There are plenty of reasons to limit one's exposure to social media--we might all be better people if we spent time off the grid entirely, reading Thoreau and Emerson by lantern light, entertaining ourselves with after-supper guitar-and-concertina singalongs in the front parlor. But I am a creature of modern habits, used to conveniences and too easily bored. So I go on Facebook and Twitter.
And sometimes people's feelings get hurt.
Sometimes it's difficult to know how hard to push--or push back--against what appear to be baseless statements. Challenging someone else's assumptions and dubious statements isn't intolerance. It's one of the ways adults advance conversations. We all ought to listen to people who disagree with us. And it's actually possible to have a grown-up debate on social media. (Not that anyone's mind will be changed. But other people can read and follow the argument. It's good to keep in mind that Facebook is a public space. You don't want to be seen throwing a temper tantrum. It doesn't help your case.)
When someone, for instance, expresses shock that there are "zero American flags" on display at the Democratic National Convention, it seems only appropriate to point out that such a statement simply isn't true. Maybe there aren't enough flags to satisfy the poster's particular appetite (though it seems more likely the poster is just looking around for an implement with which to smite political foes), but it doesn't take much effort to discover that every state delegation has an American flag on its identifying standards.
There was a flag to which the Pledge of Allegiance was delivered. Plenty of other flags. And a lot of the flags at both last week's DNC and the recent RNC were virtual flags, thrown up on a digital display. Are unreal flags flittering in some electronic breeze really so awe-inspiring?
Anyway, it's a trivial non-issue. And citizens of good will don't impugn the patriotism of their fellow citizens over trivial non-issues. That's not good debate but a diversionary attempt at point-scoring, and the people who did it on social media ought to have known better. I didn't mind telling them so.
Besides, I was raised in a military household where the decorative use of the American flag was frowned upon as disrespectful, even when the display was not meant ironically. My father disdained both Peter Fonda's star-spangled gas tank and the little flag decals that Paul Harvey hawked (and John Prine insisted weren't tickets to heaven). He refused to patronize car dealerships that flew football field-sized flags they advertised as the "largest in the quad-state region" or something along those lines. A lapel pin he could accept, but he didn't think Old Glory ought to be used in advertising or as a fashion accessory.
That's just my experience, and I'm not as rigid as my dad. I don't cringe at Presidents' Day sales or red, white and blue bikinis, and I respect other people's right to make use of the symbol in any way they want--up to and including incorporating it into a protest. I think that allowing a dissenter to burn a flag demonstrates a certain principled steadfastness. The flag is important and dear, yes, but it's not more important than the freedoms for which it is supposed to stand.
Arguments about who loves it more are specious. The assumption ought to be that we're all Americans. And that Americans are, by definition, a motley and diverse bunch who hold in common merely citizenship in a great yet unperfected nation. It is worrisome when qualifiers begin to bleed into our political rhetoric, when some begin to speak of "real Americans." That phrase appears with some frequency in cyber precincts, and the implications are ugly. "Real Americans" presumably love their country more. "Real Americans" are somehow more authentic than the rest of us. Presumably they are the ones who need lots of flags--or at least will take an insufficient number of flags as evidence of a lack of others' Americanism.
While the people who evoke this phrase seldom put it this way--the congressman from Iowa being a notable exception-- what they seem to be talking about are white Christians who, as one of the people who used the phrase on my timeline put it, "have an American birth certificate." These are the common working folks who populate such wishful fantasies as Mike Huckabee's Bubba-ville, where the conservative salt of the earth can take comfort in their moral superiority to the elites of coastal urban centers. These are the picked-on folks that the dude from Duck Dynasty (wearing an American flag as a bandana, by the way, a look John Wayne might have found silly or, in his inimitable Duke-ish way, actionable) might, say, need to have their backs watched.
Now, as a white Christian male who has an American birth certificate, I'm understandably loath to generalize about that group except to say that it's obvious to anyone paying attention that the tenuous majority position we seem to now hold in this country is eroding. And I can understand why some of us might find that scary. Tomorrow doesn't belong to us in a demographic sense; the coming reality is an America that's more colorful and more attuned to internationalism. America has always been a mongrel nation, reinvigorated by immigrants.
The politics of cultural resentment and grievance contravene the promise of the American experiment. It's no wonder some folks want to turn the country into some wishfully impenetrable fortress. With lots and lots of flags.
But the problem is, if they're able to somehow do that, those flags they love will be rendered meaningless. And insubstantial as the electrons flowing through all those screens that command so much of our attention these days. Maybe we all ought to read more Emerson.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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MovieStyle on 07/31/2016