{"id":71879,"date":"2013-10-30T12:03:17","date_gmt":"2013-10-30T16:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=71879"},"modified":"2015-05-10T10:04:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-10T14:04:55","slug":"the-books-at-large-and-at-small-a-piece-of-cotton-by-anne-fadiman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=71879","title":{"rendered":"The Books: At Large and At Small<\/i>, “A Piece of Cotton,” by Anne Fadiman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"at-large-and-at-small-familiar-essays1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Next up on the essays shelf<\/a>:<\/p>\n

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, by Anne Fadiman<\/p>\n

A powerful little essay about the American flag. Anne Fadiman and her husband had moved out of Manhattan after living there for many many years, and moved to Western Massachusetts. It was a big adjustment to these two urbanites (something she addresses in another essay in the collection called “Moving”). But they had two kids now, they wanted a yard, some space. So they uprooted themselves. A couple of years later came the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It was disorienting and terrible to NOT be in their chosen city, their home for so many years (once you’ve lived in New York that long, it never lets you go), in its time of trial. I have friends who happened to be out of town that day and described a similar sense of urgent desperation. Despite the chaos and death, my friends wanted to get back home immediately. This happened to OUR city, dammit it. Fadiman writes about the emotional sight of the flag during the World Series that year (boy, who can forget it). Fadiman writes about hanging a flag in the flagpole outside their new home, and how strange it felt, since she was not raised by a typically “flag-waving” type of family. So it made her think about the flag, and what it symbolized, and how that symbol has changed over the years. She researches the flag-burning controversy, a very good “way in” to a conversation about symbols, and what symbols mean. The danger of worshiping symbols brings to mind Lenin’s embalmed body being on display for 70 years like some fungi-sprouting Christ figure<\/a>. And yet you cannot say that the symbol has no meaning. Fadiman is interested in what that meaning is. <\/p>\n

There were many who were disgusted by the “flag-waving” after 9\/11. I wasn’t. But then, I was raised in a pretty patriotic family, and we always had an American flag hanging outside our house (alongside the Irish flag, naturally). The Star-Spangled Banner is a song about a symbol, really. “Our flag was still there” is relatively meaningless in and of itself: I am sure trees survived that battle, and ships, and docks, and all other kinds of objects. But nobody cares about those because they are not symbols of something else. The flag still being there means the country <\/em>is still there, the nation is still there. <\/p>\n

And yet we will protect the flag burners. It is very important that we protect them. I would never burn a flag myself, and was irritated when I saw this<\/a> one day in my neighborhood. Losers. But when you get into a situation where the symbol is more important than things like how you treat people\/the Golden Rule\/kindness\/empathy \u2026 well, look out. It’s one of the signs of tyranny, and you are submitting yourself to it before you even recognize its proper nature. (Nobody has broken this down better than Joseph Heller in the famous “loyalty oath crusade” scene in Catch-22<\/i><\/a>.) Heller’s scene is a perfect example of raising the symbol above common-sense reality, until it doesn’t matter whether or not the symbol has meaning anymore: As a matter of fact, strict devotion to the symbol has caused everything to go haywire. NOTHING has meaning in that madhouse. It’s one of the reasons why I’m not a huge fan of the Pledge of Allegiance, but that’s another topic entirely.<\/p>\n

Fadiman seems to be writing about her grief about 9\/11 and the way she does so is researching the history of the American flag. Here’s an excerpt, with a powerful ending. Brought a lump to my throat. <\/p>\n

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, “A Piece of Cotton,” by Anne Fadiman<\/big><\/p>\n

In March of 1918, a year after the United States entered World War I, a mob surrounded a Montana man named E.V. Starr and tried to force him to kiss an American flag. Starr refused, saying, “What is this thing anyway? Nothing but a piece of cotton with a little paint on it and some other marks in the corner there. I will not kiss that thing. It might be covered with microbes.”<\/p>\n

The previous month, Montana had enacted a flag-desecration statute that became the model for the 1918 federal Sedition Act, outlawing “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the United States government or its flag. Starr was charged with sedition, fined $500, and sent to the state penitentiary for ten to twenty years of hard labor. Ruling on Starr’s appeal, the federal district court judge who heard the appeal wrote:<\/p>\n

In the matter of his offense and sentence, obviously petitioner was more sinned against than sinning\u2026. [The mob’s] unlawful and disorderly conduct, not his just resistance, nor the trivial and innocuous retort into which they goaded him, was calculated to degrade the sacred banner and to bring it into contempt. Its members, not he, should have been punished.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although he called the court that had sentenced Starr “stark, staring, raving mad” – no penalty that severe had ever been meted out, or would ever be meted out again, in a United States flag desecration case – the judge ruled that the state law was nonetheless constitutional and that he had no other choice than to uphold the conviction.<\/p>\n

The unfortunate Starr’s only bit of luck was that the Montana mob did not assault him, unlike the automobile workers in Lansing, Michigan, who, the same winter, after a fellow employee wiped his hands on a flag, had chopped a hole in the ice that covered the Grand River, tied a clothesline to the man’s foot and submerged him until he apologized; or the saloon patrons in Thermapolis, Wyoming, who, the previous year, had lynched a man for shouting “Hoch lebe der Kaiser.” (In the latter case, the victim was cut down in the nick of time by the city marshal. The Chicago Tribune<\/i> reported: “Revived with cold water, he was forced to kneel and kiss the American flag. He then was warned to get out of town. He did.”<\/p>\n

I read about these cases – they are collected in a fascinating and disturbing book called Desecrating the American Flag: Key Documents of the Controversy from the Civil War to 1995<\/i>, edited by Robert Justin Goldstein – while I was attending a conference in Colonial Williamsburg, the omphalos of Americana. It felt strange to underline E.V. Starr’s question in a hotel room crammed with hooked rugs and embroidered samplers. What is<\/i> this thing anyway? I thought. Is it just a piece of cotton? Is it, as Katha Pollitt put it, explaining why she had refused her daughter’s request to hang a flag in their window, a symbol of “jingoism and vengeance and war”? Or is it, as a group of New York women wrote in the dedication of the silk flag they had sewn for Union soldiers in 1861, “the emblem of all you have sworn to defend: \/ Of freedom and progress, with order combined, \/ The cause of the Nation<\/i>, of God<\/i>, and Mankind<\/i>“?<\/p>\n

In the weeks after September 11, I saw for the first time that the flag – along with all its red, white, and blue collateral relations – is what a semiotician would call “polysemous”: it has multiple meanings. The flag held aloft by the pair of dissolved hitchhikers who squatted next to their backpacks on Route 116, a mile from our home, meant We will not rape or murder you<\/i>. The red, white, and blue turban worn by the Sikh umbrella vendor a friend walked past in Dupont Circle, not far from the White House, meant Looking like someone and thinking like him are not the same thing.<\/i> The flag on the lapel of a Massachusetts attorney mentioned in our local paper – on seeing it, his opposing counsel had whispered to a colleague, “I’m so screwed, do you have a flag pin I can borrow?” – meant I am morally superior<\/i>. The flags brandished by two cowboy-hatted singers at a country fair we attended on the day the first bombs fell on Afghanistan meant Let’s kill the bastards<\/i>. The Old Glory bandanna around the neck of the well-groomed golden retriever I saw on a trip to Manhattan meant Even if I have a Prada bag and my dog has a pedigree, I’m still a New Yorker and I have lost something.<\/i> The flag in our front yard meant We are sad. And we’re sorry we’ve never done this before.<\/i><\/p>\n