To be honest, flag-motif t-shirts are kind of garish and not ‘real American’

I have no doubt I’m going to see more than my share of people Thursday clad in t-shirts bearing the red, white and blue colors – if not depictions of the U.S, flag itself.

A symbol of our national pride

To be honest, a part of me is going to be shuddering at the very sight.

BECAUSE I HONESTLY think that it’s kind of tacky and garish, if not quite unpatriotic, to have to see someone wearing the U.S, flag, particularly if they’ve let the image get all faded and wrinkly.

Or worse yet, if it’s a hot, humid summery-type day and they’re covered in sweat.

How disrespectful to the image of our nation to reduce it to an article of dirty laundry.

To be totally honest, I’d find it more respectful if they were to literally wrap themselves up in a real flag – which technically would be an act of desecration. U.S. flags are not to be used for clothing!

WHICH I’M SURE every single one of the ninnies who are going around on this Independence Day will be able to shout out at maximum volume to everyone who manages to offend their sensibilities of what is appropriate.

 

Bordering on skanky

When in reality, I’d argue it is their choice of attire that ought to be considered bordering on desecration.

And as far as any women who choose to wear a skimpy bikini in a pattern of the stars and stripes, all I’d have to say is that is nothing but skanky. How cheap to reduce a field of blue stars to the bikini bottom that covers up the part of her that prevents an arrest for indecent exposure from being made.

It never fails to amaze me whenever I walk into a clothing store of any type and see the assortment of red, white and blue themed shirts or articles of clothing. Meant to be sold to people who think they’re showing off just how “real” of Americans they truly are.

People most offended by sight of this … 

WHEN IN REALITY, I’d argue that they’re showing a level of gaudiness that probably illustrates just how little they truly comprehend what “patriotism” truly is and what “America” is truly all about.

The ones who probably think the day is solely about a summertime barbecue and watching a pyrotechnics display come the evening hours.

Or maybe you’ll get into a local municipal parade that is bound to have somebody clad as “Uncle Sam,” and probably far too many people wearing their “Make America Great Again” caps in bright red.

Which amuses me because I’m sure many of them are old enough to remember the meaning of the phrase “Better dead than red.” Now, they can’t get enough of the color.

BUT BACK TO the t-shirts, most of which are usually in patterns so tacky that I’d be embarrassed to wear one. Which is why I don’t actually own one.

The only red, white and blue banner I possess is an actual U.S. flag – which actually is one of those flags that is certified to have once flown over the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

 

… might well be proud to wear this

Yes, I realize its moment of being the actual “Old Glory” on Capitol Hill may only have lasted a few seconds long. But it somehow seems like more of a legitimate gesture of patriotism than wearing a t-shirt being an assault rifle image superimposed over a U.S. flag. (No, I'm not kidding. You really can find them for sale on the Internet).

Even though I suspect the kind of people who’d actually wear such a shirt are probably the grand-children of the ones who, a half-century ago, got most offended when activist Abbie Hoffman wore his American flag motif shirt in public. Now, such a garment likely would only be worn by someone of the “far right.”

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64 + 75. Are we in for worse in 2012?

The real baseball season in Chicago begins Friday, yet the return of professional ball keeps making me think about the conditions that existed in this city some 36 years ago.

64-97



I’m referring to 1976, which isn’t officially the worst combined season for the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Cubs. But it isn’t that far off.

FOR THAT SUMMER during which I was 10 years old, it was a truly dreadful time on the playing field. Sixty-four wins coming from Comiskey Park, while the Cubs were barely better at 75 victories. Both teams had losing records, and the most memorable aspects of those seasons had little to do with actual athletic activity on the playing field.

So while I understand, in theory, that if Adam Dunn hits even remotely close to what he’s capable of that the White Sox won’t be as completely dreadful as they were last season, the cynic in me wonders if what we’re going to see this season will be reminiscent of the summer of ’76 – when the Spirit of the Bicentennial didn’t impact our city’s baseball clubs.

Or maybe it did. Because I recall those teams playing like two collections of 200-year-old men whose athletic skills were far in the past. It literally was the year the White Sox were managed by Paul Richards (a holdover from the 1950s) and had 50-year-old “Cuban Comet” Minnie Miñoso become a four-decade player – actually managing to get a base hit in one of the three games he played in September of that year.

At 75-87, not much better



Is that what we’re in store for this year? It has me wondering if I’d have a better time this summer recalling that summer from just over a third of a century ago.

BECAUSE THERE WERE quirky moments that will forevermore be remembered by baseball fans. Take April 25 when the Cubs were at Dodger Stadium and a couple of fans got onto the playing field to make what they thought was a political statement – burning a U.S. flag.

Only to have Cubs center fielder Rick Monday charge over and snatch the flag away from them – a moment that the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.,  chose as one of the 100 “classic moments” of the game.

This team card (from '77) shows the shorts



The White Sox got their own memorable moments on August 8, 21 and 22. Those were the three dates that the ball club actually wore those short pants with their uniforms that so many people like to call the “ugliest” uniform ever, and that they’d have you believe the White Sox wore for every ballgame of the mid-to-late 1970s.

Of course, everybody inclined to take the Chicago Cubs seriously (why, I don’t really know) is making much of the fact that Theo Epstein now runs their ball club, instead of the Boston Red Sox. They have hopes that new management will revitalize the team.

I CAN’T HELP but think the Cubs problems are so deep (the Red Sox were never as bad as their fans want to believe they were) that Epstein isn’t enough for a real revitalization.

For the return of Bill Veeck to the White Sox beginning in 1976 sure wasn’t enough to jolt that franchise. ’76 is arguably one of the ball club’s worst teams ever. With the exception of the following season, the rest of the decade was a collection of losing teams.

Will Harry look like a star compared to now?



Names such as Bill Nahorodny and Harry Chappas are what come to my mind when I recall the era. Although I’m starting to wonder if ’12 and the 20-teens will be just as mediocre.

Not that this mediocrity will keep the hard-core fans from still going out to the ballpark. For there is something about baseball when it is watched live that is entrancing – even in cases where the “home team” consistently manages to get its butt kicked.

THERE EVEN CAN be moments that are memorable on the playing field in those games.

Take 1976 in Chicago.

On April 17 at Wrigley Field, the Cubs lost to the Philadelphia Phillies 18-16 in a game that seems like a preview of the 23-22 loss to the Phillies in ’79. In that game, now-Hall of Fame member Mike Schmidt managed to hit four home runs, with the final one being the game winner in the 10^th inning.

The wind must really have been blowing out toward Waveland Avenue.

FOR THE WHITE Sox, July 28 was the unique moment in a bad season. That was the date the Oakland A’s, in their final seconds of glory in the Charlie Finley era, lost to the Sox, with pitchers John ‘Blue Moon’ Odom and Francisco Barrios combined to pitch a no-hit game.

It also was the season that two future Hall of Fame ballplayers both pitched for Chicago ball clubs – Rich Gossage in his last season with the White Sox and Bruce Sutter in his first season with the Cubs. Yet who remembers that fact?

So even amidst this season’s mass of mediocrity beginning Friday in Arlington, Texas (the Washington Nationals' 2-1 victory Thursday was entertaining, but really doesn't count), there are bound to be a couple of games that will be worth watching.

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When is a U.S. flag shirt disrespectful? And when is it just downright tacky!

I couldn’t help but think of the late Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman on Sunday. It’s too bad he’s no longer on this planet, because I can’t help but wonder what kind of racket he would have tried to stir up in response to the past few days.

I’m referring, of course, to the national frenzy by which we all try to pay tribute to the memory of what happened a decade ago at the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon.

IT CREATES THE mood in which the conservative ideologues who most thought of Hoffman as a subversive element are in their element – being able to demonize their opposition and wrap themselves in “the flag.”

Literally, it seems.

Because in the course of my work on Sunday, I covered a few events that were tributes to the misery of Sept. 11, 2001, I couldn’t help but notice how many people came dressed up in their “flag” shirts.

I don’t just mean a t-shirt with a U.S. flag logo printed somewhere on it. I’m talking entire shirts meant to make it look like someone was wrapped in a banner.

ONE OF THE several incidents in his lifetime that made Hoffman a controversial character was a time he wore a proper, button-down long-sleeved shirt made in the motif of the U.S. flag.

The far right denounced him for doing that – saying he was desecrating the flag; literally. There were those who tried to see if they could have him prosecuted for violating the federal laws that prohibit flag mutilation.

Now, some four-plus decades later, a shirt with a flag on it seems so routine. I literally saw people who think a flag shirt is appropriate attire to attend a Sunday church service.

I must admit to being caught off-guard. Something about using the symbol of the flag and all it represents seemed a bit inappropriate.

THEN AGAIN, MAYBE what really left me disgusted was the fact that the bulk of the men who persisted in wearing their “flag” shirts had beer bellies – making it look as though the “stars and stripes” was pregnant and about to give birth to a miniature flag that a child would wave during a parade.

Or perhaps those flag pins that so many political people persist in wearing in the lapels of their suit jackets.

Would Hoffman and his once-controversial attire now completely fit in during the 21^st Century? Or was all the past rhetoric about Abbie all a bunch of nonsense that should never have been taken seriously?

I am keeping in mind that many of these men who wore those flag shirts on Sunday were of a certain age that they would remember first-hand the racket that arose when Abbie wore his shirt.

SO PERHAPS FLAG shirts have merely come of age.

Then again, I suspect that the people who wore those shirts on Sunday were not among Hoffman’s allies back in the 1960s. They may well have been the types who still go around complaining about “damn hippies” whenever they see anything that isn’t exactly like themselves.

So I don’t really know what to think.

Personally, I would rarely be inclined to wear a flag shirt – mostly because I have a tendency to sweat profusely in anything even close to resembling warm weather.

GOING AROUND IN public in a sweat-soaked shirt would strike me as being disrespectful to the image of the U.S. flag. Then again, we’re casual enough today that a sweat-soaked flag wouldn’t have been the tackiest image in existence.

Scouring around the Internet, I literally found flag shirts designed for women in which the stars and stripes are printed in a pattern meant to accentuate the female bosom. The Jessica Simpson collection, I believe.

And as for men, too many of the shirts on the market these days would make me want play “drill sergeant’ and test their wearers to see if they ever served in the military.

“Suck in that gut! You’re disgracing the flag!!!!!!!”

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Patriot, or trash-picker?

It has been a week since I first learned of the activities of Jeff Olsen, and I have to confess that I still don’t know what to make of him.

Olsen is employed by Waste Management, and the old-school term for his job is “garbage collector.” He’s on the crews that work around the Elgin area, going from house to house to pick up the trash cans and haul the waste away.

BUT WHAT GOT Olsen some public recognition last week, and has led to follow-up stories in recent days, is the fact that Olsen makes a point of going through peoples’ trash cans, and takes his action if he finds anything resembling a U.S. flag.

It could be one of those little 3-by-5-inch flags on a stick that one waves with their thumb or index finger, or a full-fledged flag that once was rung up a flag pole as part of a patriotic display.

Olsen told the Chicago Tribune that he has managed to find about 250 flags by going through peoples’ trash. In some cases, he tries to repair them. In other cases, he takes it upon himself to give them a more dignified disposal than being dumped in a Glad bag along with someone’s pizza box and rotted tomatoes that didn’t get eaten in time.

In theory, I don’t really care what Olsen or anyone who gets worked up over his “cause” does. After all, these are items that were disposed of by their owners. So it certainly is not theft.

BUT IT BUGS me to think that someone has the potential to rifle through the trash of someone else, and start making judgments about what those people chose to dispose of.

Now I know some people are going to read this and start giving me a rant about patriotism and proper respect for the symbol that is a U.S. flag. Others may get overly anal retentive and start quoting precise portions of the U.S. Code that relate to proper display and disposal of a U.S. flag.

I suppose I can’t stop you from sending me your messages, but be forewarned that I have read the code. You won’t be informing me of anything I haven’t already seen.

And what I have seen has been vague to the point where I don’t know what constitutes proper disposal of a U.S. flag.

I KNOW SOME people swear by giving their tattered old flags to a local veterans’ organization. Those groups are good about collecting such flags, then periodically holding rituals in which they pay tribute to the nation – before disposing of the raggedly old flags into a pyre.

In short, they burn them.

But somehow, I get the feeling that the people who are most likely to want to make some sort of hero out of Olsen these days would be greatly offended if any of those people who threw their tattered flags into the trash were to have tried to create a bonfire in the backyard and had dumped the flag into the flames.

Police would have been called. Reports would have been filed. Tax dollars would have been spent to pay for the prosecutors who would have had to convince judges about whether someone’s backyard fire was dignified enough to be a legitimate disposal.

IT WOULD HAVE become a fiasco because someone thought the best way to get rid of a tattered flag was to dispose of it quietly, rather than make an elaborate ritual of the affair.

Now I will agree that dumping a flag into the trash bin, then taking the trash can out to the curb probably is not the most dignified way to get rid of a flag of any type. Just envision the stains it would gain from leftover Chinese food cartons that would spill onto it.

And what would people think if the kitty litter had managed to get onto the flag? What an outrage.

But Olsen told reporter-types he thinks people who throw the flags into the trash are the same as those who stomp on them as an act of political protest. That is just absurd. And that is why I have my problems with the patriotic trash-collector (who to the best of my knowledge has never picked up the trash anywhere near my neighborhood).

THERE HAS TO be some sense of degree. I don’t know that I want to start blaming the people who disposed of their flags for doing something all that improper.

After all, I have seen the flags that Olsen chose to have his picture taken with. They were more than just tattered. They were torn. They were definitely battered to the point where it would have been wrong to run them up a flagpole and claim they were a part of any patriotic display.

If it reads like I’m praising these people for at least having the sense not to fly a torn rag (which is what these flags had become) to score some “patriotism” points for themselves, then you’d be correct.

Should we really be trying to make a heroic figure out of someone who is “refuse rummaging” – a practice that most of us quit doing when we were about six?

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EDITOR’S NOTES: A Northwest suburban American Legion post used Flag Day on Sunday (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/06/flag-day-elgin-jeff-olsen.html) to pay tribute to a trash collector who has spent the past 18 months picking U.S. flags from peoples’ garbage cans.

Is this what it takes to turn the burning of a U.S. flag from an act some want to think is un-constitutional to one (http://www.flagkeepers.org/ProperDisposalCeremony.asp) that gives the symbol its proper due?

Flag Day is Argus of old’s Glory Day

I have never claimed this weblog to be in any way affiliated with the old Chicago Argus newspaper. But if ever there was a day to recall that newssheet of the 19th Century, it is this day, for it is Flag Day.

Depending on whose account of the holiday you happen to read, it was the Argus that inspired creation of the day to which we pay tribute to the “Stars and Stripes” and all that it represents about the United States.

SPECIFICALLY, THE CHICAGO Argus of old achieved its part of the Flag Day saga when its editors published a commentary on June 14, 1886. Entitled, “The Fourteenth of June,” the essay proposed creation of a national holiday to celebrate the creation of the flag design of 13 red and white stripes with white stars on a blue field that has come to represent liberty and democracy all across the world.

Specifically, the mid-June day was chosen to commemorate the date in 1777 when the Continental Congress officially chose the “Stars and Stripes” design as that of the U.S. flag.

Bernard J. Cigrand, a Wisconsin school teacher, had already begun holding local Flag Day observances a few years earlier. But his essay in the Argus, and a speech before the Chicago-based “Sons of America” group two years later resulted in Cigrand becoming editor of the group’s journal “American Standard,” where he continued to promote respect for the symbols of the United States of America.

He also helped organize what must have been one heck of a spectacle for Chicago in 1894 and 1895, when more than 300,000 students of the Chicago public schools took part each year in a Flag Day celebration scattered across Douglas, Garfield, Humboldt, Lincoln and Washington parks.

CIGRAND, WHO WAS actually a dentist by trade in Chicago, Batavia and Aurora, later went on to become dean of the Columbian Dental College, which over the years has evolved into a part of the college of dentistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Insofar as that old Argus newspaper is concerned, I don’t know much else about it, other than that it appears to be a creation of the 1880s and was defunct before 1900. Back then, there were up to a dozen daily newspapers in Chicago (both morning and evening editions), and while the Chicago Tribune survives from that era, many publications came and went.

The Argus itself was obscure enough that an official listing of all Chicago newspapers compiled by the Chicago Public Library does not even include it, although a listing of Second City rags put together by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign does include it – although the university cannot provide exact dates of its existence, other than to say it was a 19th Century publication.

SO WHY BRING this up, if there’s no direct correlation between the Argus of old and this website?

I find it interesting that on this Flag Day that clearly is a national holiday, it is a creation of Chicago (even though to read the accounts of the holiday’s origins written by the Daughters of the American Revolution, Cigrand and the Argus are only minor players behind their own work to celebrate Old Glory).

I also find it intriguing that a newspaper that named itself for the giant from Greek mythology who had 100 eyes and could see in all directions at once used its clout to put muscle behind a Chicago dentist’s dream that we celebrate the symbol of the U.S. flag as a way of showing our love of the concept of democracy that we’d like to think our country stands for.

IT IS A noble concept, one that we all ought to believe in. All too often, people in politics and in our society are too quick to give lip service to the concepts of Truth, Justice and the American Way without really thinking about what they really mean.

Some even get so obsessed with the piece of cloth (although the U.S. flag I own is a nylon job that flew over the U.S. Capitol for a few seconds on Aug. 1, 1997) that they forget the ideals of which the flag stands for. It is the ideals that matter, not the piece of cloth itself. It is the reason I personally consider the issue of flag burning to be a trivial one, with people who insist on a constitutional amendment outlawing it to be wasting their time.

This holiday (which is one of the lesser ones that some of us likely didn’t even realize was occurring Saturday until they happened to stumble onto this commentary) is not so much about a piece of cloth/nylon. It is about the ideals that make this country a unique place on the surface of Planet Earth, and in the history of mankind.

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EDITOR’S NOTES: David Letterman includes a mention of Bernard J. Cigrand on the website (http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/wahoo/index/php/20070614.phtml) for his late night television show. He’s also remembered for (http://www.luxamculturalsociety.org/CigrandDentalOfficeMuseum.htm) his dentistry.

Cigrand did not live long enough to see his life’s “crusade” become an official federal holiday (http://www.nationalflagday.com/bjc.asp), which was signed into law by then-President Harry Truman in 1949.