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Contentious symbol

Thursday, June 11, 2009

THIS WEEKEND Flag Day is observed. It’s not actually a federal holiday, and I dare say many Americans see it pass each year –  despite its deep roots, from a 1917 presidential proclamation by Woodrow Wilson, and an echo of the flag’s own adoption by the Second Continental Congress on June 14th, 1777 -  with not much more than a shrug.

A certain crop of TV news anchors and pundits, though, can be relied upon to display Stars and Stripes lapel-pins on Sunday – and predominantly on cable channels, of course. I expect they’ll include the same crew of so-called on-air “talent” which has been variously harrumphing or whining this last week about President Barack Obama “apologizing for America” everywhere he went in the Mid-East and Europe.

 

Their sartorial ostentation will serve to remind us of the political freight that the much-used and abused Red-White-and-Blue can be made to carry.

 

But who cares to remember now the bathetic kerfuffle that was raised (or at least stirred) by the insistent grilling of candidate Obama on ABC News’ so-called "debate" in Philadelphia - conducted by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, as they tried to discomfort the Illinois senator for not wearing such a pin.

 

That manufactured controversy was a true hallmark of the George W Bush years.

 

When the suits worn by Bush’s team (following the example, according to their own internal folklore, of the ultra-loyalist Budget Director Mitchell Daniels) began sprouting flag-pins in the wake of the September 11, 2001, few observed then that the neo-cons were taking up a Republican playbook last used by the Richard Nixon administration.

 

THE MEDIA BEAT has occasionally been admonished for harping a bit on those Nixon years (and the lessons of those years, too often forgotten), but I’m glad to be reminded by a sharp brand-new book, Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism from Dr Woden Teachout of Union Institute and University in Vermont, about exactly how the Nixon gang so determinedly hijacked the star-spangled banner.

 

They had seen of course the spread of flag-burning as a protest against the Vietnam War, and records now show that Nixon’s Chief of Staff H R Haldeman suggested in a 1970 cabinet meeting that all members should wear flag-pins in order “to stick it to the liberals”. Nixon himself followed this up with a directive memo to all the staff. Ten years later the right-wing historian Richard Brookhiser was recalling in the National Review that as a result such pins “became a sort of GOP costume”.

 

Indeed, in an almost Masonic way they functioned as a silent signal to all the “silent majority” that Nixon claimed to speak for.

 

But inevitably Watergate tarnished the symbol, and it’s significant that when Gerald Ford made his “Our long national nightmare is over” telecast in August 1974, his navy-blue suit jacket that evening was plain and unadorned.

 

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AT STRATEGIC MOMENTS during the 2008 campaign, Obama of course wore a pin – at least from April ’08 onward, having previously voiced the pointed (and I believe widely shared) judgment that wearing  the symbol had become “a substitute for true patriotism”. By then he was ready to reappropriate it.

 

And his campaign as a whole was retooled to undermine the Republicans' claim on patriotism - the spurious claim that in opposing Bush’s military adventurism, critics were being anti-American (just as in the 1970s Nixonites had slandered their Vietnam war critics as traitorous).

 

The key Obama stump passage went like this:

“There are patriots who supported this war in Iraq and patriots who opposed it, patriots who believe in Democratic policies and those who believe in Republican policies. The men and women who serve in our battlefields - some may be Democrats, some may be Republicans, others Independents - but they’ve fought together and died together under the same proud flag.”

 

And I well recall – as a lot of bemused Republican apparatchiks still do – Obama’s crowds waving American flags and chanting “USA! USA!”

 

Depending of course on how this Administration fares - not least in that greatest test of patriotic commitment (also familiar from the Nixon years) ... foreign battlefields that generate high body-bag counts - we can perhaps look forward to a period when the US flag is again a unifying symbol more than a divisive one.

  

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