I don’t know if this qualifies as a hot take or not, but I am seriously starting to believe that the United States Government should send (upon request) every citizen at least one Revolutionary War flag (3x5, Made In America, etc.) free of charge.
It seems like a ridiculous notion, but if we’re going to be screaming about civics and patriotism then I think it’s a relatively low-cost way of promoting it to the citizenry. Our Revolutionary War flags are significant because I don’t think we should allow one party or another to co-opt these flags. They’re too important and they’re the birthright of every American.
I’m tired of the Left- because it’s always the Left- just rolling over and surrendering on this issue time and time again. I get that certain parts of the Left are going to be queasy about this country and its history and parts of the Far Left are going to hate it no matter what we do, but if you’re tired of the military-industrial complex monetized patriotism of the Right, then you need to do something about it and why not this?
Consider then, the latest controversy over The Pine Tree Flag.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito flew the flag outside his house several times. It had been flown outside of San Fransisco City Hall for decades. Somehow, it’s become tied to the ‘Stop The Steal’ movement and some nutty ‘Appeal To Heaven’ initiative of some preacher in South Carolina who wants to ensure the government of the United States is based on Christian values and support elected officials ‘who will commit to live and govern based on biblical, constitutional and Federalist principles.’
This should have been so easy: San Fransisco should have said, ‘Oh, it’s been co-opted by the Far Right? We’re co-opting it back,’ and left it right where it was because The Right’s interpretation is wrong.
‘An Appeal To Heaven’ (which is written on the flag) is taken directly from Locke’s Second Treatise on Government:
And where the body of the people, or any single man is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case, yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz, to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven.
The point of the quote is to reject the divine right of Kings. In the current political climate, if you’re on The Right, you probably view the administrative state/creeping Federal power, etc. as something to ‘appeal’ against, but it applies on the other side of the political spectrum as well. If you, on The Left, believe in democracy, checks and balances and you know, a non-unitary executive— or one that is at least checked by the people and the other branches of government wherever possible, then this applies to you as well. The Right wants to set up a ‘divine right of Kings’ again— only this time, it’s the billionaire class and letting them do whatever they damn well please.
In other words, the original meaning of the flag is something that cannot be co-opted by anyone and is one of the founding principles of this country. We all stood up and said, ‘No more Kings.’
I don’t even want to say that it’s been co-opted by Christian Nationalism because really, from what I can tell, somebody somewhere thought ‘AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN’ was the equivalent to ‘Y’ALL NEED JESUS’ which it’s not. It would be like deciding that because Chick-fil-A proclaimed ‘EAT MOAR CHIKIN’ we should rearrange our entire food system to produce nothing but chickens and to make Chick-fil-A the only legal place to sell food to everyone in this country. Just because you rolled out your ‘jump to conclusions’ mat and jumped, doesn’t mean you landed on the right conclusion and more to the point: it wasn’t the original purpose of the words.
The Pine Tree Flag1 was originally commissioned to be used by a squadron of six schooners that served in the Massachusetts Navy in the early days of the American Revolution— regionally, pine trees are seen in a lot of historical flags of New England- including the unofficial flag of New England and the original flag of Maine, which they’re trying to bring back as we speak2. (Hopefully, this idiocy doesn’t scare them off of the idea, because this is far better than their current ‘Seal On A Bedsheet’, which has history and would instantly be an iconic design for the state.)
So, not only would I say that the Right hasn’t co-opted this in any meaningful sense, they’re just using it. Anyone can use it. It’s a free country, after all. Flags don’t belong to anybody. Plus, this is a flag with a lot of really cool history behind it and a lot of solid, regional symbolism. Why are we letting a Supreme Court Justice scare us off from this flag? Justice Alito could be nuttier than a fruitbat for all I know, but he’s got a right to fly this flag for his reasons and you and I can fly it for our reasons as well. If you cede the symbols of our history to one side or another in this god-awful endless and exhausting culture war we’re all trapped in together, you give ground to the nonsense of both sides. Fly this flag. Fly the Gadsden Flag. Fly the Betsy Ross Flag. Fly the Serapis Flag, the Fort Mercer Flag, the Flag of the Green Mountain Boys, or the Guildford Courthouse Flag. Make them all the colors of the rainbow for Pride Month if you want. Make ‘em the colors of your favorite sports team. But fly them and make no apologies for it.
I don’t usually lean into my identity as an immigrant all that much, but I am. I’m a first-generation immigrant and I grew up here. The accent has long since faded from my voice and the miracle of orthodontia fixed my teeth but the more I see of this Culture War the more exhausted and angry I get. America can resemble a Hot Mess Express a lot of the time. It’s not a perfect country by any stretch of the imagination, but to the best of my knowledge, it is the only country that charges its citizens to do better. The process of forming that perfect union isn’t some kind of a zen thing. You don’t achieve it and then sit back and relax, no, it’s a constant process of change and evolution and recognizing wrongs and righting them where we can.
Sometimes, that does mean that yes, monuments have to come down. But other times it means that you leave other monuments alone. A balance has to be struck and as with everything in America, the process of finding that balance isn’t always pretty, but it’s always worth doing.
I originally fell in love with this flag when I first saw it in the opening credits for the HBO series John Adams and wound up purchasing it a few years later. I tackled it on This Week In Vexillology all the way back in 2016 when I did a series called ‘The Brown Flag Challenge’ because brown isn’t a color you see a lot in flags.
Really hope this works out for them. DON’T LET ALITO SCARE YOU OFF, MAINE!