What is so grand about the Grand Old Flag?
Ah, summer camp
When I was 10 or so I used to attend Innisfee summer camp in Howell, MI. One of our outdoor activities was an exhausting game of capture the flag. Innisfree was a huge camp and featured what, in memory, was a huge front lawn, which was more mowed field. It was complete with a few massive trees and small hills which gave opposing team members great places to hide on the way to capture the opponent’s flag. Little regard was given the care of that flag. In fact, it was fully expected it would be dropped, stomped, muddied and maybe even torn. Such were the stakes of such a game.
Flags for games are fine. Pieces of cloth in no particular shape or material or quality. No man revered them and no country (save the imaginary land of We-gotta-beat-them-guys) fought over or for that fabric.
In the lifetime of nearly everyone alive today, a flag, the flag, represents many things to many people. First, a semantic distinction. A flag, as a thing, holds no meaning. The various people for whom that flag hold meaning assigned that meaning. It is projected. Upon inspection, it is a rectangular piece of cloth assembled from many pieces of cloth, each of a very particular color and shape. In the aggregate, it comes to hold meaning for many.
Betsy Ross, call your office
Nearly no one doesn’t know the cute story of Betsy Ross sewing the first flag. Libertarians are well familiar with the Gadsden Flag. Mary Anna Custis Lee, wife of General Robert E Lee, designed the flag for her husband’s headquarters. The arc of the stars was to represent the Arc of the Covenant (h/t Dissident Mama).
People have probably used flags for as long as they could walk, carve a stick and skin an animal. The Roman Legions had flags. The Samaritans had flags. Their flag was cool. A skull on a stick with a wind-sock style tail. In the High Middle Ages, Heraldic images signified which royalty the riff-raff belonged to.
Denmark has the oldest national flag still in use, the Dannebrog, which dates back to 1478.
The 
Netherlands’ flag, a tri-color flag, is the oldest of its kind and is traced back to Charlemagne. Of Charlemagne, there is a fun yet unsubstantiated story that he preferred the rind of Brie over the center.
How a piece of cloth came to be as revered as a national flag holds much curiosity, for another day. An industry has been established in the manufacture and display of the US flag. It is nearly twice as wide as it is high, 1:1.9, and the measurements for the stripes and the field and the placement of the union are very specific. Additionally, the study of flags has earned its own name, vexillology. As a craft, flag making is as precise as crafts can get. There is no room for nuance or inspiration. As a piece of cloth, it is meticulously made. However, what lies beyond that fabric, the affairs of governments, is another matter.
I am a big, big fan of physical place in history. The Freedom Trail in Boston passes some our nations most famous, or infamous, churches and buildings and cemeteries. I love Boston. I found myself solemn in Princeton, New Jersey when I drove past what I learned later was the Princeton Battle Field.
I like early American history, and for all the errors and faults we can easily find these years on, I remain unapologetically in awe of the chutzpa it took to decide enough was enough and break ranks from England and establish independence. The bravery to discard the well known for the unknown dazzles me. Their fight for their liberty and ours, as stated in the preamble of the Constitution, “…secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” is a point held by many that we ought to respect and, maybe, revere.
The sticky bits
Now the weeds. Flag desecration issues have been part and parcel of the United States since at least 1897. The current reverence we know is in large part to the 1942 Federal Flag Code which detailed much of our current flag custom. That law did not, however, address desecration at a federal level, but specifically left that to the states. (the embedded link is to an article written by Murray Rothbard on the “flag flap”.)
In 1968, reacting to a flag burning in Central Park in protest to the Viet Nam War, Congress passed the Flag Protection Act, which was later struck down as unconstitutional and we’ve been going back and forth since.
Passions for the issue run high, hot, and deep. That is probably as it ought to be. Some people will maintain that the flag is but a piece of cloth and a country, as an idea, might be worthy of respect, but a thing is not. This country’s government has done unspeakable horrors in the name of that flag and revering that flag legitimizes the awful things done in to advance it. Detractors will say something about advancing liberty and democracy in the world, but I am reminded of a Paul McCartney lyric about things not being so.
I fly the flag. I fly the flag because I saw the tomb at the Princeton Battle Field where the bodies of both Continentals and British soldiers are buried. American and British sons are buried somewhere near the marker, both sides killing the other on January 3, 1777.
Division everywhere
That Americans hold such a divided opinion of the flag says something about what they are not being told by the government they stubbornly support. A picture of a Nazi flag fails always to stir emotion. I suspect if more Americans knew what was done in the name of their Stars and Stripes, they may think twice about being as lemmings.
My query into flags started innocently enough when I asked an An-Cap friend about his yellow and black flag on his FaceBook page. He told me that flags had meanings (I retorted they do not, we assign meanings) and that got me started. It seems we have started to round toward the factions of old. The Coat of Arms from a clan or a house showing to all who can see we be affiliated with them. Flags do have meanings. An-Cap flags, and Pride flags and Communist flags and the Confederate flag and ISIS flags and Nazi flags and Antifa flags and college football flags. The flag fliers are telling all who can see they are part of this or that faction. So it is with the US flag. Often enough, it isn’t what is being said that is relevant, but what is not being said that is the real message. When you see an An-Cap, or any other flag, inquire not why that flag, but why not the other. The answer might surprise and upset you.
This is the language of the Flag Protection Act.
Flag protection language
The text of the law reads:
- (a)(1) Whoever knowingly mutilates, defaces, physically defiles, burns, maintains on the floor or ground, or tramples upon any flag of the United States shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.
- (2) This subsection does not prohibit any conduct consisting of the disposal of a flag when it has become worn or soiled.
- (b) As used in this section, the term “flag of the United States” means any flag of the United States, or any part thereof, made of any substance, of any size, in a form that is commonly displayed.
- (c) Nothing in this section shall be construed as indicating an intent on the part of Congress to deprive any State, territory, possession, or the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico of jurisdiction over any offense over which it would have jurisdiction in the absence of this section.
- (d)(1) An appeal may be taken directly to the Supreme Court of the United States from any interlocutory or final judgment, decree, or order issued by a United States district court ruling upon the constitutionality of subsection (a).
- (2) The Supreme Court shall, if it has not previously ruled on the question, accept jurisdiction over the appeal and advance on the docket and expedite to the greatest extent possible.
For this article I referenced information on
http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/more/desecration.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Protection_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_v._Johnson