Old Glory

By TAD BARTIMUS

When I saw the picture in the catalog I flashed back to my dad, rooting around in the garage for the box with the flag and flagpole and calling to me to "get the ladder and hurry up."

Every patriotic holiday dad liked to be first in the neighborhood to unfurl the flag, so carefully packed away from the last time, and hang it from the balcony. Special occasions -- John Glenn's orbit of the earth, Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon, Apollo 13's struggle to get home -- were honored that way, too.

Raising Old Glory, then lowering it to half staff, lent comfort as my family, along with the country, grappled with the loss of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Vietnam fiercely divided us but even I, the family liberal, held the flag sacrosanct and was deeply pained when anti-war demonstrators burned it in protest. The day the war ended I hung my own flag from my own balcony, as my parents' did from theirs. Different reasons, same symbol.

Somewhere during the past few moves my flag disappeared. By then my relationship to it had shifted. Ever mindful of the sacrifices made on its behalf, I was nonetheless fed up with jingoists who wrapped themselves in it to effect bogus patriotism. I was sick of flag-wavers attacking other Americans because of their sexual orientation, their version of family values, their individual exercise of cultural and religious freedoms. I was sad to see the flag bastardized on everything from plastic picnic bowls to soccer shorts. The co-opting of Old Glory by special interests for commercial and political gain had turned me off.

But holidays weren't the same. Seeing a sturdy cotton version of the flag in a catalog sent me to the telephone with my credit card. For the next two weeks I drove the postmaster crazy: "Is it here yet? Are you sure? Look again, behind that pile over there in the corner." On a Saturday, when the post office was officially closed, he called to say: "Come get it!" When I hung the flag from my porch I realized how much I'd missed it.

Even then, there was a disconnect between the piece of cloth and the ideal it was supposed to represent. Recently, a friend remarked, "Every day I wake up and say thank God I live in America." Gee, I thought, pretty corny. She started talking about why she didn't just want to take for granted free speech, unrestricted movement, public education, social security and Medicare benefits, the library on the corner. She cited newspaper headlines from Kosovo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, China, Korea as testimony to how good we've got it.

She's right. For all our faults, America is still a noble experiment to which millions around the world aspire. I have to disassociate the flag from the zealous special interest groups who use it to try to co-opt me. The flag doesn't belong to anybody; it belongs to all of us. It is a symbol of our collective best hopes, greatest sacrifices, finest deeds.

I won't wear clothes with an Old Glory motif and I won't buy plastic dishes with stars and stripes on them. I won't blame the flag for bonehead government, bad politicians or dangerous foreign policy. I will honor it for its own sake, and try to remember that it represents my right to change those things at the ballot box.

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