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Old Glory has become so ubiquitous and frequently so bewildering in its political, cultural, commercial, civic and patriotic implications that millions of American moderates are left simply regretting the loss of its earlier innocence. Some have decided, rather sadly, not to fly the flag these days lest it be misinterpreted. In this sense, there is a new group of silent Americans—the ones who feel that their flag has been expropriated by the right or by commercialism, but also feel no impulse to turn it into a shirt.
Says one young Atlanta father: "I told the children we would not be getting the flag out for Flag Day this year. When I was a kid during the Second World War, the flag stood for something decent and humanitarian. But how do you tell children about a national sickness, or about the way that symbols of one ideal can be subverted to become symbols of something entirely different?" A Denver housewife, Mrs. Kitty Boyd, explains: "We have a flag in the closet, but I won't fly it right now, because right away I think: 'Republican, Nixon, war.' But please understand that if I dropped it or anything, I'd burn it as you're supposed to." Adds her husband Bill: "We've made the flag a sacred, spiritual kind of thing." Others are deeply unhappy about the furious ostentation or the denigration they see the flag enduring. One New York hardhat, Edward Polito, looked at the flag decals plastered on his coworkers' helmets and shook his head: "They should show the flag in their heart, not on their helmets." But he marched along with them anyway.
As in a spiraling arms race between nations, it is sometimes difficult to tell just who started the flag-waving. Certainly a primary stimulus for the newly demonstrative patriotism came from the much publicized antiwar dissent. Just as the televised image of flaming Vietnamese villages aroused visceral protest, the spectacle of flag burnings and Viet Cong banners detonated a deep patriotic emotion in millions of Americans.
Protest and Put-On
The young, especially of the campus left, often carry—or wear—the flag with a studied, shocking irreverence, a theatrical impulse common enough to the young in any period but skillfully developed now by the example of such public relations geniuses as Abbie Hoffman. Some, of course, costume themselves in the Stars and Stripes with no overt political intent. But however faddish the flag fashions are, they implicitly contain a put-on or a flare of adolescent rebellion. "Desecrating the flag is just fun," explains Beth Spencer, 21, of Berkeley. "It's burned, torn or worn for the sheer joy of doing something naughty and getting away with it." Says Carl Boockholdt, a boutique operator in Indianapolis: "It could be a parody type of feeling, to signify that the red, white and blue shouldn't be such a heavy symbol as it's been." Richard Spiegel, a member of the Boston cast of Hair, says simply: "This generation really has no sacred objects."