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The South Atlantic Quarterly 101.2 (2002) 375-383



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Old Glory

Susan Willis


They just want to show their patriotism because that's all they can do.

—A flag salesman in Durham, North Carolina,
interviewed on BBC World Service, December 6, 2001

In the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center, America responded with the rapid deployment of the American flag. The urge to display the flag was ignited by the Iwo Jima–style image of the three firefighters who raised the flag over the rubble at the Lower Manhattan site and whose photograph was then emblazoned across the front pages of the nation's newspapers. Desire to perpetuate the heroic image has since impelled the development firm Forest City Ratner to commission a statue in the likeness of the photo, which will be installed at the New York City Fire Department headquarters. Subsequent calls that the statue reflect the multiethnic makeup of the victims of the attack—and America generally—have resulted in the decision to create a statue where two of the original white flag raisers will be replaced by representative black and Hispanic figures.

Many Americans who support the inclusion [End Page 375] of nonwhite figures fail to realize that New York City's firefighters—like its police force—are almost exclusively white. Mayor Giuliani, everyone's hero of the day and Time's "Man of the Year," reigned over this country's most ethnically diverse city with the most racially exclusionary uniformed brigades. The nation's desire to transform the statue of New York's firefighters into an emblem of diversity gives symbolic reversal to the city's racist policies. It also makes the statue a displaced icon of a different fighting force that is racially diverse: the U.S. military. In the guise of New York's firefighters the statue embodies the nation and facilitates a shift from the local to the international, from the work of recovery to the work of war. As a sliding signifier, the statue enables the nation's attention to move from Lower Manhattan to the new Iwo Jima in Kabul and Kandahar.

The desire to inculcate the statue with the spirit of multiculturalism also serves to assimilate America's nonwhite population under the universal blanket flag euphoria, in contradiction to the fact that the demonstrative display of flags has been a predominantly white response. Notwithstanding the Arab merchants who quickly attached the American flag to their homes and businesses in the hopes of heading off attacks by rabid bands of U.S. patriots, most black and Hispanic neighborhoods have been relatively flag free. Incorporating black and Hispanic figures into the composition of the firefighter statue may well give recognition to the numbers of nonwhites who serve the country, but its larger purpose is to launder the image of the flag itself and the country for which it stands—both better known by these same populations for sponsoring racial profiling, neighborhood sweeps by "la Migra," and doing everything possible to avoid reparations for slavery.

While the attitude of many nonwhite residents and citizens of the United States is one of letting white folks do their thing, the meanings attached to flag waving have a lot to tell us about the America that emerged phoenix-like out of its ashes to remake itself for the twenty-first century. This survey of flag scenarios looks beyond the various clichéd versions of "United We Stand" to consider ideologies implicit to empire and free-market consumerism—all unfurled with the flag.

Not only is the flag displayed at fixed positions, on homes, freeway overpasses, and storefronts, it has also become a circulating signifier. The flag raised Iwo Jima style over New York's Ground Zero was subsequently shipped to Afghanistan where it was raised over the Kandahar airport. Passed from the hands of the firefighters to those of the marines, the flag designates [End Page 376] a shift in America's interests away from a host of domestic needs left pending after September 11, and toward a politics aimed at military operations overseas, whose repercussion on the...

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