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My country, this, of thee? [1]
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Date: 2025-01-18
This is my American flag, which hung on the pole outside my house for several years, before wind and the elements finally got the better of it. (Don’t be angered over its placement on the ground for the picture, a violation of the U.S. Flag Code; it will be honorably retired at the local VFW post.) I requested and received the flag from my congressman at the time, Jamaal Bowman, one of the only representatives to confront Marjorie Taylor Greene to her face about her tactics. (He was primaried and replaced by George Latimer, also a Democrat, who had no business leaving a cushy job as the Westchester County executive to replace an effective legislator and become a freshman congressman at the age of 71. I’d be embarrassed. The gerontocracy rolls on.) The flag lasted longer than any one I’d ever had, but age finally got it, as it gets us all.
Whenever I would look at the flag, flapping in a strong breeze and slowly shredding, it reminded me of the poem “Barbara Frietchie,” by John Greenleaf Whittier. Written in 1863 and not much remembered today, it was a tribute to a woman who stood up to Confederate troops vandalizing and terrorizing her Maryland town. As a character in the film “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” said of apocryphal history, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” What exactly happened that day in 1862, or sometime around then, was reworked, possibly a composite of several people and incidents – even the real Barbara Fritchie’s name was spelled several different ways – and probably much different from its telling, but the poem suffers no lack of dramatic effect. It evokes a truly emotional response in the reader – at least, a reader who is a true patriot, not the type who resides in the last refuge of a scoundrel, wrapped in the flag.
In it, General Stonewall Jackson leads his Confederate soldiers through Frederick, Maryland, and orders them to shoot down the American flag Frietchie has hanging in her window. “Dame Barbara,” 90 years old, snatches up the flag before it falls.
“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
“A shade of sadness, a blush of shame” come over Jackson’s face, and “the nobler nature within him stirred/To life at that woman’s deed and word.”
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.
Barbara Frietchie takes up her flag in an 1867 engraving.
Long after Barbara Frietchie’s work was “o’er,/And the Rebel rides on his raids no more,” the poet paid honor to her and asked the reader to shed a tear, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier, a magnanimous gesture of forgiveness and unity.
Contrast that with the weaponization of the justice system, vengeance, vindictiveness and retribution to come. One hundred sixty years ago, we were warned: The South shall rise again. The Rebel rides on his raids once more. Sadness, shame, a noble nature … no more.
Like Jimmy Carter, who hoped to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris, I had hoped my flag would last long enough to hang at half-staff, in mourning, and upside down, in distress, on Inauguration Day, but no flag will hang outside my house now, and for how long, I cannot say. My flag is torn and tattered, just like my country. I can get another flag, but I cannot get another country.
I hate to be so negative, but I don’t see much reason for optimism at this point. All we can do is hope that what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature will someday prevail.
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