Rumination on The Flag

The US flag is all state glorification, the 13 lucky originals showing their red blood and whiteskins, and the current crop high in an orderly constellation; few flags in this world have an agenda of development as ours. I was born between the admittances of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959 but I haven't seen the 49 star flag which surely must have flown during that summer; and at some point someone must have designed a contingent 51 star model for POOH purposes. Our flag is all about states asserting themselves as individuals, nothing could be more American.

You can't be a country without one. Even Antactica has a flag, although it is just a mindless silhouette of the continent, white on blue. The British Indian Ocean Territories has a cool one, a union jack in the upper left like other Brit-derived places, but with wavy blue stripes, like ocean waves, and a palm tree and the royal crown. Nepal is the only country that doesn't use a rectangle, they have a double golf-flag design. But only the US has this long orderly development where the design has systematically changed in order to accommodate the number of states; it engages one's geometric and compositional sensibilities.

In Jamaica Plain, MA, where I live, the gayest zip code in a state lurching headlong into what will be endless years of wrangling and legal conflicts over same-sex marriage, most of the flags I see fly in front of gas stations run by immigrants. But bleached by the sun the red strips fade to pink; lordy, this is indeed gay America... Out my window flies the noblest flag in the neighborhood, in front of the Mann-Mann (same sex again!) Funeral Home, where for a year has been festooned a big RW&B banner reading "We Support All Our Troops" - well, Of course a funeral home would support the war, good for business...

I am somewhat disheartened, naively perhaps, that flag hygiene has declined since I was in the cub scout honor guard, and people do not replace worn flags or take them down at dusk, or declare Unclean one that has violated the touching-the-ground taboo. Perhaps it is because the scoundrels keep wrapping themselves in it; they can give it a bad name; jingoism leaves such a bad taste, if we asked to stop thinking in order be team players. Some of us Americans happen to believe in the legacy of the Enlightenment that the Founding Fathers bestowed to us. We have a nice flag, and it has been a powerful symbol for all that can be good in people when used for the proper purposes. Part of the origin of flags must be as an organizational battlefield tool, and in the past most were in truth no better than that; let not our Old Glory be just another military patch. Things by themselves have no meaning, only the meaning we put into them.

With some irony the flag of the Russia is now blue, white and red; no political party symbol like the USSR. Russia doesn't really have a ruling party anymore, anyway, just a Putinized coalition; he's the doctor and they were sick and they trust the cure. Hope it all works out. Who isn't disarmed by Canada's wise choice to honor the showiest of trees - that's a flag that doesn't seem well suited to fomenting bloodlust on the battlefield.

Having a flag out my window is a practical advantage as I always know the speed and direction of the wind. Flags depend on renewable wind power; no fossil fuels consumed as it represents the fluid patterns of the air; it brings us back to a basic, even as we may sit inside sealed buildings with false atmospheres and temps; remember, our flag cannot fly indoors, it can only hang. Is America changing from an outdoor to an indoor country now as we are up to our knees in the electrically driven things that enable modernity? Maybe soon they'll have a light-sensitive flag that can represent flying for the indoor people to enjoy, and sure that would be cool, maybe it would flutter flawlessly, and not get tangled and wrapped around the pole. But I agree with the central doctrine of American military thinkers since 1941, Air Superiority; air is superior.