Flagged Out

There's something reassuring about the fact that the flag, the old Stars and Stripes, can still kick up so much popular controversy. It happened in 1984-85 when pop-phenom of the year Bruce Springsteen made the flag the visual centerpiece of his Born in the USA album and tour. It happened again last year, when the Bush/Atwater crowd pinned Michael Dukakis to the wall on the Pledge of Allegiance.

America's universal symbols are few and far between. And when you get down to it, most of them are commercial, like the Coca-Cola logo and the golden arches. So it's a little bit touching to see that people still have some sort of allegiance to a not-for-profit, unregistered, public domain trademark -- even if that allegiance does tend to function at the same level as the Coke vs. Pepsi brand loyalty.

And now, with this past summer's Supreme Court decision overturning flag desecration laws, and the Bush administration's subsequent attempts to revise the First Amendment, the flag as sound-bite fodder is most certainly back. And I, like Michael Dukakis before me, would just as soon not discuss the issue on the terms circumstances have dictated.

I dare say that for most Americans who, as Arlo Guthrie once said, are "trying to stop war and stuff," flag-burners are an embarrassment. I know the First Amendment arguments for defending flag-burners. I agree with them. They're right. But it still rubs me the wrong way to have to defend the practice.

By disposition and political judgment, I'm inclined to favor a "recapture-the-flag" strategy toward the symbols of American patriotism. I tend to think that Bruce Springsteen played the flag game pretty well. He put Old Glory forward as an open-ended assertion, without embroidery or comment, and then proceeded to heap hot coals of ambivalence upon the initial "the pride is back" responses.

If the flag is in fact a universal American symbol, then it has to be big enough to contain even its opposition. That's what the Supreme Court said. And as a corollary I would add that the opposition needs to be big enough, and humble enough, to include itself under that flag and take responsibility for it -- even for the sins committed under it.

That said, the right to burn the flag does still matter. And it matters in some ways that cut far deeper than the conventionally legalistic -- and bloodless -- civil liberties arguments. It matters first and foremost as a statement about American identity.

Performance artist Laurie Anderson, commenting on the themes of her mega-opus United States, once said that she was especially pleased to live in a country whose national anthem ends with a question mark. She pointed out that every time we sing that much-maligned tune we're asking, "Is the flag still there? Can you see it?"

That was the point of the Supreme Court decision -- and the point that the Bush bunch willfully misses. As Anderson and a surprising Court majority seem to know, if America's symbols stand for anything, they stand for free and open-ended debate over their definition. If they signify any meaning, as such, it is to be found only in the struggle over their meaning. To declare that meaning fixed, that debate closed, and that struggle decided is to declare America itself over and done. And if that is true, then a symbol like the flag is robbed of its power. It's not even worth burning.

In his dissenting opinion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist stated the case well for the Bush-bunch view of America as a closed case. Wrote Rehnquist, "The American flag has come to be the visible symbol embodying our nation ... The flag is not simply another 'idea' or 'point of view' competing for recognition in the market-place of ideas."

Whether Rehnquist realizes it or not, such abstract talk of "embodying our nation" assumes that there is an American nation -- like the French, German, Japanese, or Lakota Sioux nations -- which is ethnically, culturally, and linguistically defined. But America is not, or wasn't supposed to be, and shouldn't be, that kind of nation.

AMERICA IS AN IDEA. Before it was a political entity, it was an idea about freedom and equality, imperfectly expressed in the Declaration of Independence. That idea has continued to evolve, sometimes growing and sometimes shrinking, as a consequence of open debate and social struggle. Once it was an idea about white, male freedom. Now it is, or can be, somewhat more. But, Justice Rehnquist to the contrary, if America is anything worthy of even the most provisional allegiance, it is precisely because the fact of American identity and its symbols are ideas among others in a marketplace of ideas.

Symbols, like the flag, are both the language of a culture and the alphabet of that language. If the flag is the symbol of the American battleground of ideas, then it has to stay in the public domain. It can't be trademarked or copyrighted, like the Disney characters, or deified, like the British royal family.

Perhaps the most cogent comment on the Supreme Court flag-burning decision came from an anonymous philosopher in one of those "person-in-the-street" interviews on public radio. This unsung master of American ambiguities, without betraying a trace of irony, said simply, "Hey, if it's my flag, and I bought it and I paid for it, then I can burn it if I want to."

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.