No. 4: The Face of Them and Us is Us
Instead of punching Nazis, take responsibility for the face of the world.
The Old Truck on Tyranny.
This week continues a series inspired by Tim Snyder’s 2017 book On Tyrrany and the “20 Lessons” derived from his study.
Take responsibility for the face of the world. The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow. Notice the swastikas and other signs of hate. Do not look away, and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
The dogs need to go out. They are pressuring me any way that they can. It does not seem to be an urgency to offload urine; they want to burst into the morning light and feel their bodies stretch. We play the game of strained patience every morning. They lay down, wound tight, while I open the screen door. Axle and Betsy peel out on the hard floor on command. One dog body bumps against me as they gain traction and velocity for the outside world.
I take the flag, rolled up on its pole, and follow them. They are stretching their bodies, finding the right bush to pee on, checking the fences for the neighbor dogs.
In the front of my house is stump of great character. I affixed the flag mount here when I moved in. Lots of folks in my neighborhood fly the American flag. I take responsibility for what that means to me. I am not afraid of them because they are very likely kind, good people.
They could be jerks, too. Flying the U.S. flag does not mean specifically that the residents of that address are jerks or good people.
Nor does an "In Our America" sign, an American flag imprinted with the values of the left wing, optimistically written so that it could mean all of us. Is that common where you live? It was created in Portland after the 2016 election by a group called Nasty Women Get Shit Done. I was one of the first cash contributors to that group and get the sense that the sign is ubiquitous across liberal enclaves of this nation. Every third lawn in Portland sports an In Our America sign.1
As an exercise, when I walk through Portland and see the In Our America planted in a nice gentrified house lawn, I defy my instincts and imagine that the residents are jerks. Just to stretch out my thinking about what any of these signs mean. Certainly some conservatives presume that jerkdom resides there.
I live in rural Oregon now, moving back to where I grew up in 2022. There are less (but far from zero) In Our America signs here.
Some in my neighborhood fly other flags that I don't like to see. No swastikas yet, so following Tim Snyder's advice does not yet mean pulling them down. Trump flags are common, though.
I do intend to take responsibility for the face of the world. I worry that the idea of tearing down swastikas that Tim Snyder calls for invites the "punch a Nazi"2 policy, which I think is not an effective strategy. In my view punching one Nazi is exactly what the fascist leadership would like you to do.
I am more confident in the mindsets he expresses to close this 15-minute podcast about the fourth lesson.
"We have a very hard time thinking of the future, and without the future Democracy is very hard to maintain. And since we have this problem we should recognize the people who can help, and the people who can help are the artists. The people who can help are the writers. The people who can help are the poets."
Taking responsibility for the face of the world is creating more than just Not This. When you are led by your creativity, when your creativity allows you to see more deeply, you can create from an imagination of us.
All the people who are shoved to one side by a society which is pragmatic or instrumental, which confuses efficiency with values or productivity with aesthetics. These are the people that are capable of helping us to think about what kind of face we would like the future to have or what kind of face we would like to be able to turn towards the future.
Autocracies spring from the values of the typical left wing and the right wing. They share strategies, including the constriction of creatives. Soviets attempted to crush a generation of poets, only to forge masters out of them, such as Anna Akhamatova composing in her memory outside the prisons that held her son and her husband. She was asked on a cold day in line for a prison visit, "can you describe this?" and she replied, "I can."
Part of taking responsibility for the face of the world is thinking about what the future should look like and taking seriously the people who labor in the direction of generating possibilities.
What is it that Autocracies crush? It is not just the defiant Not This. In truth, an opposition is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of an autocracy. Punching the Nazi proves that there is an opposition, that the autocracy has a function.
They are more scared of the uniting US that would dissolve their power. They are afraid of my liberal Christian classic-car racing friend who wears a baseball hat sporting an American flag.
The flag that I am unrolling in the morning light while my dogs dash around the yard.
What closes the gaps between us? I take responsibility for planting that sign where everyone can see it. I build with my neighbors a face of the world that is tolerant, in which people need not fight or injure each other to feel safe themselves. The shared sign is the powerful sign.
Sign and signified are powerful topics, easily misunderstood. The artists and creators should be feeling that power, that the item they wield in word or image is an item empowered by everything it has passed through.
The flag of the United States of America has a history that is not simple, not wholly "good." There are those on the left who struggle to find affinity with it. Perhaps they prefer to avoid any tribal collection of unity at all. Perhaps they reflect upon misdeeds "done in our name." Perhaps they managed a simplistic, good-guys-and-bad-guys reading of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in their youth and it stuck.
I pass through these reflections every morning as I unroll this flag and insert it on the mount on this stump.. But what history I understand is well beyond a simple story of born-good versus born-bad. That what we are doing here in America is still a great experiment. That the peaceful transfer of power allows us to continue to try to be more perfect. I fly a flag that has stood from the beginning for due process, equal treatment under the law, and constant creation. All the "inefficiencies" that Leo reminded us of in last week's Old Truck Good Coffee.
I fly the flag to make ridiculous the cult worship of flags. To indicate that we includes you. The American flag is this cult's vulnerability.3
These days, I have been joining my anti-fascist compatriots at rallies. I take this flag down from my yard and carry it to the street corner where we gather for supportive honks from passing truckers. I hold the flag up high. A tribal elder leaned in to me at a rally and said "you take care of that flag," I felt blown back by the gravitas in his voice and said, "yes sir."
What if you flew the flag? What if you found what this symbol signifies that is the very thing you are afraid we are losing?
This is the fascists vulnerability. Because what if this symbol represented them AND us? The idea of tyranny, powered by blame of others for their supporter's suffering, is dissolved by something truly uniting. They will likely attack anything that suggests unity across our interchanges. If they do, it will be a good sign. Keep doing that thing.
When my flag grew faded, I stopped putting it up. My neighbor asked why I stopped flying the flag and I told her that it was too faded. She drove to town and bought me a replacement at the local hardware store. That sort of neighborliness is bad for fascists.
No matter how hard a blow you land, punching a Nazi is good for Nazis writ large. If instead you provide signs of unity, signs that remind us us coexistence, you are helping. If one person sees your signs and feels less divided and desparate you have doubtless improved our collective situation.
This evening, the dogs and I will walk out to bring the flag in. They will do the same patrol routes as usual and I will likely still be considering the complexity of this sign and what it signifies. It is not simple, but it is the face of the world I want to live in.
Or…
For discussion of “Punch a Nazi” https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/should-we-be-punching-nazis
My mindset is that the end of fascism is when more moderate people abandon it. That forming a path back to a world that welcomes them will drain the cult's power. I am not thinking about how to rhetorically undermine the hardest cores of hate and dysfunction.This is why I write Old Truck Good Coffee with Leo, for the interchanges to more richly connect us and give autocracy no reason to exist.
We is them and them is us, as in, humanity as a whole, no matter what flag you fly, for a flag represents to a community an individual's identity. A lot of hippies wore parts of the stars and stripes in the 60s for they sought to form a new American identity. I've furled, folded, unfolded and unfurled in uniform the US flag many times as the flag represented the US Constitution which we as soldiers pledged our lives and service to while in uniform. I’ve never had a flag I wanted to fly, because I know I can’t belong, but that’s my bag, not yours. Let us not think of a nation-state or an experiment in democratic freedom, but work to not fuck each other over to fulfill our selfish desires and our beliefs in our rights and wrongs. We are all connected in love. #freakpower