I'm just old enough to remember Republican outrage after Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman was arrested, in 1968, for desecrating the symbol of our democracy. Called to be dressed down by members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he'd appeared wearing an American flag as a shirt. Decades later, surprised by seeing Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Richard Myers wearing a flag shirt on Memorial Day in Washington, DC, in 2005, writer, activist, and Yippie co-founder Paul Krassner made the obvious connection to Hoffman, who as the police led him away had been heard to remark, "I only regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country."
Well, look at the flag these days: It's ubiquitous, appearing not only on baseball caps and T-shirts (this Disney Mickey U.S. Flag T-shirt should be a collector's item, at least in Florida), but on pins and bumper stickers, the union downward, all black, or clutched in a screaming bald eagle's talons. The flag appears on guns and on NRA merchandise. And it flies at night and in rainstorms, "bigly" over banks and used-car lots and the whatevers and whatnots of strip malls because Congress eagerly loosened the rules of display back in the bicentennial year, 1976. Our flags are polyester now, said the lobbyists (with fists full of dollars), so there's no need to lower them.
