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Pitchaya wrote a quiet little piece about the American flag a few months ago that stuck in my head. Simplifying immensely, he said that the flag is simply a symbol, a symbol of ourselves, not worthy of adulation, not worthy of contempt. George Carlin put it this way: “I leave symbols to the symbol-minded.” Now the implication is that because symbols are just that, the value lies only in the holder of the interpreter. Wrrrrrrrrrrong. Signifiers and signifieds are, of course, arbitrary. Their power comes when they are shared, when these signs can be used to communicate their values among a community, who share particular interpretations of symbols. Humans are symbol-processing animals, and culture is made and broken on the use and misuse of symbols. In other words, if you, an American, think burning the US flag is acceptable practice, then you’ve been miseducated. Severely miseducated. You probably do not belong in the American community. Symbols have real meanings to their communities. Denying that reality is like denying the power of language, another set of shared symbols that has magnified human intellectual power like a lens, that has carried ideas as ephemeral as democracy, freedom, and self-government thousands of years into the future. I am a patriot. I am no nationalist, “My country right or wrong.” It was patriots, who realized that Britain was wrong to demand so much of the American people and not give it a voice, who founded the America we know, many losing everything, property, health, and family, in the process. I am a patriot, and I speak out when my country does wrong. Does that mean I burn the flag when the Supreme Court sanctions murder under the name of the right of privacy so-called? Or on any occasion except in respectful retirement? Let’s take another symbol, the wedding ring. Are you the kind of person who takes off her ring when your spouse does something wrong? Are you the kind of person who blatantly flashes his ring while violating the spirit of the marriage. Symbols matter. Is it wrong for me to despise a flag with a swastika bendwise sable, on a roundel argent, on a field of blood? Is it wrong to despise a sickle and hammer, or, underneath a mullet voided or, on another field of blood? Is it wrong to despise a mullet, or, in dexter chief, with four mullets diminuative, on yet another field of blood? Saying that these are meaningless symbols denies the fields of blood that these symbols have engendered.
Let’s take another symbol, one of the few I hold in more reverence than the American flag: the cross. In seventeenth century Japan, in order to prove that they were not Christians, Dutch traders were permitted by the Emperor and Shogun to step and spit upon the cross. They later affirmed this by annihilating, using sustained bombardment and samurai auxiliaries, No, Pitchaya, the flag does not merely symbolize us, with all our foibles and misdeeds. The flag represents ourselves at our highest possibilities, our highest attainments, our dedication to freedom, justice, and the American way. Burning a flag is the act of an implacable enemy, as the people of the Ivory Coast showed France by burning the French flag, as the people of Iran showed us in trodding upon, spitting upon, and burning our flag as they violated centuries of diplomatic precedent to take Embassy hostages. No: I do not think there should be a law against flag burning, nor a Constitutional amendment against it. But I do not think that a flag burner belongs in the American community either. Let us not deceive ourselves as to flag burners: they are the kind of hypocrites who delight in their hypocrisy, for whom symbols are meaningless, for whom the mental connection that others instantly make are toys. They are demagogues of the worst sort. They are a sort of deconstructionist, without the quasi-redeeming sense of humor that most deconstructionists apply to their work. (I think this attitude comes about from the realization that universities still pay people to write the kind of drivel that de Man wrote. Poststructuralists are a different story.) Symbols matter. And a symbol-less human is no more than a walking, talking animal.
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