The flag flap is stupid

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

According to most sources, the first flag — as we would recognize it today — was hoisted somewhere in either what we call the Indian Subcontinent or China as early as the first millennium BCE. Historians debate, but it appears that the Zhou dynasty of present-day China sported a white flag carried before its founder, which was meant to identify his personal authority and carried with it the explicit demand to be treated with likewise respect.

In other words, a flag is a symbol of power and authority over others and a signifier to its viewers that they should show proper obeisance. It’s an icon to be venerated. A construct of authority whose positive acknowledgement denotes submission, or rejection represents defiance.

That’s one reading of what flags mean — they can also be affirmations of and invitations to solidarity with a cause or collective identity, and an expression of pride of independence. In that context, to fly your flag is to assert your allegiance with whatever idea it stands for, and is therefore an exercise in freedom. 

Which leads me to my premise: The pissing match between cities and the Idaho Attorney General’s Office over what flags can or should be flown in various places is being conducted in bad faith. Those who are most offended by the idea of a Pride flag flying at the city halls of places like Boise or Salt Lake City — or a Canadian flag in Bonners Ferry — purport to be the stewards of a tradition of libertarian individualism, but shrivel in horror when anyone actually telegraphs their individuality. 

Their obsession with the totalizing power of their own symbolism over the symbolism of whomever they consider “others” makes them, well, totalitarians.

Piled onto that, the other profound irony is that most of these flag warriors hail from a Protestant Christian religious tradition, which famously despises iconography of any kind. The “protest” in Protestantism was against displays and actions that elevated the profane (a.k.a., human and worldly) above the sacred (a.k.a., ineffable truth accepted on faith). Yet they’re the most avid displayers of flags of all stripes, stars, bars and snakes-not-to-be-trod-upon.

If they were honest, our culture war inquisitors would call that heresy; but, seeking ideological consistency among the contemporary flag suckers is a fool’s errand. They seem allergic to honesty on every level, anyway. They view flags as cudgels of dominance, and despise them as symbols of inclusion, which is the place from which Idaho’s moronic flag ban law comes.

Heather Scott (who sponsored the flag bill) grins over a Confederate Battle Flag — a racist, serial-rapists’, oligarchic traitors’ rag — and it’s OK. It’s “heritage,” or whatever, or some addlepated nod to being a “rebel.”

Khaki-slack-clad incels armed with tiki torches and Nazi swastika banners march around chanting, “The Jews will not replace us” and they are “good people.” Right. 

Your lame neighbor pins up a Gadsden Flag almost as big as their shitbox house, conveying that no one should tread on them, while submitting to a constellation of cynical ideologies that demand unthinking acquiescence to a corrupt ideology that actually treads on them. 

The techno-plutocratic conservative swamp rulers are laughing up their sleeves all the way to the tax-free bank as the nation’s schools, roads, hospitals and every other public good that even the most trenchant Know Nothings demand for their convenience is stripped away.

But they’ll “own the libs” with their bully-boy flag game in the meantime — until those China tariffs kick in and all those polyester shrouds in which they wrap their stupidity cost at least 120% more, because that’s where their pathetic mental externalizations come from: sweat shops in commie-world, which is the perfect, paradoxical expression of laissez-faire capitalism.

My theory is that the degree to which a person is obsessed with displaying their lazy allegiance to some idea or person through the petarding of their flattened ideology is directly proportional to how idiotic they are.

Symbols are, by nature, powerful; and, as Stan Lee has taught us, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Flags are the most visceral representations we have of community, and community is power, and the flag flap really pits small government against big government, with the battle lines drawn — again paradoxically — with progressives on the side of local control vs. the fanatic right-wingers on the side of centralized, state power. What a world!

It’s above my pay grade, interest or inclination to tell people which flags to fly. But I’m not buying the supposed de-politicizing nature of this law, nor the argument that it’s some constitutionally brave rebalancing of power between state and local government.

The mere fact that there’s any implicit question about whether a Pride or swastika flag is more appropriate on public property goes to show how reductive and fatuous our politics have become.