Don has a flag kink
Trump’s people are trying to pretend he’s not picking a fight but actually reaching out to embrace us all.
The White House on Monday sought to soften the president’s controversial comments.
“Celebrating and promoting patriotism in our country is something that should bring everybody together,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “This isn’t about the president being against something. This is about the president being for something.”
Yeah, for everybody doing what he says, and for his absolute power to tell us all what to do and make us obey. He’s down with that.
At a campaign rally for Sen. Luther Strange (R) on Friday in Huntsville, Ala., Trump previewed the gains he foresaw by denouncing players who voiced political opinions on the field. The first owner who bans players from protesting on the field “will be the most popular person in this country,” he suggested, giving political advice that only he has taken so far.
And it’s not making him more popular. The people who love everything he does are happy with it, but they already loved him, so that doesn’t gain him anything. Sad!
There is little question that fights over the flag helped Trump when he was a private citizen and then as a candidate. On his golf courses, he has used flags — typically giant ones on poles as tall as eight stories — as a way of shaming local authorities with whom he has tangled over other issues. He put up one on a California course, refusing to pay the required permitting fee, and another at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., in clear violation of local rules. In both cases, he publicly argued that local officials were unpatriotic, even though they were only following regulations. “The town council of Palm Beach should be ashamed of itself. They’re fining me for putting up an American flag,” Trump fumed to the news media.
I suppose if he suffocated someone with an American flag, the cops should applaud because flag?
During his presidential campaign, he repeatedly used respect for the flag as a stand-in for his own connection to his supporters, mocking those who disrespected it as un-American elites. “Total disrespect for the American flag,” Trump said at a Greensboro, N.C., rally in October, after a protester held up a flag upside down and began shouting. “That’s what’s happening to our country.”
A few weeks earlier, when Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers decided to sit for the national anthem before games in protest of racial inequality, Trump had a quick rejoinder. “I think it’s a terrible thing,” he said.
Those comments were quickly forgotten in the quick-moving presidential campaign. But Trump returned to them weeks after his election, when a flag at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., was burned by an unknown vandal as it hung on a campus pole. Trump’s response was to propose new consequences for a form of protest that the Supreme Court ruled in 1989 is protected under the Constitution.
“Perhaps a loss of citizenship or a year in jail!” the president-elect tweeted.
Oh yes, I’d forgotten that. He gives us so much to be disgusted at, the older examples fade out.
My favorite comment so far: You know what really disrespects the flag of the United States? Flying the Confederate flag.
(And I don’t remember where I saw that. Apologies if it was here!)
Donald the Donald will stand at the salute if he sees this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c49gVR5oV-k
IMPORTANT: MAKE SURE THERE IS NO REPEAT FUNCTION ON, OR HE’LL BE SALUTING FOREVER.
We British types tend to find the flag fetish hard to understand. If anything, most of us are slightly embarrassed about flags. Oh, there’s still a contingent that stands for the national anthem in their own homes with nobody watching and which probably salutes tatty bits of fabric with a mess of crosses on. There’s a larger cohort that vaguely recognises the image of the flag as symbolic of something that never existed in the first place and, if it had, would have been deplorable anyway. Hence Brexit.
But very few people see an actual rendition of our horrible flag as a sacred object. If there are rules about whether flags are allowed to touch the ground or how they should be disposed of, nobody knows about them or takes the slightest notice of them. Most of us don’t even know that there’s a right and wrong way up our flag can be because holy fuck nobody can tell which way up it is without a tape measure anyway and NOBODY AT ALL CARES. By far and away the greatest use of the Union Flag is to symbolise tacit support of a team in a football match that the British will inevitably lose. And t-shirts in the 80s. And James Bond’s fucking parachute.
Here’s the way I think about it. Suppose competitions were held in the US and UK to design new national flags and citizens voted for which one to adopt. The US one would probably be relentlessly patriotic with dogged symbolism and the whole thing would be taken very seriously indeed. The UK one would be a picture of an arse with “FUCK OFF” written across it in childish letters and a crudely drawn cock and balls in the top right hand corner. Flaggy McFlagface.
But what we do understand is flagrant disregard of authority. We expect authority to quietly get on with its job without telling us what to do or think. If it stops us doing what we’ve always done, so much for authority. Hence, again and mistakenly, Brexit. Sure, we vote in terrible governments every so often but it’s not as though we’re going to do what they tell us or anything.
This is the contradiction we see in the US: generally defiant, independent people who are obsessed with doing what they’re told by anyone with a special hat. Odd.
We’re unusual in the U.S. – not unique, but unusual – in not having a state associated, even imperfectly, with a nationality or other old symbolic bonds. The United Kingdom, for instance, may be divided among four nationalities – and I wouldn’t want to minimize that – but there’s the single monarchy and something of a single British identity beyond English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish. France has the French language in particular as a tool of national identity, but language and ethnicity in general get used by most states to establish and maintain a sense of “us”.
It’s not perfectly natural or uniform for any state – maintaining that French or Spanish identity is a lot of work against regional resistance, and the extent of the Russian and Chinese identities has been the result of outright force for centuries. But the U.S. has been caught between a political ideal and partial reality of being a polyglot, multinational state on one hand and being mostly English-speaking and predominantly a sort of developing ethnicity based on a mingling of European descendants. The first strain leaves us in need of something to provide a sense of unity, consistent with diverse languages, religions, and ancestry; the second suggests creating such an identity on a classic model, but would mean excluding or at least problematizing the minorities.
So here come the flags, the anthems, and the pageantry. They’re straightforward symbols that need not be tied up with ethnic ties and aren’t all tied to language. (I’ve never heard the National Anthem in Spanish, but I’m pretty confident I could.) So they would be suitable as a touchstone for national identity on either conception, but they can also take on a kind of sacred value (just because they’re almost arbitrary) that can be used as a cudgel to mark off some as unpatriotic, as Not One of Us, for unwillingness to take them as sacred.
Age and size of the society is another factor. People can be pretty casual about their affection for and allegiance to their neighborhood without it being insincere, just because it’s close by and familiar. When you can readily roam from one end of your nation to the other – from a combination of size, affluence, and good transportation – and when the roots of the society go back ten centuries and more, it can be taken for granted quite comfortably for all concerned. When it spans a continent and only a few generations, you can’t have that easy confidence and if you’re going to keep a nation at all, you’ve got to be a bit more solemn about the ties that bind it.
Jeff:
I get what you’re saying, but it’s a fucking FLAG. It’s a symbol, yes, but a symbol of something awful. And what Trump is banging on about isn’t the symbol so much as the actual bit of knitting. In his ill-considered kneejerking, he wants everyone (American or not, presumably) to do – for some reason – the exact opposite of prostrate themselves to the actual bits of fabric, wherever they may be.
I couldn’t give the slightest fuck about why people might or might not consider a flag sacred. Neither should anyone else, it’s the most ludicrous idea there could possibly be.
That said, I thought despite myself that your post was interesting ;)
Ha! Righto. I’m not going to claim it’s not stupid or grotesque – I’m just aiming at an explanation. Me, for symbols of national unity, I’m fond of the Constitution (warts and all, and certainly open to improvement). The trouble with a flag is that you can load anything into it as a symbol, and what people have loaded into ours is often awful.