If anyone disrespects the American flag, it is Donald Trump
and his Vice President Mike Pence, not Colin Kaepernkik or the other NFL
players who take a knee during the national anthem.
Kaepernik and the other players are affording the flag the
kind of patriotic respect the simple minds of demagogues refuse to understand. The
players who take a knee while the national anthem plays are taking the sort of
risks the founders knew would be necessary to achieve justice.
Trump and Pence, on the other hand, are the kind of despotic
rulers the First Amendment predicted would always challenge the exercise of
freedoms, and from whom the Constitution was designed to protect us.
Last weekend, Pence and Trump orchestrated some cynical
political theater. Costing taxpayers a quarter of a million dollars, Pence flew
to Indianapolis for an NFL game between the Colts and the San Francisco 49ers. It
didn’t take a soothsayer to predict the players would take a knee during the
playing of the anthem. Trump knew that would happen and dispatched his Veep to
the game with orders to depart dramatically when it happened.
Pence’s entourage arrived along with a van filled with
reporters. According to CNN, who Trump has conditioned his base to believe is “fake
news,” the reporters were told it was not necessary for them to leave the van because
Pence would not be in the stadium very long.
When the inevitable knee-taking occurred, Pence took off in
a pretend huff, announcing that he and the man the U.S. Secretary of State
calls “a moron,” would “not
dignify any event that disrespects our soldiers, our Flag, or our National
Anthem."
Immediately,
the Make America Great Again Committee used the contrivance to raise campaign
cash. Trump Tweeted his reliable donors saying, “your Vice President REFUSED to
dignify their disrespect for our anthem, our flag, and the many brave soldiers
who have died for their freedoms," Trump requested campaign donations to
support the move.
His
so-called “base” loved it and America became more divided than it was the day
before this stunt.
It is
all a reality TV show. This one is more like the old Jerry Springer Show than
it is like the Apprentice. Jerry Springer’s MO was to pit guests against one
another, to create anger and chaos, which more than occasionally culminated in
fisticuffs on stage.
For the
President and this Vice President, the whole world, to paraphrase Shakespeare,
is a Jerry Springer stage. One of the props is the American flag.
Pence and his boss, Donald Trump have turned the nation’s
symbols into cheap political gimmicks. They have done far worse than to take a knee.
They are using the flag to create anger and chaos and to divide Americans for
their own political gains.
The Trump-Pence gang aren’t the first Republicans to do so.
I am old enough to remember how Richard Nixon and his crooked Vice President
Spiro Agnew did it. They adopted the U.S. flag lapel pin as a symbol of
division in order to provide them with cover as they waged an illegal and
immoral war in Vietnam. The ploy divided American then as this one does today.
So, this sort of patriotism-based demagoguery is nothing
new. That fact doesn’t make it any less disgusting.
The flag doesn’t belong to Trump and Pence. It isn’t a tool
to achieve their political goals. But neither is it the exclusive symbol of
what Trump calls “the many
brave soldiers who have died for their freedoms." It is typical Trump-buffoonery
to suggest that Americans should not exercise the freedoms for which our
military veterans fought.
The U.S.
flag does not represent veterans to the exclusion of the rest of us. Yes, it is
a symbol of the freedoms for which they fought and died. But it is more than
that. As a symbol, it reminds us not only that we are free but that we are
obliged to use those freedoms to strive for justice and equality.
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