How nice to see the Valley thrust into the national headlines over “flag gate” or “flag flap” or whatever moniker has been put upon the episode at Hampshire College. As a predictor of things to come in “Trump time” we might one day be able to say (or lament): It began here.
I have stopped watching TV news and all the usual talking heads since the election, so I deliberately missed the hystericized commentary, choosing instead to read about it. But it could be a harbinger of things to come.
Trump’s tweet about flag burners having their citizenship taken away – a classic move from Soviet-era communist dictatorships – is a hint at some of the early legislation we might see from the GOP domination of the country. It has been pointed out that flag burning is protected speech, but it is not. The last time Republicans tried to outlaw the burning of the flag, the Supreme Court overturned it by a vote of 5-4. Once Trump appoints his own justice it could easily go the other way.
Especially as we can expect a goodly number of Democrats in the House and Senate to liquefy their backbones and go along with a new law, or even a constitutional amendment to prohibit desecrating the flag. (The last time that was tried it failed in the Senate by only one vote.)
Trump will need to throw some red meat to his base, and as the Wall Street robber barons and billionaires he is surrounding himself with will immediately go to work fleecing whatever is left of our commonweal, a “Protecting Old Glory Act” would be a good place for him to begin his con man’s misdirection of “We the People.”
And as usual, America will spend all its political capital fighting over exactly the wrong issue.
Don’t get me wrong, the flag is an important symbol. I saluted it for three years as a young infantryman, I have wanted to see it burned for the sins and crimes the government it represents has perpetrated over the years, I have proudly faced it while singing the national anthem at Red Sox games, I lead my students in the pledge every day, and I have cringed while watching it fetishcized by pseudo-patriots and even well-intentioned (if hyperventilating) liberals like our own Gazette which ran a banner headline, “Old Glory again flies at full staff,” as if the boys were again storming the beaches at Normandy for chrissakes.
But it is really a Rorschach test – it has no meaning but what the viewer brings to it. There has never been a Ku Klux Klan rally at which it did not fly, nor did Dr. King ever speak without that unfurled banner nearby. It was at My Lai when the bodies were stacked like cordwood, and over Lincoln’s shoulder when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
It was carried by those men who did storm the beaches to save the world from fascism. But it was also on the shoulder patches of those paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division (my old unit) when they invaded an English town prior to D-Day and methodically, maniacally, broke every single cup, glass and plate there because they’d heard a regiment of black GIs had already eaten off the same tableware.
And now poor, old Old Glory once again graces the flagpole at Hampshire College – meaning the dissidents lost, badly, baldly and publicly. This is the other side of the coin of our future in TrumpUSA®. For while the right can be counted on to make a furor over the flag, Hampshire President Jonathan Lash’s craven caving to pressure could also be a harbinger of what opposition to Trump might look like – dazed and confused.
One expects to be vilified for being a dissenter, but this is the “Age of the Bully” and Lash’s foolish decision to rescind his original foolish decision, to me, was a response to the kind of bullying Trump has made part of our new political discourse. Yes, Lash might say that the threat of violence made it a liability issue – better safe than firebombed.
But his retreat – which now appears a retreat for all anti-Trump forces – was couched in the language of freedom. His Gazette column Dec. 3 said his surrender was the result of “… dialogue … facilitated discussions … focus group sessions…” on his campus. “This is what free speech looks like,” he concluded.
Ah, no, Mister Prez, it’s not! Free speech ain’t any more free than freedom is. It would have served Da Cause better had you just admitted you made a mistake and would rectify your personal error. As it is, we are just one more point behind, and it was an own goal. We can ill afford any more such losses.
P.S. And to the moron who burned the flag in the first place: you should Google “Archduke Ferdinand” and “road to hell paved with.”
Joe Gannon, author, lives in Northampton. He can be reached at jgannonoped@gmail.com.