For seven years I lived on the top floor a Victorian railroad company’s repurposed headquarters where I would often spend time looking out over the Lehigh Valley at a gigantic U.S. flag that was positioned on a tall flag pole in the lonely parking lot of a Perkins that was open 24-hours and where after a night at the library I’d often stop for a Western omelet ($14.99) or a slice of peanut butter silk pie ($4.89).
The vista was dramatic; the shallow Lehigh River meandering between the steep green hills of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with the rusted, decaying moonscape of the steelworks positioned beyond. But right there, at an off-ramp from the bridge, was the Perkins in its valley, the stars-and-stripes large enough to cover a small house. In sunshine it hung like a tarp; during Hurricane Sandy (for nobody bothered to take it down) it whipped so rapidly the colors were barely visible. With cups of instant coffee or a Yuengling in hand, I’d sit smoking Camels and peering through the bird-shit-stained window and I’d contemplate America.
My academic research dealt with the origins of American identity, and like anyone doing humanities graduate work it was an opportunity for this second-generation grandson of immigrants to work through some things. I’ve never been an uncomplicated patriot, child and grandson of antiwar protestors—my grandfather having thrown away his World War II medals at a Washington DC demonstration against the Vietnam War. I’m an inheritor of that profound ambivalence about America—in the truest sense of the word “ambivalence”—that in my estimation has always existed in the truest of the national tradition. Looking at that banner, I couldn’t help but often feel a genuine affection, a love, for what it represents at its best: that inviolate truth concerning life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Even after 250 years of the nation so-often violating that creed, even during this current moment, there is still a bit of charged aura that draws me to those thirteen stripes and fifty stars.
“The signifier of myth presents itself in an ambiguous way,” writes Roland Barthes in Mythologies, “an instantaneous reserve of history, a tamed richness, which it is possible to call and dismiss in a sort of rapid alteration.” An overdetermined thing, there are many flags: the one flown by those who liberated the plantations of Galveston in 1865 or Buchenwald in 1945 is very different from those on the choppers that landed at My Lai in 1968. Ironically, today we’ve seemingly got a proliferation of new American flags, of those with blue lines in the middle or where the red-white-and-blue are replaced with the punishing starkness of black-and-white. In a way, there’s an honesty to this. Let the fascists have their new banner and leave the original to those of us who still revere the promise of that older and truer nation, of that “Centre of equal daughters, equal sons” that Walt Whitman imagined.
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Art by Lara Schaberg
