A Flag to Burn

Last night I attended a flag burning. Athens' most interesting gallery had an opening featuring anti-authoritarian themed works from a variety of artists. This included a charred corpse in the sand manufactured out of melted green army men, a 15-foot high mushroom cloud with a rope ladder hanging out of it (presumably a cross-reference to heaven), and a performance of a eulogy mourning the death of America (and our aspirations of human rights) at the hands of a primitive authoritarian element.

Later on in the night, the attendees were invited outside to listen to an a capella Star Spangled Banner and the burning of a lighter fluid soaked flag - "as a celebration of the freedom that we have to do so...for now." Others were invited to throw smaller flags in the fire. The reactions were varied. The crowd stood in silence. Some people left. One lady said that it brought tears to her eyes. The event was marked with a strange anticlimax, though.

The sense was due, I think, to a broader process of the banalization of the flag in the larger culture. On one hand, the post-911 flag is ubiquitous - stamped on everything but the toilet paper. This might signal the increased importance of the flag as an object of veneration. But this use has diluting effect, too. No longer is the family flag flown and taken down each night, folded, and burned ceremoniously at the end of its life. Now every SUV is marked with a series of magnetic "loyalties," one of which is probably the US flag. (Another might be one's favorite sports team logo. At Penn State, they managed to conserve space on the tailgate by merging the two.) A million tattered plastic car window flags have flown into roadside ditches. I find them there all the time on my walks. Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren have most successfully wringed the recognizability capital out of the flag, but they are certainly not the only ones.

In the famous Texas v. Johnson flag burning case, which ruled against the vague Texas statute prohibiting flag burning, the justices debated the idea of descecration. They came to agree that that descecration required something venerable in the first place. Makes sense. The problem now is that the flag burning amendment debated in congress every Flag Day is in danger of becoming increasingly meaningless. I wouldn't be surprised if the issue goes away completely. This is not for lack of veneration, but rather a change in the relationship between flag and citizen. The new relationship is a symptom of the corporatization of civil life - that a flag exists not as a object that symbolizes a set of common values, but rather an object of consumption that expresses the most primitive (go, team) kind of loyalty. In short, the flag, that symbol of both the greatest (of democratic aspirations) and the worst (of nationalist imperialism), has been all but bled dry of its significance.

When the last bit of charred flag dropped off the pole, the person with the candle said very matter-of-factly, "This flag was made in China." For better or worse, I long for the days when we had a flag worth burning.