Soiling Old Glory
For this Memorial Day, a reflection on service, the flag, and America's mixed record of expanding its promise of freedom
“On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Coast Guard, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your father’s honorable and faithful service.”
These words, softly spoken by a serviceman to my oldest brother at our father’s funeral, broke me: the solemnity, the grief, the flag. Paul A. Blanks, Sr. lived to be 83 years old, well over a half-century removed from the service that earned that ceremony. He served in the USCG in the years in the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a Black man in Jim Crow New Orleans. I wept.
Dad and I never talked directly about his experiences from that part of his life, though a few years before he died—and roughly one year after Hurricane Katrina—we drove together along the Gulf Coast after a family reunion in Atlanta. On one Sunday morning, downtown New Orleans was startlingly empty, save the crowd pouring out of Harrah’s casino and occasional National Guard personnel smoking cigarettes on street corners in desert fatigues. Out in the lower wards beyond the FEMA trailers, there was still no power in the houses, though here and there people sat on the porches looking out into the street and the ubiquitous “X-coded” homes on which spray paint told brief stories of rescuers, survivors, and victims. And there were piles of detritus serving as roadblocks down the neighborhood streets like some dystopian hinterland in civil war. For me, it was a surreal first trip to the Big Easy.
“Not one mile over.”
In my mind, my father never obeyed the posted speed limit when I rode with him as a child. Whether he was driving his sky blue Chevette hatchback or his ancient rusted red Chevy pickup, I had to hold on to something to keep from being tossed around as he accelerated or navigated winding streets.
When I approached driving age, he—a retired police detective—taught me how to speed while minimizing my chances of being pulled over. Nearly 15 years later, he rented a Cadillac for that long trip South so I volunteered to drive the entirety of the more than 1,800 miles round trip. Like I imagined a younger version of my father would, I sped the whole way down. He didn’t criticize my driving once, though he probably brought up the time when I was 16 and flipped my mother’s car onto its roof. Because I walked away from the wreck without serious injury, that incident was one of his favorite ways to both humble me and crack himself up at the same time.
I drove through southern Indiana, then Kentucky, and Georgia to the reunion at a Stone Mountain hotel. (Yes, that Stone Mountain.) We resumed the trip after seeing family, and I drove the rest of the way through the Peach State, into Alabama, and eventually to his parents’ home state of Mississippi. At no point did Dad say anything about my heavy foot. As we approached the next border, though, he said with a seriousness I wasn’t expecting, “Don’t speed in Louisiana.”
“Really?”
“Not one mile over.”
“OK.”
I should have pushed the issue, and not interrogating him about his time in New Orleans is among my biggest regrets. I don’t know how much he would have told me, really, because he was not one to detail hardships in his personal life...to put it mildly. Nevertheless, this proud twenty-year veteran of law enforcement wanted no part of Louisiana’s good ol’ boys. This apprehension wasn’t about getting a ticket: he didn’t trust them and that mistrust ran deep.
And perhaps had I sped through Louisiana, nothing bad would have happened, whether I had been pulled over or not. But the possibility was acute enough for my very pro-law enforcement father to speak of Louisiana cops in the same tone he spoke of criminals. One need not believe ‘All Cops Are Bastards’ to fear the ones who are.
To protect and to serve whom?
The fraught relationship between Black Americans and the police is an old one, and part of a deeper very complicated interplay between us and the country of our birth. In her opening essay for the 1619 Project, Nikole-Hannah Jones described how she felt the feeling when her Black veteran father flew the U.S. flag:
So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this Black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused Black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.
Though I never felt that way—my dad, too, flew the flag in front of our home—I recognized the sentiment. Referencing a scene from Richard Wright, James Baldwin referred to Black life in the “sunlit prison of the American Dream.” The promise and reality of America have never been the same for so many born and raised under poor conditions or treated badly because of race and heritage. And too often in our history that mistreatment was aided, abetted, or directed by police officers.
People on the margins come from all races and ethnicities, but the sins of slavery and segregation put Black Americans in direct antagonism with law enforcement, both public and private. Whereas slave-catching posses and Bull Connor’s officers were enforcing explicitly anti-Negro laws, today’s police enforce facially race-neutral prohibitions, but most aggressively in poor Black neighborhoods. (That most major U.S. cities and many smaller ones continue to have poor Black neighborhoods is generally taken for granted, which is notable in its own right.)
Some commentators have drawn a straight line between the openly racist eras and today. Although such a linear relationship oversimplifies the evolution of American policing, millions of innocent Black Americans all over the country have been stopped, questioned, and searched by police officers in ways that most similarly situated white Americans simply do not endure. This disparate treatment implies an enduring lesser social and legal status for Black people in American society. With this context, some Black resentment of national symbols like the flag—which adorns many police uniforms today—should not surprise anyone paying attention.
Desecrating the Flag
Since the ascension of Trumpism, the U.S. flag has been increasingly used as an offensive weapon in our politics, though it is not a new phenomenon. Republicans have long tried to co-opt the flag and patriotism writ large as their exclusive brand, belittling Democrats’ and other left-of-center folks’ love of country. (In my teen years, I was one of those Republicans.)
But this latest variant of populist patriotism is showing up at rallies and demonstrations, sometimes carried by masked men wearing tactical gear—or jerry-rigged sports equipment—who may or may not be visibly armed. In their hands, the flag represents intimidation and the thinly veiled threat of violence. This violent Americanism culminated at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, not very far from my home in D.C., but as I had previously written in the Washington Post, the trend had been building over time.
Stepping back from the peak of potential violence at Trump rallies and the like, the flag has become a prop in tough-guy, patriotic merchandise from t-shirts, to hats, to swimwear, and firearms accessories. And one of the themes seen often on cars and trucks on the road is the flag combined with the “thin blue line” that is supposed to represent police officers. One version combines these elements with the Punisher skull logo, taken from the Marvel comics antihero who hunts and kills mobsters after his family is murdered. Many cops and their supporters have put some version of the emblem on their personal gear or vehicles.
It turns out that those who so ostentatiously embrace the flag tend to promote the profit-making of its desecration. The U.S. Flag Code lists a number of ways that one can disrespect the flag, including that it “should never be used as wearing apparel” and “should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.”
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Personally, I’m not reflexively offended by flag clothing or artistic changes to Old Glory, flag code guidance notwithstanding. (Indeed, I’m rather fond of the re-rendering of the flag in red, black, and green by David Hammons and the provocative art of Faith Ringgold.) But neither am I promoting an exclusive, hateful version of Americanness.
Shallow Christian Jingoism
What is offensive is the hypocritical and myopic view of America that assumes a white Christian conservative version is the true patriotism, and it fetishizes police and vigilante violence against fellow Americans who don’t fit that mold in one or more ways. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a white Christian conservative, the specific type of American politics these symbols reflect and the white Christian nationalist ideal it appeals to are anathema to the pluralistic, tolerant freedom many Americans grew up cherishing. (Certainly, this is not the Christianity I was taught, but again, neither is this the conservatism in which I once believed.)
And the hypocrisy is not limited to their narrower view of American freedom. The hollow valorization of the U.S. military became the paper-thin mask for the reactionary shadow-banning of NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick, recall, took a knee during the national anthem in protest of police violence in 2016. None of his most vociferous critics cared that he shifted to taking the knee after an Army special forces combat veteran suggested the knee as a more respectful way to protest than sitting on the bench during the pre-game ritual. The retired green beret once even stood next to him, hand over heart, as Kaepernick knelt during pregame to support the quarterback’s free speech.
Then-candidate Donald Trump, predictably, used this protest to stoke culture war resentments, “I think [kneeling] is a terrible thing, and you know, maybe he should find a country that works better for him. Let him try, it won't happen.” Returning several times to the controversy during his administration, he later tweeted “You have to respect our flag and our country. I want that as president and I'd want that as a citizen,” and “We should be standing up straight and tall, ideally with a salute, or a hand on heart. There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag - NO KNEELING!”
Trump himself feels no compunction for dishonoring American war dead, calling them “suckers” and “losers.” This shouldn’t have been surprising, as he had previously criticized and insulted a Gold Star family while campaigning for the presidency.
The Khans, whose son Humayun died in combat in Iraq, had appeared at the Democratic National Convention to push back against Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry. In response, the ever-sensitive Trump implied Mrs. Khan was silent beside her husband on stage for religious-cultural reasons, doubling down on his anti-American insinuations against non-white, non-Christian Americans.
Trump exemplifies the faux patriotism that infects much of today’s American right: it doesn’t really care about service, sacrifice, and honor; it doesn’t value the freedoms of speech and belief practiced by others; and it doesn’t recognize an American identity that looks and worships differently than its adherents. To such people, the flag is a cudgel with which to beat ideological opponents and others not like themselves. The stars and stripes are a symbol of their identity—with a reactionary and hostile exclusion of others—and they mock and smear the nation they pretend to venerate with their grotesque, spittle-flecked, flag-draped patriot cosplay.
Red-Hatted Anti-Patriots
The entire Trump phenomenon compounds levels of pathetic irony. The counter-protests to “Black Lives Matter” demonstrations prominently display the American flag as the retort to the assertion that the United States generally and the police specifically uphold systematic white supremacy. It is as if, when activists accuse the nation of racism, the Republican crowd responds, “America, Fuck Yeah!”
When the red-hatted anti-patriots stormed the Capitol on January 6, the thin blue line adorned more than a few star-spangled banners. Cops were on both sides of the riot that day, and some Capitol police officers were almost certainly beaten with those symbols that reflect the belief that Blue Lives Matter. In that moment, the men and women of the thin blue line quite literally protected democracy from those who wanted to overthrow it in their name.
What has always made America great has been its evolution and general expansion of freedom to more people inside and outside of its borders. It’s never been perfect, nor has the expansion been constant or consistent. That freedom is sometimes rescinded, as we see now, by those who use “freedom” and “liberty” in the same coded way they manipulate the stars and stripes. Their pride in American liberty is not a genuine love of country, it’s a masturbatory identitarian fantasy. Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, described Trumpian politics—and broader American politics—as fashion:
“[Steve Bannon] got it immediately. He believes in the whole Andrew Breitbart doctrine that politics is downstream from culture, so to change politics you need to change culture. And fashion trends are a useful proxy for that. Trump is like a pair of Uggs, or Crocs, basically. So how do you get from people thinking ‘Ugh. Totally ugly’ to the moment when everyone is wearing them? That was the inflection point he was looking for.”
They literally wear their cultural politics on their sleeves, their red MAGA hats, or bastardized flags. This is their America: a truly exceptional idea dragged into a cesspool by a mob of the wholly unexceptional.
The flag becomes a symbol not of the country and the freedom for which it stands, but their strident opposition to their cultural enemies—fellow Americans, usually—as evidenced by puerile slogans like “Let’s Go Brandon” and displaying gaudy AR-15 flag art.
Reconciling the American Ideal with American Reality
While the damage Trump’s election did to the country cannot be undone in any real sense, it does not have to define the nation going forward. My love for the idea of America hasn’t wavered these past few years. Indeed, the fear of its irrevocable loss has made me better understand how precious it is on a visceral level. As Baldwin famously wrote, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Of course, it bothers me that this rabid faction of sub-literates has seized our national standard to lead their death spiral of racist incoherence. Their vainglorious flag frippery is a source of personal irritation and revulsion. I clench my teeth—and sometimes my fists—at sporting events when surrounded by such flag-bedecked goons who would just as soon sing “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” than the national anthem, as if America’s value was limited to its capacity for bombing brown people into oblivion. Their chauvinistic white resentment painfully stokes resentment in me when I see the flag out of place and assume—usually correctly—it’s one of “them.”
But then I think of my dad, serving his country as a young man even though the federal government wouldn’t protect his right to vote until he was 37 years old. I think of the dangers he must have faced for wearing his nation’s uniform in 1940s Louisiana; or, for that matter, if he wore it riding in the segregated train cars or bus seats on leave going home to Indiana.
After he left the service, he came home and started a family…and then, eventually, another one. He saw all of his children reach adulthood and met five of his six grandchildren. He lived long enough to see a Black president, and I can attest that lifelong Republican was an enthusiastic Obama supporter. After all, despite being a police officer, he was a “race man,” albeit in the conservative mold.
And when my father’s time came, his country—which, for so much of his life, explicitly or implicitly said he and his family weren’t worthy of equal rights; that abused him and denied him equal opportunities—thanked him for his service with the honor and dignity he could not have expected growing up in Depression-era Fort Wayne.
The honor guard presented my brother with that American flag that they carefully and ceremoniously folded, and said those simple words to simply recognize our father’s fulfilled commitment to his country. It’s a small gesture, really, but an important one that reminds me of what the flag should represent. This small act could not undo everything that was done to him, nor does it negate all of the problems Black Americans still endure; and it wasn’t meant to. But there is humility in the idea that America and its symbols stand for something bigger than any of us individually.
And so I unclench my teeth, remove my ballcap, and place it over my heart when the anthem plays, though I can’t fully shake the anger for what Trump and his ilk have done to our country. I know that the hate he tapped into has always been there—the anti-Black violence and the racism that animates it never entirely disappeared—but his right-wing populism brought blatant racism from out of the shadows and into our institutions and politics.
When I look at our flag, I’m unsure whether the American experiment will continue to endure. But in spite of the terrible things I know about my country, I’m not giving up on trying to make it the place so many of us want it to be.