The story that came out of Valdosta State University on April 17th is like a grab bag of what’s wrong in this country. If you weren’t paying attention, here’s the short version: a small protest group had set themselves up at VSU and, as part of their demonstration, had laid an American flag on the ground and were walking on it. Tipped off by a student, Air Force veteran and former Playboy model Michelle Manhart came onto the campus and, while arguing with the protestors, grabbed their flag and refused to give it back. Campus police were called, and they literally had to wrestle Manhart to the ground to get the flag (i.e., “the stolen property”) back, at which point they returned it to the protestors (i.e., “the rightful owners”). Manhart wasn’t charged, but she was banned from campus activities in the future.
Conservatives, of course, have rallied to Manhart’s side. Manhart, for her part, is unapologetic, citing the flag as a “symbol of freedom”, and saying that it “belongs to the whole country”. Expect protests and counter-protests to follow.
Read on to see my short and incomplete list of what’s wrong with this story:
1) The flag doesn’t represent “freedom” – it represents us. It represents who we as a country choose to be, what we choose to do, moment to moment. Our best and our worst, our proud deeds and our dark sins. If you were a child in Iran around, oh, 1953, you watched the US depose a popular, elected prime minister to reinstall the Shah, who on his bad days made Saddam Hussein look like Santa Claus. Then, if you were unlucky enough to be the child of, say, a newspaper editor, you might have watched the secret police kick in your door in the middle of the night and drag your dad away for thinking he could still express opinions about the government. If you think, after seeing that, the US flag would represent “freedom” in your mind, you have a screw loose. The indiscriminate drone attacks that kill hundreds of innocents for the sake of taking potshots at what is effectively a global street gang do far more to sully the flag than some yahoos demonstrating on a campus in Valdosta. If you want to preserve the reputation of the flag, do better things.
2) Even if it did represent “freedom”, the right to trample, burn or otherwise destroy a flag you bought yourself is actual freedom. I don’t know what it is about some brands of conservative and the tendency to value symbolism over substance. Taking away freedom to protect the thing you say is a symbol of the freedom you’re taking away is just, Christ, just so fucking stupid it makes my eyes bleed.
3) The symbol may belong to the whole country, but any particular made-in-China piece of cloth bearing that symbol is a commercial good someone owns. Taking it from them, however noble you see yourself for doing it, is “theft”. At least for most people.
4) And beyond all of this, former Playboy model Manhart is just a poor standard bearer for this particular cause. If you’re going to take offense to the flag being mistreated, maybe you shouldn’t have used one in one of your nude shots, holding it like a beach towel covering your landing strip and, yes, hanging down onto the floor. The shot with the two small flags strategically covering your breasts also probably isn’t in sync with the US Flag Code. I don’t know, I’ll have to look that one up.
5) And finally, this whole incident gives police the chance to throw the double standards of justice in our face yet again. Michelle Manhart literally wrestled with police over a flag she’d just stolen. Had she been one of the black protestors doing the same thing, she could have considered it a happy ending if she’d only ended up plucking taser leads out of her ass. Eric Garner did nothing but yank his arm away from police who, from what I saw in that video, had neither told him he was under arrest nor asked consent to search him, and he ended up dead – and I’ve yet to see a conservative call that anything but his own fault. In all too many situations, invoking your rights (“becoming confrontational”) or resisting being manhandled for no reason (“being combative”) can get you slammed into the ground hard enough to cause permanent injury, or leave you bleeding out on the street from a piss-poor grouping of bullet wounds. But obviously, that’s only if you’re “one of them”. A white conservative woman can snatch someone else’s property, wrestle cops to the ground, and end up being charged with nothing - and certainly not be seen by the public in the same light as a black man who did the same thing. Note to Manhart: that gross incongruity is one of the things our nation is doing right now, collectively, and is therefore one of things the flag currently symbolizes. Get it now?
Conservative forums aren’t likely to bash Manhart over trying to interfere with someone else’s freedom. They’re not all that likely even to uphold the protestors’ right to do what they want with their own property. That’s just the hypocritical nature of the beast. I don’t even care about that.
I care about the fact that Michelle Manhart can be taken into custody without a scratch on her after wrestling with police, while in Baltimore Freddie Gray merely attempts to flee an arrest – the reasons for which the Baltimore PD still can’t seem to say – and ends up so severely injured that his spine was 80% severed and he died in a coma seven days later. I care that the standards of using force, especially lethal force, are so vague and shifting that the only thing known for sure is that if you’re not white, you’re probably on the wrong side of that line. And I care that the broader public reinforces that double standard with double standards of their own.
I care about this for the obvious moral reasons, but also because I care about the flag, and – unlike Manhart – I know what really sullies it, and I want it to stop.