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At the same time, the flag is a collage of collective memories and assumptions about what America is and ought to be. W.S. Barber, commander of a Houston American Legion post that will fly 1,500 flags along the city's freeways on Independence Day, spent three years in a Japanese prison camp during World War II. "I was out from under this flag for three years," he says. "It's a symbol that means apple pie and baseball, and a long, hard pull for me without it." Boston City Councilwoman Louise Day Hicks, who wears a rhine-stone-spangled flag pin, defines the whole matter with finality: "The flag is motherhood and apple pie."
Still, Americans are increasingly troubled about the moral content of their assumptions. A group of Marines in Viet Nam were discussing the flag raising over Iwo Jima, that heroic image of World War II. "Hell," said one Marine, "a man could get himself killed doing that." "Within the kids' lifetimes, this flag hasn't stood for the things it stood for when John Glenn and I were young." says Allen Brown, a Cincinnati lawyer. "The flag then was still the flag of the dream. It's hard for us to understand kids who have only a book idea of the flag. They didn't see men die within the framework of that idealism of World War II. It's as if people see the flag the way Moses saw the golden calf. Half our population remembers it as a blessing, and the other half, who have grown up since World War II, see it only as a golden calf. If only both could get beyond the symbolism."
The battle over the flag tends to erase distinctions. Says S.I. Hayakawa, president of San Francisco State College: "You can be a rightist or a leftist and be a patriotic American. When a symbol becomes a fetish, then you make the semantic error of confusing the symbol with what it is supposed to symbolize." The flag in theory symbolizes national unity, but such a unity in the U.S. has always been somewhat illusory except when war or depression joined together the nation's disparate cultures to overcome an overriding threat. In any case, national unity can never be legislated or policed into being. Ideological bullying cannot conjure it up when it does not exist, nor when it does can the infantile desecrations of the radical left destroy it.
James Steam, 24, fought for three years as a Marine in Viet Nam. "I didn't fight for the flag," he says. "I fought for the freedom we were supposedly there to protect. When I come back and try to exercise that freedom, they say you don't have the right." He wears a flag shirt anyway.