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The laws raise the issue of what desecration of or contempt for the flag really means. No one doubts that burning a flag, spitting or stomping on it, represents contemptuous treatment. At the same time, the public relations talent of the radical left and the outrage of the right have exaggerated the number of such incidents. The more difficult question is to decide whether or not it is desecration to wear a flag-shirt, or to fly the flag upside down, or to substitute a peace sign or ecology symbol for the flag's canton.
What the Flag Means
Protocols governing the use of the flag dictate that it should not be used as a costume—so that Uncle Sam should be indicted first, followed by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Abbie Hoffman and millions of the young, hardhats, police, and even those who wear the flag as a lapel pin. Against all the rules, construction men leave their gigantic flags hanging from girders, unlighted through the night and exposed in any weather.
For years, politicians, including Abraham Lincoln, published their campaign messages against a flag backdrop—a practice that was partly responsible for a wave of flag laws around the turn of the century. According to custom, the flag should be raised and lowered by hand; yet Barry Goldwater has his flagpole in Scottsdale, Ariz., run by an electronic gadget. Will the producers of Myra Breckinridge (see CINEMA] be arrested for a scene in which Raquel Welch, wearing star-spangled bra and striped bikini pants, performs a spectacularly unnatural act on a young man?
Obviously, the offense is in the sensibility of the beholder. But the fight for the flag is much deeper than legal is sues. Says Dr. Paul Chodoff, professor of psychiatry at George Washington University: "How a man feels about the flag may be a better index of his feeling about the country than what he says about the country. For the hardhats, the flag is an ego ideal purified of all doubts and contradictions. The flag also represents the motherland, to be defended like their wives and mothers against the assaults of the rapist flag burners. For the radicals, the flag represents a negative identity. They express their hatred and contempt and lover's disappointment in America."
The flag has always occupied a much stronger place in American life and mythology than have flags in other countries. In a nation created as an experiment, a republic as much willed as evolved, the flag has embodied an entire national idea. And in "one nation under God," the idea implies divinity. For many Americans, the flag is literally a sacred object. Insists Arthur Stivaletta, an organizer of last April's "Wake Up America" rally in Boston: "I see the flag as I see God: a supreme being." Now hear the word of Billy Graham: "The American flag is what the black man means when he says Soul. It's like the Queen of England—the flag is our Queen."