Most mornings, Jim Carr parks his Ford S.U.V. on a distant interstate overpass within the unincorporated group of Agate, Colorado. The view from the bridge is brown prairie: stacks of spooled hay, an deserted backhoe. The blades of a sprawling turbine farm flip slowly within the distance. Carr’s car is unmistakable: a number of years in the past, he had the outside lined in a vinyl “pores and skin” constructed from a super-enlarged colour picture of an American flag.
Carr, who’s in his early seventies, had spent hours looking out the Web for a flag {photograph} with simply the best “circulation.” To the pores and skin he added medallions (“VIETNAM VETERAN”) and decals (“NEVER FORGET”). Above his “Purple Coronary heart” license plate, he hooked up small replicas of the fight medals he stated he obtained for serving in Vietnam, in 1968 and 1969, as a member of the 82nd Airborne; these embrace the Bronze Star and the Military infantryman medal, which is conferred on troopers who struggle the enemy intently sufficient, as Carr places it, to “look him within the eye.”
One latest morning, site visitors zoomed alongside I-70—eastbound to Kansas Metropolis, westbound to Denver. Carr, who has white hair and watery blue eyes, had on denims and a T-shirt that referenced a profit for veterans. Holstered on his left hip was a Colt nine-millimeter handgun—Colorado is an open-carry state. He raised the rear hatch of the S.U.V. and eliminated twenty-nine massive flags, every of which was hooked up to a pole product of P.V.C. pipe. Most of those had been American flags, however there have been additionally banners honoring prisoners of conflict and law-enforcement officers. Carr went up and down the bridge, affixing the flags to both aspect of the overpass, the place they lifted and flapped within the wind.
The array was an arresting sight for such a colorless stretch of interstate. Motorists might see Carr sitting on the tailgate of his S.U.V., in a camp chair, waving. Draped over the again of the chair was his black-leather bike vest, which was crowded with patches—“Brothers Perpetually,” “PTSD,” “Patriot.” He introduced out a espresso thermos and a small Igloo cooler, which held his on a regular basis lunch, a ham sandwich. At his ft sat a storage bin containing a number of the Beanie Infants that he as soon as collected by the 1000’s, as an funding. He now offers the toys to schoolchildren at Christmas and to households who cease by the bridge.
Carr had been flying his flags for the previous forty-eight days, but he nonetheless couldn’t perceive why some passersby gave him the finger. He owned an unlimited “TRUMP 2020” banner however selected to not fly it for concern of showing “political”—the nation had turn out to be “so divided,” he advised me, including, “America is simply so mad.”
The “Blue Lives Matter” banner he displayed—a modified American flag with one blue stripe, honoring the police—little doubt angered those that favor “defunding“ law-enforcement businesses. The concept of demanding better police accountability had intensified for the reason that deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But Carr assumed that the flag that he had worn into fight was mutually understood as a logo of nationwide unity. He stated, “These flags symbolize freedom.”
When Carr was within the eleventh grade, in Georgia, he dropped out of faculty and ran away: “I didn’t like residence life. I had 4 sisters—I couldn’t get together with anyone.” Enlisting within the Military straightened him out. “If I hadn’t went into the Military I’d most likely be in a sequence gang someplace—in jail or one thing—as a result of I used to be imply.”
After the conflict, Carr got here residence “tousled.” He advised me, “I couldn’t get nothing organized.” He tried nursing college, however he stop and finally grew to become a self-employed electrician, preferring the solitary work of fixing different folks’s houses. He received married and raised three kids. (“And none of ’em’s in jail.”)
Round 2005, Carr noticed information reviews that members of Westboro Baptist Church, a Christian splinter group in Topeka, had been demonstrating at army funerals. The church members equated U.S. casualties within the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with divine punishment for America’s tolerance of homosexuality. Their protest indicators stated, “GOD SENT THE IEDs” and “PRAY FOR MORE DEAD SOLDIERS.”
Outraged veterans began displaying up on the funerals en masse, on bikes, to offer safety and emotional help to the households of the useless. They flew American flags on their choppers and drowned out protestors’ chants by revving their engines. These counter-demonstrators grew to become the Patriot Guard Riders, a nonpartisan group with chapters nationwide. The Riders required solely that members exhibit “unwavering respect for many who danger their very lives for America’s freedom and safety.” An early chief as soon as stated, “We present households in grieving communities that America nonetheless cares.”
Carr joined the Riders round 2015. Honoring fellow-veterans gave him a way of function and peace. He attended as much as six funerals per week, driving so far as Oklahoma. He traded in his bike, a Can-Am Spyder, for the S.U.V., and deliberate to dedicate his retirement to paying tribute to as many veterans and first responders as doable.
When the coronavirus pandemic—“this corona crap”—began, public-safety measures went into impact. The Guardian Riders “mandated all the things on us: we’ve to remain six ft aside, you must put on a masks, you may’t discuss to the household,” Carr advised me. “I stated, ‘You understand what? You are taking your rules and shove ‘em up your ass.’ ” After Carr stop the Riders, he thought, “Now what the hell am I gonna do?” He stated that God then advised him, “Discover a bridge and set your flags.”
Colorado, with a inhabitants of almost six million, has been known as a political microcosm of America: voters nearly evenly symbolize Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. The state voted Republican in six of the ten previous Presidential races, however city voters in Denver and Boulder pushed the previous three elections to the Democrats. Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Trump in Colorado, in 2016. Polls present Joe Biden with a double-digit lead there. The previous governor, John Hickenlooper, the Democratic challenger to Republican Senator Cory Gardner, who’s working for reëlection, stands a powerful probability of flipping the seat and, doubtlessly, management of the Senate.
Carr was an ardent Trump voter in Trump nation, an hour east of Denver. However on the bridge he sometimes felt lonely and glum. “The very first thing I get is folks flipping me off, and never blowing their horn and liking what I’m doing,” he stated, on the morning that I met him. One among his largest indicators clearly said the spirit of his mission: “SALUTE TO AMERICA.” Regardless of his fastened earnings, Carr had commissioned the message and framed it (extra P.V.C. pipe). Often, a passerby made a donation that allowed for the maintenance of his solitary operation: a fifty-dollar-bill in a thank-you card, a wadded-up hundred. Carr saved the money in a Ziploc bag in his car, close to a roll of duct tape and one other handgun. At any time when he talked in regards to the donations, he received emotional. He stated, “We have now to face collectively!” He appeared to each sense and reject the concept that Trump has made it laborious to do this.
The city of Palm Seashore, Florida, limits its flagpoles to a peak of forty-two ft, and its flags to four-by-six ft. In 2006, Trump, at his non-public membership there, Mar-a-Lago, erected a flagpole that stood eighty ft tall. He raised a flag that measured a minimum of fifteen-by-twenty-five ft—a sq. footage better than that of some New York Metropolis flats. Neighbors complained; Trump defied municipal orders to reduce, then sued the city for twenty-five million {dollars}, claiming infringement of his constitutional and civil rights. He reportedly argued that he wanted such a mammoth flag with a purpose to “appropriately categorical the magnitude” of his “patriotism.”
Greater than 100 thousand {dollars} in municipal fines accrued. The press reported that Trump finally agreed to shorten the flagpole by ten ft and relocate it to a much less seen spot, and to offer 100 thousand {dollars} to charitable causes, together with a veterans’ group. The Washington Submit revealed, in 2016, that he paid these bills utilizing cash from a nonprofit basis funded with different folks’s donations. The association could have violated legal guidelines prohibiting “nonprofit leaders from utilizing charity cash to profit themselves or their companies,” the newspaper famous.
In 2016, the N.F.L. participant Colin Kaepernick declined to face for the pre-game taking part in of the nationwide anthem, saying that he couldn’t “present satisfaction in a flag for a rustic that oppresses Black folks and folks of colour.” Trump gained reward from his political base by condemning Kaepernick as un-American.
In 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, a white-supremacist rally featured the American flag, however a lot of the marchers carried Accomplice flags and swastika banners. After one of many white supremacists plowed his Dodge Challenger right into a crowd of peaceable protesters, killing certainly one of them, Heather Heyer, the far proper appeared to rebrand, in line with Bethan Johnson, a College of Cambridge scholar and a fellow on the Centre for Evaluation of the Radical Proper. Calling the rally “a catalyst for fast change throughout the total politics of flag-waving within the radical proper,” she famous that some members of the far proper had been rejecting swastikas in favor of the American flag, maybe partly in order that any assault on them would seem like an assault on america itself. Johnson wrote, “Scientists have discovered that Individuals report back to really feel a way of satisfaction and reverence in direction of the American flag and, vicariously maybe those that stroll beneath it. In actual fact, so sanctified is the thought of the flag that the American authorities has codified rules concerning the show of nationwide flags, going as far as to state that the American flag not solely represents America, however ‘is itself thought of a residing factor.’ ” One white nationalist had stated, “If an American flag can draw extra folks shut sufficient to listen to our message, it’s our responsibility to utilize that instrument.”
This previous February, Trump, whereas on stage on the Conservative Political Motion Convention, crudely hugged and kissed an American flag whereas mouthing the phrases, “I really like you, child.” In June, it was reported that his Administration had relocated the P.O.W./M.I.A. flag from atop the White Home to a much less distinguished place, angering advocates for prisoners of conflict and army service members lacking in motion. The Democratic senator Jack Reed used the chance to level out that Trump had no bother selling the Accomplice flag.
Lately, Trump advised a compulsory 12 months in jail for anybody who desecrates the flag. (Burning or in any other case desecrating the flag is protected underneath the First Modification of the Structure, which Trump had cited in his protection of the flag at Mar-a-Lago.) In August, Trump held the ultimate night time of the Republican Nationwide Conference, for the primary time American historical past, on the White Home; aides constructed a stage on the South Garden and loaded it with fifty-four American flags.
All through the summer time, flag-decked Trump flotillas coursed down rivers, and throughout lakes. On Etsy, venders bought American flags superimposed with Trump’s identify and face, and with such messages as “Trump 2020: Fuck Your Emotions” (sixteen {dollars}) and “FUCK TRUMP: In the event you like Trump, nicely fuck you too” ($19.99). On the huge Sturgis Bike Rally, in Fast Metropolis, South Dakota, in July, one native resident, Joe Lowe, was bothered to see such vulgar manipulation and misappropriation of the nation’s image. “It’s simply disrespectful,” he advised a information station. “My dad died for the nation and my uncle died on the battlefield. They fought for the county, for america of America, not america of Trump.”
The flag has represented completely different concepts at completely different instances in American historical past: throughout the Revolution, it was an indication of radical democracy, although the eagle was the extra dominant emblem; within the eighteen-forties, it stood for anti-immigration politics; throughout the Civil Conflict, it was utilized by each anti- and pro-slavery causes; within the eighteen-nineties, the Pledge of Allegiance was created, and waves of immigrants got flags as a part of their “Americanization”; throughout the Vietnam period, it was seen as a pro-war image. Instantly after 9/11, the flag had a extra unifying presence; with the invasion of Iraq, throughout the Presidency of George W. Bush, it additionally grew to become synonymous with the U.S. army.
In 2003, Woden Teachout, a graduate scholar at Harvard who was ending her doctorate in American research, took an American flag to a protest of the Iraq Conflict, in Montpelier, Vermont. Teachout, who was together with her sisters, Zephyr and Dillon, seen that the opposite demonstrators couldn’t work out whether or not she was “a part of the protest or a counter-demonstration.” Teachout later stated that for her the flag was “a logo of democracy—folks within the streets, speaking to their authorities,” however that others had been utilizing it as “a really sturdy pro-war image.”
Teachout, who now teaches on the Union Institute and College in Cincinnati, wrote a e-book, “Capture the Flag: A Political History of American Patriotism,” exploring how the American flag “strikes from one which means to a different.” She famous that throughout the civil-rights motion, Medgar Evers gave American flags to 6 hundred schoolchildren in Jackson, Mississippi, the place he was the state subject secretary for the N.A.A.C.P. Marching by way of city, the scholars met a line of law enforcement officials, sheriff’s deputies, and state troopers, who took the flags. The sight of American flags finally discarded “within the mud and within the grime” grew to become a robust image, Teachout said, of how Black residents’ “American rights had been trampled all through the segregated South.”
