Lean Left

Fetish Flags and Competitive Display

by KTK

September 6th, 2008

The GOP’s latest stupid stunt is to circulate a story about how they “rescued” a bunch of flags from the Democratic convention hall and are now distributing them to their supporters to show how much better Americans they are than the Democrats. As the Democratic organizers point out, it simply means they are thieves: the flags were leftovers that were being stored for use at rallies and other events later, and someone took them without permission, then lied about it. This is of a piece with the earlier, idiotic rash of GOP-sponsored stories about Obama’s lack of a flag lapel pin, who says the Pledge of Allegiance most often, which corner of an Obama pamphlet some blue and white stars were found on, and other forms of Republican ritual patriotic mating display (slogans on coins, military parades, public references to - but not material support for - veterans, and so on).

The flag has long since become a fetish object for the right wing - it has been embued with significance in and of itself, not merely as a symbol of something. The right wing reacts to the symbol as if it were the object symbolized - they treat it as having the value inherent in the thing it refers to, rather than as a reminder of it. (The Fox News story about the stolen Democratic flags referred to them as “orphans”.) And this, too, is a part of their tendency to fetishize everything they don’t want anyone to question or think about rationally: the fetus, veterans, “security”, “freedom” (”. . . you had freedom to; now you have been granted freedom from. Don’t underrate it!”), God and organized religion, capitalism, and all the other props of their Potemkin philosophy.

It’s time to reclaim reality - to see things as they are and talk about their meanings, rather than being stampeded into genuflecting before the ever-changing puppet show of tokens and symbols the right wing flashes for the purpose of provoking and dictating reactions they then manipulate for their own benefit.

There is a story about the time, a few years ago, that McDonalds Corp. produced some paper cups bags with pictures of the flags of the nations of the world involved in the World Cup soccer finals on them. The Saudi flag has a few words in Arabic text on it, taken from the Koran. Muslim law holds that no part of the Koran may be desecrated or destroyed. Some fetishizing fanatic claimed that throwing away the paper cups bags after use - with their tiny blob of unreadable ink depicting words on a depiction of a flag depicting part of a religious text - would constitute desecration of the Koran. After much nervous negotiation, McDonalds had to ritually dispose of the entire production run of cups bags under religious supervision and promise never to do it again.

Unquestionably, the LGF/Michelle Malkin freak-mob that is constantly howling about “dhimmitude” would be aghast at this stupid and heavy-handed browbeating by way of the irrational worship of trivial inanimate objects. But they are the same people who take exactly the same attitude toward religious and political symbols they find useful for their own cause. In fact, of course, what they object to is not the irrationality of it - that would certainly be a boldly ironic stance on their part. What they object to is somebody else’s symbols and values being treated with respect. But we can do better than that. We can point out that any treatment of a symbol as valuable in itself is missing the point. Symbols refer to other things. It is those other things that are of value. We use the symbols because we value the things they refer to, but it is a mistake to treat the symbols as equivalent to the things they denote. Protestants often accuse Catholics of making this mistake by filling their churches with statues and icons, but for some reason they can’t seem to make the leap to recognizing their own behavior toward flags, pins, songs, uniforms, and the other political-rally gewgaws they love to mesmerize themselves with.

Flags are just paper or cloth. They symbolize something, but so do words on paper, pictures, logos, bunting, and all the rest of the valueless ephemera that accompany political rallies. They’re not (usually) historical artifacts, personal mementoes, or otherwise unique, and unless they are they don’t need to be treated as anything other than what they are - cheap paper or cloth. They can be disposed of, when need be, without fear and without ritual. (The Flag Code says otherwise, but it is useless verbiage - which no doubt explains why it’s not part of the criminal law, and is legally unenforceable.) Flags can be used symbolically, including by destruction, but so can printed words, pictures, logos, and such. Not every action involving a flag, or a pamphlet, or a picture or logo or what not is symbolic, and not every one needs to be responded to as symbolic. When a response is required, it should be directed to the message implied by the symbol, not the act of symbolism - to do otherwise is, again, to treat the signifier as the signified, and to reduce your own things of value to the substance of worthless paper or cloth.

You cannot insult a flag - it has no feelings. You cannot desecrate a flag - it is not sacred. And the sooner we stop treating flags as persons, or nations, or objects of worship, we can move on to treating the other desiderata of the political landscape at their true value. We can start to talk about the things that matter, and not the symbols of the things that matter: soldiers’ lives and veterans’ care and comfort - not uniforms and flags; moral personhood and the locus of moral rights and interests - not “pre-born citizens” and “snowflake babies”; the real differences between women’s lives and bodies and those of embryos or fetuses - not abstractions so vague they exist only as slogans; the rights and freedoms actually available to citizens - not colors on some Homeland Security daily fever chart, or the unknown machinations of secret tribunals passed off as “due process”; the resources and guarantees actually claimable by the sick or elderly - not the “freedom” of “private accounts” that consists of playing the stock market with your healthcare or pension; our politicians’ actual plans and policies - not what they wear or the slogans they chant.

That transition would be deadly to the party that trades in falsehood and superficialities, but for some reason the party that caters to the reality-based community can never seem to stand up and say “Enough is enough”. (Obama is now wearing flag pins.) More to the point, I guess, the country that repeatedly elects the party of lies, falsehood, ignorance, superficiality, and incompetence - that allows itself to be stampeded with bizarre doomsaying about gay weddings and orphan flags - will not say to their politicans “We want the truth, we want detail and substance, we want to know what you actually intend to do and what we can expect from that”.

Maybe they don’t want that. They’re certainly willing enough to be treated as stupid - to, literally, be given flags to wave and to wave them on command and to think they are thereby playing some role in the guidance of a great and powerful nation - to be told that their vote should be determined by superficialities and symbols, and to allow it to be. But if we could stop the nonsense, insist on things being taken at their true worth, reject fetishism and sloganeering and self-delusion, we might have a real government, responsive to a real democracy.

Update: Corrected description of McDonalds incident.

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