My American Flag Was Made in China

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. My first flag came in the mail around 1983 from the Disabled American Veterans along with a booklet explaining etiquette, and thence forward I proudly displayed it from the balcony of my swinging bachelor pad every Federal holiday. (Including Armistice Day, which I still call Armistice Day. Then again, I still shout into the phone long distance.)

Upon getting married, I gave up the Derek Flint digs and kept the flag, and I know I made the right decision on both. When my wife and I got our house and began drinking enough to have children, I bought a new, larger flag with eagle, pole, and holder. After splintering most of our front rail trying to hammer the bracket in with screws, I proudly called my love outside to see the new standard. She glanced at the wood chips on the ground, muttered something, and walked away, but I sensed a hidden pride in her. Unfortunately, it was so well hidden I have still not seen it.

Since then, our kids accompany me out to the front deck every holiday morning to raise the flag, and I always feel a tear in my eye as I tell them the story, once again, of how Fidel Castro personally came to our house and wrecked our rail, and how it is not at all stupid to hammer in woodscrews as long as you’re really, really mad at them.

This was all before September 11.

As shaken as we all were, can you imagine the expressions on the faces of those who owned flag stores? One day you’re sitting behind the counter quietly doing a crossword puzzle, the ticking of the clock sounding like a middle linebacker walking on rice paper. The next day it’s as if someone hung a sign outside your place that said “Free Dates With Kathy Ireland.” I wanted a flag for the car, so I went down to our local flag and banner store, Flags And Banners. There was a line in front that took hours, but no one complained. In fact, there was a tacit bond between us, a shared look that needed no explanation. I know lots of folks sneer about flags on cars, but I had to say something, and this was the only thing I could think of. By the time I got inside the store, the shelves looked like a supermarket in Poland in the fifties, and all they had left were cloth ones you had to duct tape onto your windows, so that’s what I did.

Taped or bracketed or glued, I was not alone. Over the next few days, roughly ten to twenty percent of the cars I saw in Los Angeles had flags. Remember, that’s pretty good for an area where, prior to the eleventh, American flags of any kind were as rare as Windsor knots in the Nation of Islam. My taped-on flags were holding up just fine, but a couple of weeks later, I was in Ralphs and saw a display of car flags with plastic window-brackets, so I bought one of those and took the taped flags off.

(An aside of interest, at least to me: For those who don’t know California, Ralphs is a massive supermarket chain, and for many years it annoyed me that their signs never had an apostrophe before the “s”. Not as infuriating as “Like I said” or “irregardless,” but grating nonetheless. Then about a year ago, I saw a TV special on Ralph’s life–no kidding, a special–and learned that his first name wasn’t “Ralph” after all, his last name was . . . “Ralphs.” Are we clear on this? Feeling a great weight lift from my soul, I shouted the motto of my state and fairly skipped upstairs to tell my wife. Her reaction was similar to when she saw the splintered rail.)

That flag had been on my car about six weeks, when I did something stupid. I was taking the kids to school and accidentally hit the switch that rolled down the window with the flag on it, and it instantly shot into Grantland Rice’s blue-gray October sky at sixty miles an hour. In my defense, the kids had made me turn on the Radio Disney ten minutes before, and I felt so pummeled with syrupy pap I was on the verge of confessing to the Lindbergh kidnapping. But that flag went right into orbit, boy, and I felt terrible. My only consolation was to imagine it coming down and lodging in the neck of the manager of a boy-band, or someone from the Berkeley City Council.

After dropping the kids off and taking a roundabout series of sidestreets and alleys home, I returned to Ralphs to get another flag, but they were all out. In fact the entire display was gone. Maybe Vanessa Redgrave bought the whole chain just to have the flags shipped to Gaza and burned in parades. I thought of the flag and banner store (Flags And Banners, remember?) and decided to give them another chance. Perhaps they had restocked? They had been, and I strolled down a long aisle of nothing but car flags, plucked one out, and turned to the register whistling a Sousa march.

And that’s when I saw it. A tiny tag sewn onto the seam of the flag. Three words: Made in China.

I stopped strolling and whistling. I don’t buy things made in China. Well, we all buy things made in China, because the current level of trade is so high (at least on one side), it’s unavoidable. I mean, for all I know, our two American cars had their drive-trains made in China. Most of the toys the kids get as gifts are made in China, and you can’t just tell a three-year-old his shiny Radio Flyer tricycle has to go back. Well, you can, but then someday he’ll write a book about you.

So I don’t consciously buy from China. I check the labels on all our clothing, kids and adults. After buying a set of kitchen spatulas at Costco for a fabulously low price, I saw they were made in China when I got home and returned them on my next trip. I never buy the six-dollar hammer at the hardware store, I always buy the twenty-dollar hammer made here. (Although you already know what a handyman I am; I’m pretty sure the Chinese aren’t broken up about losing my tool business.)

This doesn’t make me a hero, I just won’t do it. My blood boils at the massive injustices they cavalierly dole out to their own people, their neighboring countries, and, not incidentally, us. In the recent past they tried with great success to steal as many secrets from America as they could; doubtless they’re still doing that, but presumably with fewer partners in the executive branch. They viciously suppress religious people within their reach, especially Christians. If you need more than that, I can’t help you.

Those of you who are cast iron free-traders will shrug this off. Okay, good for you. Enjoy your spatulas. And if these feelings make me an 18-carat capitalist instead of a 24-carat one, so be it.

But those guys really make me mad. When their runty boss-of-all-bosses was getting the fifty-cent tour of our country a few years ago and had his picture taken at that hockey game wearing a boys-husky jersey it made me nauseous, and I prayed for a hat-trick on the off chance that someone would toss him onto the ice. Boy, where are the violent hockey-dads when you need them, huh?

So there I am in the aisle at Flags And Banners holding this flag. (Our flag? Their flag?) Am I crazy, or is this at least ironic, or are those two separate questions? Have we sent so much manufacturing abroad that we can’t even make our own flags anymore? Talk about a “Cultural Revolution.” If we were Freedom Riders on a bus in 1964 would we stop at the Grand Wizard’s gas station? If we had to, I guess. I don’t know. I wanted a flag. I could have gone somewhere else. I didn’t know anywhere else. I could’ve checked the phone book. I didn’t want to check the phone book. I could’ve driven around a little. I didn’t want to drive around a little.

I bought the flag. It’s on my car. Ah, well. C’est la guerre. Anyway, who knows, maybe in a couple of months I’ll be tooling along the freeway, the back loaded with kids, everybody except me singing along to Aaron Carter, a small vein starting to throb on my forehead like “Scanners . . .” I’ll reach out to lower the window, accidentally hit the wrong button, and–

Hey, you think with the right updraft a plastic car bracket could fly all the way from the San Fernando Valley to Peking? If it does, they’d better duck.

Oh, come on, puns are great.

Larry Miller is a contributing humorist to The Daily Standard and a writer, actor, and comedian living in Los Angeles.