Waving Flags
An unintentional encounter with ‘Murican patriotism
It starts, as these things always do, as a joke.
At somewhere around 10 o’clock at night, after a long day of drinking in the sunshine, you make a drunken bet over a game of pool against a French colleague. The prize for nailing a tricky shot after far too many drinks is a stupid one, and neither of you can remember after the fact why you chose it.
You make the shot, you win the bet, and as your prize, you arrive at work a few days later to find Old Glory, The Star Spangled Banner, waiting on your desk.
You are unsure what to do with it, having never owned an actual flag before, and for lack of a working flagpole in the immediate vicinity, you unfurl the Stars and Stripes, lay it over your chair, and you sit on it.
(You are British, and European, and so you don’t really think of this as an inflammatory act.)
Several Americans comment in jest on the fact that you are sitting on their national standard, and you make light of it, tell them that you hope to break wind on it occasionally, and carry on as normal. No big deal.
A few weeks later, another one of your colleagues steals the flag and hides it. You work in a place where this sort of childish behaviour is normal. When you eventually chance upon it at his desk, you steal it back.
You return it to its rightful place at your desk, and you sit on the flag again, mainly to wind him up.
A few days later, you come back to find that someone has folded the flag up neatly and placed it on the chair as if admonishing you for a lack of respect.
Again, you assume that it’s a joke — someone is quite clearly trying to wind you up — and unfold the flag and sit on it. You don’t live in America, you live in California. No-one actually cares about this stuff in 2016, do they?
You go away for Memorial Day weekend, and when you come back, the flag has been neatly arranged in the sort of military fold that ends up on the coffins of brave young servicepeople who have come back from Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, along with a passive-aggressive but anonymous note instructing you to ‘honour the flag.’
At this point, it still feels like a game. No-one has come to actually talk to you about it seriously, so you assume that someone in the office is playing a long and elaborate prank on you.
You unfold the flag and sit on it again.
A day or so later, you receive an email from your HR department informing you of a complaint that you are violating the codes of ‘flag etiquette’, and asking for you to remove it.
Somewhere within, quietly, British and European notions about freedom of behaviour and speech begin to flare up.
You respond that it is several months after April Fool’s Day, and you offer to give each of the people who complained a Union Jack flag for them to sit on in exchange.
The next day, you are notified by HR that six people within your company have registered formal complaints, despite the fact that still, no-one has actually expressed their offense directly or even come to talk to you about it.
Again, you offer to buy each of the aggrieved parties a Union Jack to sit on in retaliation, and ask if it would be possible to speak to any of them in person — dialogue, you believe, always helps.
You are told that whilst you were away from your desk, the flag has been removed from your chair to prevent any further complaints, and are asked to respect their decision and not pursue the matter any further.
You have not, as far as you are aware, broken any laws.
Again, you suggest that this must be some sort of elaborate joke being inflicted upon you.
You are told that each of these people has connections with the military, and that they are extremely sensitive to any slights against the flag.
At this point, you realise that it isn’t a joke.
You think about the military children you went to school with, the British people that you have encountered who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of whom are now missing limbs, and many of whom saw their friends come back from those same countries in coffins with the Union Jack folded on it in exactly the same way, and try to imagine any of them batting an eyelid if an American were to sit on the British flag in the workplace.
This seems unlikely.
You are reminded by your wife, who is Brazilian, that in her home country, people wear their national flag as a sarong to the beach and lie on it whilst sunbathing half-naked.
You think about the fact that there is not a flag in the world that someone hasn’t fought and died for. Why is this one quite so different?
You think about the fine line between sensitivity and censorship.
You think about reminding them that presumably, these people with links to the military understand better than anyone that America’s soldiers fight for a range of national values, and that generally those are condensed into the notion of ‘freedom’, and that yours is being encroached upon by their indignation.
You think about pointing out how many Americans would more readily identify this sort of behaviour with countries like Iran, Russia, and China, where ‘freedom’ is meant to be less of a thing.
You think about how it’s impossible to bring up any of the above without sounding like a massive, jumped-up, pretentious twat making a fuss over nothing, and so you don’t mention any of it.
You consider the increasingly hysterical nature of dialogue on such things, where compromise and understanding can feel like defeat, and decide that you don’t want to contribute to making that any worse.
You try to look at it from another angle.
You are unsure whether you feel pity or envy towards a nation whose national ideal is still so powerful that sitting on their flag can generate such offense. When was the last time that anyone in Britain felt strongly enough about anything to do that?
You wonder if this sort of reactionary patriotic indignation is a feature of all large empires going through an existential crisis, if long before desecrating our idols become a popular national pastime, British citizens might have reacted the same way to Jonny Foreigner sitting on their flag or taking The King’s Name in vain between the First & Second World Wars.
You think, for quite some time, about quitting on the spot, and for all subsequent job interviews in future to involve you asking your potential employers up front if they think anyone in the company will actively interfere with your right to sit on a flag at your desk if you so choose.
You feel a surge of very deep homesickness and nostalgia, the sort that only normally rears its head when someone sends you an article from home that makes you laugh till you cry but which you can’t explain to anyone you work with, and consider moving home straight away.
You, of course, don’t do any of that. You stay put.
Several months later, a furore arises in American sports over the quarterback for the 49ers kneeling during the singing of the national anthem, in protest over the treatment of black people by police in America.
This is deemed a grave stain on the flag and the nation by an entirely predictable swathe of Americans. It appears that whilst expressing concern for gay people or minorities or freedom of speech or people dying at the hands of the police for being black makes you a ‘liberal snowflake’ and a slave to political correctness, there is a blizzard’s worth of snowflakes on the other side of the fence plenty sensitive about the flag and the anthem and the people that died for them, and that really it’s just a question of what you choose to be sensitive about.
(There are, of course, plenty of people on the fence).
The quarterback continues to kneel, and other people copy him. You feel a sense of admiration for his refusal to bend the knee about bending the knee, and as this small act spreads throughout sport, you conclude that you are an utter coward.
You are still, to this day, unsure whether you have used ‘being considerate’ and ‘respect’ as an excuse to make you feel better about giving in.
Then you think again about those people that you work with, and how they must have felt when they saw the flag that their friends and family had fought and died for being sat on by some English prick, and you are somehow also glad that you stopped.
Either way, you decide that you will stay in America, and see how this whole thing plays out.
You decide to buy a Union Jack, and sit on that instead.
