X-ing the Flag

All flags fly at half-mast for me. Where many fill with pride at the sight of their flag, I feel a certain fear and sorrow. Not fear as in the awe of allegiance--I know as a citizen I'm supposed to feel that for the national flag--but fear as I think on those who were killed and, moreover, who have killed beneath its furl. And here "killed" encompasses both the physical and the social, both body and personhood. No matter how much a noonday sun turns its fabric into an eternal flame at the tomb of the unknown soldier, I register the chill of its shadow on the earth. And so, when I was asked to write about the Confederate flag controversy and what I thought of the flag's being flown in Columbia, South Carolina, and other places in "the South," a question was my first reaction. Was the Confederate flag any more or less problematic than the flag of the United States?

If the United States flag symbolizes the freedom of democracy, what does it symbolize, what does it incarnate (for clearly anything deemed to be its desecration has become akin to murder) in the wake of attempted flag protection amendments that could send one to prison for harming it? What bearing does such legal protection of the flag above the right to freedom of expression have for the Confederate flag issue? After all, those who wish to fly the rebel flag and have been told to remove it declare that they have been denied their civil rights, that they are being censored and discriminated against. What of the irony of contradictory commands involving flags in the last decade? If a flag is a "living symbol," it must be spared; it must be killed. How like the very logic of society and war itself--thou shalt not kill, thou shalt kill. Fighting fire with fire. This flag will not burn! Speaking of which, what does it mean that, in the case of the revival of the Confederate flag, dissensus from a presumed national consensus--the very expression of protest--takes the form of a flag, that object of potentially enforced veneration? Isn't this rebellion too predictably scripted? And isn't the controversy itself perhaps unwittingly caught up in the same conundrum? The controversy is not about other Confederate symbols or remnants. Such attention on the flag both illuminates and obscures the underlying paradoxes not only of freedom and obligation, but of liberty and enslavement, in the United States as a whole, over time and at present.

Behind the Confederate flag--the white-star-studded diagonal blue cross on a field of red--is the U.S. flag, the stars, and stripes, or in light of that paradox of freedom for some at the expense of slavery for others, the stars and bars. Both flags share the same basic selection of colors and forms--red, white, and blue, stars and bars. Only, they are arranged differently in relation to one another with the Southern flag appearing more heraldic, more visually static with its great big X anchoring a field of red in contrast to the U.S. national flag with its horizontal bands streaming left to right from a star-studded blue field, seven stripes of red on an expanse of white or six stripes of white on a field red as the Confederacy's. Blowing in the wind, this U.S. flag becomes rivetingly kinetic. The stripes, bands, or bars appear to flow like rivulets--white or red as in a Rorschach test. If red, one might even see that the stars are bleeding, just as one may think of the Confederate flag's field of red as both premonition and reminder of the gallons of life-blood lost by one in four Southern men of military age, not to mention by women and those undocumented. But then again, this may be part of the appeal of flags--the totemization of trauma, the conversion...