The Last Refuge of Scoundrels?

Not since Barbara Frietchie has there been a howl so heartfelt as those thousands of talk radio Americans enjoining the Supreme Court: “Justice, burn not that flag.” One recent caller to Bernie Herman’s WWBD talkathon exclaimed that allowing flag burners to go unpunished was the final nail in America’s coffin. An enraged patriot “threatened” Dick Oliver’s “Voice of the People” (WOR) that he was going to burn his own flag and flagstaff on the Fourth of July, in a demented kind of self-immolating patriotism.
 
The median kookiness of the outrage doesn’t give you a lot of confidence in the emotional health (or political sophistication) of the great unwashed. Time after time, these callers implied that the Court was actually encouraging people to go out and burn their flags. Very, very few took any comfort at all from the fortuitous juxtaposition of unleashed AK-47’s on Tiananmen Square and a guarantee of freedom of protest even to the most contemptibly unpatriotic. “Common sense” about doing in your enemies is much closer to the mentality of most Americans than the ultra-complex Constitutional issues.
 
Patriotism has always been a funny issue in America. My hunch is that the promise of the American Dream has so often outstripped the actual payoff among most of the public that there has always been a disaffected minority aching with its own expectations gap. Those closer to the Dream’s payoff tend to dismiss those “losers” with LOVE IT OR LOSE IT bumper sticker bromides. Is it significant that the only states without flag-burn laws are Alaska (too unbridled or too isolated for burning rituals—hell, maybe just too cold!) and Hawaii (in its polyethnic achievements having the lowest per capita loser population)?
 
The electronic babble-line broadcast other anomalies. Liberals who were quite adamant about protecting dissenters on a flag-burning tack bristled when it was suggested the Ku Kluxers ought to be protected in their cross-burnings. What’s sauce for the Marxist flag-burner goose ought to be the same for the racist gander.
 
One rather dim woman attributed the decision to the justices’ failure to get their salary raises last summer, a kind of simple-minded economic determinism more appropriate for a Marxist agitator. A matronly lady from Queens expounded a metaphorical interpretation that appealed to me; “Every time a voter fails to discharge her duty, every time a citizen breaks the law, each of them is burning the flag a little.”
 
It’s a beguiling model. As one Brooklyn lady put it, “Why are all these callers berating the Supreme Court for defending dissenters when they didn’t say a word when Oliver North practically threw out the whole Constitution?”
 
A good question. The yellectorate much prefers a Rambo to a nitpicking jurist splitting judicial hairs about some abstract legacy. I assume the same mentality prompted the fans in Riverside Stadium to rise en masse on opening day to give Pete Rose a standing ovation. “Love me, love my public enemy” is the prevailing ethos.
 
One other thing that troubled me: The talk show hosts peppered their defense of Constitutionalism with periodic insults at the man who burned the flag. It seemed as if they were afraid of being too tarred by the Supreme Court’s broad brush. They were continuously distancing themselves from the dissenter by using epithets like “stupid” or “I’m enraged by what that monster did.” Imagine Jefferson or Madison stooping to such crowd-pacifying behavior. Vox Pop poops on you if you don’t go along with the crowd.
 
In this bicentennial of the Bill of Rights, it is scary to perceive just how tenuous the legacy really is. Not only do a great many Americans not know what the crucial amendments are, but they also don’t give a hoot or a holler for protecting them when their own and shifting interests are not at stake. It’s clearly a lot easier to state a Bill of Rights than to get every generation to re-invest its intellectual and emotional energies into comprehending and valuing them.
 
One caller wanted to start a recall of the Fatuous Five of the majority. Another wanted a new amendment outlawing the burning of Old Glory. It made you wonder what they learned in civics. Then I remember how abstract the nuns’ teaching of the subject had been. No allusions to Father Coughlin, to the UAW sit-down strikes, to the Memorial Day Massacre at Ford in ’37, to California State police hassling the Joads. And as the movement to legislate scuzz out of rock music lyrics mounts, how much are this generation of adolescents being told about the anomalies in our national life that make Constitutional guarantees such a valuable heritage?
 
Dr. Johnson’s classic saw about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels needs to be updated. Show me a person who waves the flag as a substitute for thinking through painfully complex issues and I’ll show you a dropout from the college of hard Constitutional knocks, a flunk at the daily and unending course of reweaving the fabric of rights and duties into the ever-new conditions of the republic. It is easy to salute the flag. It is damned difficult to add to its meaning and heritage with continuing civic behavior that alone validates the flag’s importance.
 
Like the visual components of the flag itself, our support for its values must evolve as the nature of national life changes. The outcry against protecting the rights of dissent is not a sign of electoral vitality. It’s evidence of intellectual and ethical arteriosclerosis in the body politic. It comes from a generation of Disneyfication of our politics—cynical poll-taking politics, rampant Atwaterism, the reduction ad absurdum of the old Madison Avenue empiricism, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if anybody salutes.” Playing such games deadens. Happy Fifth of July.
 
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, July 26, 1989