Showing the Flag

Fourth of July musings on symbols, patriotism, and identity 3

flagSketches of ideas for the JP Green House exterior all include banners, signs, and flags at our request. This reflects our plan to unearth the former corner store that used to be housed in the “flatiron” triangular building. It’s also a means of advertising our demonstration project and a good fit with our civic purpose, to serve as a community center and climate campaigning “hub” for 350.org.

The kids will enjoy making their own banners as well—indeed, their after-camp project today is to design a poster for the JP Green House Kids’ $5 Lemonade Stand & Mini-Toboggan Run/Water Slide planned for the weekend. Andrée and I have cautioned that they may not see many takers at that price, but I forget that five dollars isn’t quite the grand sum it was when I was a kid.

As in this early sketch by neighborhood architects Bill MacIlroy and Nancy Shapiro, we plan to have a couple of flag poles above a storefront sign, with banners on each side and a neighborhood bulletin board.

But what flag or flags to fly?

jpgh flagJP Green House exterior design concept showing U.S. and Earth flags.Bill MacIlroy and Nancy ShapiroFlag-flying, like bumper stickers, is an expression of personality and identity, which also, in the aggregate, helps define a community. The journey from Jamaica Plain to Roslindale (the JP Green House sits smack on the line between these two Boston neighborhoods) is marked by a decline in rainbow flags and Tibetan prayer banners and an upsurge of shamrocks and American flags.

It has always struck me that the liberal/progressive rejection of the American flag (traceable to anti-Vietnam protests, I assume) has had a subtle but nonetheless powerful impact on U.S. politics. Refusal to show the flag is an eloquent expression of deep ambivalence toward America and a huge boon for conservatives and the Republican Party. It was a move of genius for the Obama campaign to employ a logo that evokes the flag, yet subverts the formula by dropping stars and choosing slightly off-true colors.

At this moment in history, facing immediate crises and the looming weight of climate cataclysm, I think it’s time to reclaim our flag as a symbol of national bonds stronger then partisanship, as an affirmation of those parts of the American character on which we must rely if we are to face the terrible danger before us, and as an expression of the true, lasting, and revolutionary founding principles of the nation.

On this Fourth of July, we will proudly fly the American flag at the JP Green House ... right next to a bold banner proclaiming “$5 Lemonade.” What could be more American?

Ken Ward is a climate campaigner and carpenter whose work can be see at http://jpgreenhouse.org.

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  1. randino Posted 11:44 am
    02 Jul 2009

    Delightful.  However for people of a certain age and political tendency, embracing the flag is kind of like embracing someone who broke your heart, emptied the bank account, got sole custody of the kids, and turned all your friends against you.  It is also the symbol of people who used to beat you up.Glad you can do it, but it is still a bridge a little too far for me. Randy Cunningham 

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  2. Ken Ward's avatar

    Ken Ward Posted 1:47 am
    03 Jul 2009

    Randy, I'm driving two of the kids (Simon 7 and Kuba 10) to camp yesterday, barely awake because I haven't had that second cup yet, and can't stop from saying, "oh sh*t" when the lights go off on a cop car behind us. Kuba, who's alert to nuance and can swear like a sailor, asks what's up, and so I tell them a little bit about what it was like when I was not much older then he is now, and me & my friends were routinely "hassled" by "the fuzz." 40 years later (and having not had a stash in my car for decades), I can still get that sudden leaden feeling in the pit of my stomach when I see gumballs go off. Both kids were fascinated and asked many questions. They seemed most interested in how we stood out (much to my relief; it didn't seem to occur to them to ponder why we might be subjects of interest). They marveled that long hair, jeans and a couple of earrings on a teenage boy could get you pulled over or rousted, and I suddenly had a vivid recollection of one time I was hitching from Boston to Amherst in a snowstorm, going the northern way on Route 2, and got dropped off outside some town, Gardner I think it was, and had barely put out my thumb before the cop car rolls up. Those days, police didn't get out for the likes of us, they'd just roll the window down and you'd have to walk over to them and they always seemed to have an American flag decal on that left rear window...   I remember the Gardner cop because he put me in the back seat, drove to a diner, bought me a coffee and donut and then dropped me off on the other side of town, one of those occasional gruff human acts a white boy might get, but I'll bet I wasn't wearing my patched jeans that day, the ones modeled after the cover of Neal Young's first album, the ones with the American flag patch just like the one on every cop uniform, carefully hand-sewn on the ass.

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  3. randino Posted 5:16 am
    03 Jul 2009

    Happy 4th, Ken. Let those bad - and funny - old memories not deter us in the never ending job of building a decent future for those kids.  There is no better work. Randy Cunningham 

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Series Intro
In which we chronicle the creation of a groundbreaking eco-home 5
How we found 133 Bourne St., and how we almost lost it 3
Fighting climate chaos with a hammer and a heart 4
Getting to know the neighborhood -- through its trash 0
Fourth of July musings on symbols, patriotism, and identity 3
You and me and a billion tiny spores 6
Treasure hunting during building demo 1
Love in a time of cataclysm 5
The amazing promise and many challenges of passivhaus construction 4
Should Kuba have a puppy? 19
Puppies and bunnies and carnivorous eco-curmudgeons 7
The fight to save childhood 8
Therapy on the Titanic 4
Roselle's Rollicking Tale & Moral of the Story 0
The best part about climate change 1
Eve of Destruction (New Millennium) 5
Simple people 6
Slideshow: Reinventing the JP Green House 0
Home Economics of the JP Green House, Part 1 0
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