I had occasion to contemplate our flag a few weeks ago. Conversations occurred about when to fly it and why, and those led to memories.

I’m not much into flags (or symbols in general), but I respect the power they exert on many. I think traditions are sort of like language; you have to learn the rules before you can break or satirize them. So I don’t display the stars and stripes, but I also won’t stand by while a flag is on the ground, and I notice when traditions aren’t respected.

Nowadays, some people think it’s okay to leave the flag up at night and without a light on it. Of course it isn’t. There’s no reason to fly a flag that can’t be seen. And there is a symmetry in the tradition of sunset flag-lowering: the ritual of triangle-pleating the cloth without letting a corner of it touch the earth.

Some young adults think that all or most or many households regularly flew the flag in the good ol’ days of the 1960s. Not so! In fact, it was ticky-tacky enough in the suburbs then, without adding matching flags to everyone’s front porch every day; that would have been dreadful. We would have resembled rows of ships.

I spent formative years in the suburbs of San Diego. That’s the largest naval base in the contiguous U.S. Every dad in our neighborhood was a war vet, and most were career servicemen. It was easy to find the John Birch Society, or Goldwater headquarters, and the newspaper? The San Diego Union? It was the Fox News of the time. In other words, our community was conservative.

Here’s the truth, kids. Most households had a flag, just like they had a gun. Most porches had a bracket for flying the stars and stripes. And those households put the flag out for Memorial Day, July 4^th, and Veteran’s Day. The father or one of the kids took the banner in at sunset. Other than that, the only times the flag appeared was to fly at half-mast, to mark the death of a patriot.

Oh, and we didn’t have flags for our cars then. That seems to be a post nine-eleven style. I’ve always thought it’s silly when a car’s bumper tells me to kill my television. It’s beyond silly, it’s oxymoronic and surreal, when a citizen uses a gasoline-fueled car to fly the flag.

At freeway speed the flags are bound to fray:
appended to antennas like the crests
of gaudy parrots, signaling the way
to be American. Within our breasts
our arteries are hard, our hearts are sick;
without we bind to us the stripes and stars.
Exchanging motion for emotion, slick
for crude, we manifestly deck our cars.

Beneath disputed territory pools
await the tap of human enterprise.
There’s compound sludge and salts and fossil fuels
and everybody knows it, for the spies
have reared economists – they mark the curves
of battle-lines above the world’s reserves.