AP Photo/Julio Cortez
The promised return of “common sense” to America will have lots of people squealing. Already there are people complaining that the most common-sensical things of all are somehow a problem.
Take the “one flag” directive that the State Department has issued in this first flurry of executive orders.
The wording is plain enough: that “Starting immediately, only the United States of America flag is authorized to be flown or displayed at US facilities, both domestic and abroad, and featured in US government content.”
It is amazing that this could be controversial. Even more amazing is how we got here in the first place.
After all, it’s not like the pledge of allegiance is unclear. “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
In America’s past there has been good reason to agree to swear allegiance to one flag. Historically the country has been capable of ripping itself apart over such issues.
But just consider what the people have been expected to swear allegiance to in the past few years.
Each year as pride parades have turned into pride week and then pride month US federal buildings and embassies abroad have chosen to fly the “Pride” flag. A flag that has got more monstrously ugly with each year.
Starting from being a perfectly pleasant symbol of gay liberation it suddenly experienced a set of strange redesigns.
Around the time that the “Black Lives Matter” movement surged the colors of the rainbow suddenly had black and brown added to them. The argument was that black people weren’t represented in the pride flag as it stood.
Many of us were left scratching our heads over this. After all, if the colors of the flag were meant to represent different races then who were the orange and red stripes meant to represent. Was it gays with too much fake tan on? Or white lesbians who had been left out in the sun too long?
Perhaps it is best to pass over who these people thought the yellow stripe represented. But the blue and purple ones? Come on. Even thinking that the flag was about race was a demonstration of Olympic-level stupidity.
Yet US Embassy buildings flew the flag anyway.
Then came the introduction of the triangle into the flag and then a circle inside the triangle. These symbols were meant to extend the reach of the flag — the thinking being that the old pride flag was not “inclusive” enough.
And so transsexuals, “non-binary” people and “asexual” people were “included” through the intervention of a triangle and a little circle.
Because if there was one thing that Americans were screaming out for in the past few years surely it was for more pride to be publicly expressed by people who aren’t much interested in sex. Definitely a historical wrong righted there.
How did we put up with this nonsense for so long? And why?
It is the same with the demand that government buildings should fly BLM flags.
Apart from being one of the biggest financial hustles in modern American history the BLM movement was also one of the most divisive.
It swiftly moved from an awareness-raising movement to a revolutionary anti-American one.
Apart from buying herself multiple luxury mansions, what did BLM leader Patrisse Cullors and her colleagues actually do?
Nothing — except to try to divide America. The fact that so many institutions from the government to the churches actually fell into this trap is something future historians will wonder at.
But it isn’t a mystery. All of these movements long-ago morphed from rights movements into revolutionary anti-American movements. That was their aim.
One of the most popular writers forced onto American college students in recent years was the Afro-Caribbean French Marxist Frantz Fanon.
As well as being one of the worst writers of the post-war era Fanon (who died in 1961) was also one of the most blood-lusting revolutionaries.
He was an “anti-colonial” writer. But what he said the colonialists had done was what he and his followers wanted to do in turn.
As he said described it in Paris in 1956, that included taking over a country by making sure that, “Its systems of reference have to be broken.”
Could anything better describe what has been tried on America in recent years?
Even President Trump the other day accidentally said “two genders” where he meant “two sexes.” “Gender” is a “construct” as we have been told for years.
And as such it is a construct to which we should wave bye-bye. Or as Mrs. Tim Walz (remember her?) might say, we should “turn the page” on it.
But that wasn’t all that the cultural revolutionaries of recent years wanted to do.
As Fanon put it, to destroy a country it is also necessary to destroy its “cultural patterns.” It is necessary to “destructure” the country, and to ensure that its “values are flaunted, crushed, emptied.”
We all lived through an attempt at exactly that. Years in which the American Founders were literally spat upon. Years where we were told that there was nothing more important than identifying yourself by race.
And years of being told that every norm — including biological sex — had to be erased.
We were even told — by no less an organ than the New York Times that this country was not founded when we thought it was, but was actually founded in 1619. This is something that schoolchildren in America were even taught.
What the cultural revolutionaries tried to do to this country — to rip it apart and divide us — nearly worked.
But what is done can be undone. And what has been destroyed can be built back up.
I can think of no better way to start that than to agree to the norms on which this country was founded. On a set of shared values which allow a set of shared set of ambitions. All pursued, united, under one flag.