We probably hang around with the wrong kind of people. For most of June, there were complaints about the American flag. How long did it have to be at half-mast out of respect for a deceased president? This was mostly sour grapes from certain people whose memory of President Ronald Reagan was less rosy than what they were seeing on TV, hearing on radio, and reading in magazines. Oddly enough, we heard it from a number of small-business owners, who began to ask each other, “How much longer?”
These grumpy folks had good intentions. After all, they wanted to do the right thing, within the limits of the law, while not compromising their own personal views. It is worth pointing out now what that rule is: It is required that flags be flown at half-mast for thirty days after the death of a former president. Yes, even Richard Nixon got the treatment. (Though we wouldn’t be surprised if many flag-fliers declined to make this tribute back in May 1994—even after Nixon’s apologists, including President Bill Clinton, had convinced us that his main crime was getting caught. You know, he normalized relations with China!)
When we don’t know what the rule is, we worry that we might be offering a hollow tribute. We don’t want to go through the motions only because of peer pressure from others who have an unusually elevated and amplified view of the deceased. Also, we’d rather not be confused for the brown-noser who jumps twice as high as he is asked to.
No worries there. We were simply doing our duty, whatever our affiliations. Flags all the way back up now, thanks.
In this case, observing the rule to the final hour of the final day was right as rain. There were few people as literal-minded as President Reagan or his most ardent fans. The man who saw the world in black and white—or perhaps in red and white—had a base of support in the Christian right. If there is a single unifying shibboleth of this self-assured and self-righteous bunch, it is their view that the Holy Bible says what it means and means what it says, and “interpretation” is a fancy word for “making stuff up.”
It is agreeable to believe that the world divides neatly into good and bad, right and wrong, America and everyone else—and to swear on a stack of Bibles that this is so. President Reagan’s unflappable faith in our nation’s divine right was as refreshing in 1980 as it is today, even though it was a dangerous delusion. Was and is. The present version is deadly, in case you haven’t been watching the news lately.
The problem with a literal interpretation of the Bible, the world, or the rules pertaining to the flag is that reality simply doesn’t work that way. Many thank Reagan for the fall of the Soviet Union. To be sure, it was an almost inconceivable and abrupt end to a paradigm—the Cold War—which had hung over our heads like a black cloud for half a century. But what killed Soviet communism was Soviet communism itself: the literal-minded view that one communitarian system applied to all people at all times in all places. The beauty of capitalism is that it recognizes that people aren’t wired that way. In fact, it has no idea how people are wired, and merely tries to maximize the opportunities for variety. A political and economic system that cultivates individualism—messy, figurative, diverse—is so much more real, it’s a wonder why we ever bothered about the Reds.
But perhaps the lesson was never learned. The U.S. itself has slid into an egregiously simple view of itself and the world. Our politicians believe it is semantically impossible for our foreign policy to be wrong, and too many of our people believe in the statistical impossibility that we are all destined to be in the top one percent of the “have-mores.”
It’s OK to be literal about the half-mast ruling. But we are gratified that most Americans neither know nor observe the dozens of other regulations circumscribing the display of Old Glory. As a nation, we eventually reject systems and dynasties, and embrace details and individuals. We are a nation built for the smorgasbord rather than the prix fixe, and this is why we ultimately will prevail over enemies both foreign and domestic. At least that’s the idea.
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