Upside-down Flag

Aged immigrant gets patriotic

I took my new American flag to the anti-Musk demonstration at the Tesla dealer on Van Ness Avenue last Saturday. My new flag is the upside-down kind, with the stars at the bottom. I had to upend the flag myself: the $28 kit I got off Amazon included a rather flimsy pole but there were no grommets in the flag itself, so I had to improvise the reversal. It’s been an interesting experience because it’s the first American flag I’ve ever owned, and my memories of the flag are from the Vietnam era – that is, I remember people burning it.

But as an immigrant, I kind of like the flag and I like the constitution too, for all its limitations. They actually gave me a free copy of the constitution when I became a citizen in 2008, which I did in order to vote against George W Bush and the torture scandal. (Remember that? The US torture program, designed by two psychologists and resulting in, for example, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed being waterboarded 183 times.) Weirdly enough it was a giant video of Bush that welcomed me, and about four thousand other people of all nations, to citizenship at our swearing-in at the Masonic Auditorium on Nob Hill. We don’t hear much from George W Bush lately, do we?

I feel that since we demonstrators/resisters are the good guys and the constitutionalists this time around, we should reposess the flag. I figure I can avoid the accusation of militarist imperialism that hangs over it from the Vietnam era (at least for my generation) by flying the upside-down flag, signifying that the Republic is in danger. And it is. The Republic actually is in danger. I keep thinking of Benjamin Franklin’s remark at the close of the constitutional convention in Phildelphia in September 1787, where the constitution was written, to the lady who buttonholed him on the way out. “Well doctor,” she said, “what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”

Franklin’s answer was “A republic, if you can keep it.”

A republic, if you can keep it. It’s not actually clear that we can keep it. Trump and his advisers are clearly bent on getting rid of it. Witness the denial of civil rights to immigrants, Mr Miller’s proposal to abolish Habeas Corpus, the absolute refusal to allow due process to Kilmar Oswego Garcia (he’s still in the El Salvador jail)*, the attempt to abolish the independence of the judiciary by intimidating judges, Trump’s hints that he might like a third term and so on. These people don’t believe in the constitution, and they are the first US administration since Benjamin Franklin that openly doesn’t.

Last weekend the regular anti-Tesla demonstration, where I took the upside-down flag for its maiden voyage, had gotten smaller -- either because people are exhausted or because Musk has in fact gone, pushed out by Trump because he was getting too crazy. Or, if you believe the New York Times, because he has blown his brains out with multiple substances including not just daily ketamine but also ecstasy, mushrooms and possibly adderall. The Wall Street Journal adds LSD and cocaine. The explosion of Musk’s Starship rocket on May 27 didn’t help either. In a remarkably good piece of timing, Jesse Armstrong’s movie Mountainhead premiered last weekend with a portrait of a nasty bunch of tech-bro billionaires one of whom is a kind of Musk/Zuckerberg cross – he’s an empathy-deficient “effective altruist” worth a couple of hundred billion dollars whose software is about to destroy the world. I recommend at least the first half of the movie for an exposition of the Peter-Thielish “effective altruism” doctrine that seems to have poisoned a chunk of Silicon Valley. The idea is that since your technology will change the world and save billions of future lives (e.g. by getting them off the planet), you can do anything you want now and still come out ahead by the utilitarian calculus of the greatest good for the greatest number.

Small or not, it’s good to have a demonstration. To show the flag, either way up. As the Tesla demonstration has shrunk down to the hard core of lifelong protesters, it has become multi-causal, with protesters supporting gay rights, Gaza, Ukraine, Mahmoud Kahlil (in jail in Louisiana because his pro-Palestinian sympathies were held to be a threat to US policy) and finally, and most relevant from my point of view, supporting the judges who have pushed back against Trump, including the redoubtable Judge Boasberg from the US District of Columbia court. I deeply admire the people who are pushing back against this regime, up to and including Harvard University itself, which (much as it ain’t my favorite ruling-class power node) we all need to support at this moment. Go Harvard! Go judges! Go non-caving-in law firms! It would be wonderful if Columbia could show some spine too.

• No he isn’t. They let him out and brought him back, only to charge him immediately with “trafficking migrants.” They can’t admit they screwed up.