasper Johns and an American flag? Carolyn Marvin, a professor once excoriated for burning a flag in Pennsylvania, later wrote a book on the flag with David W. Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag (1999), in which she explored the "deep, unspeakable meaning of the American flag" and the visceral responses it evokes in citizens. We can never fully answer what the flag, an ever-changing symbol, means. But even if definitions are hard to come by, it is important that our "flag [is] still there," much as Francis Scott Key saw it flying from the battlements of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. That it endures. One of the most poignant images created in the wake of September 11 was the AP photograph of three firemen raising a flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center. A deliberate invocation of the famous Joe Rosenthal shot of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, the kinship between the two pictures is less important than a common meaning of hope and determination. We survive. Karal Ann Marling is a professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B15
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education