What's in a Flag?

(With a major tip o' the tinfoil hat to Constant Reader, CC.)

      At times over the course of one's life, one comes across a revelation that alters one's outlook on one thing in particular or even life in the abstract. One came to me today after receiving an email from my constant reader, CC, who over the years has sent me countless scores of news items that I put in my nearly daily news digest.

     Among the most embarrassing revelations are the ones in which the truth stares you right in the face and makes no attempt to hide. In my case, it's the state flag of Massachusetts, which has been staring me in the face nearly every day in the going on 45 years I've been living in my adopted state. It reacquainted me with the racist and genocidal history that served as a bedrock of colonial America not just in New England but all of the 13 colonies.

     I certainly wasn't ignorant about such history. Far from it. As a historical novelist, I'd be making a mockery of my chosen vocation/avocation if I didn't study the history of my home state of New York and that of my adopted state, Massachusetts. In fact, I'd scrupulously studied the history surrounding the Anthony Burns riots in 1854 Boston while writing Gods of Our Fathers in 2015. It's a course of study that I'd intermittently augmented since beginning the prequel a couple of years ago.

     But, as President Truman had once famously said, "The only thing that's new under the sun is the history that we've forgotten." And, as we'd just celebrated the nation's (allegedly) first Thanksgiving 400 years ago, that's a lot of history to learn about just one small state. And the genesis behind the current state flag, which is now under fire from several Native American coalitions, is a faint but unmistakable echo of our Commonwealth's history of racism and genocide that had seeped its way into our state flag.

     It led our governor, Charlie Baker, to announce the formation of a "Special Commission to Investigate the Features of the Seal and Motto of the Commonwealth" last July 19th. The Committee's recommendations were due last October 1st and, to date, they haven't been submitted. That's no cause for alarm. Change at the state let alone federal level takes time and, in cases where the proposed changes are to painful reminders of a state's racist past, always painful to someone. I'm confident a meaningful recommendation will come from the Commission.

     But, again, this is primarily about the Massachusetts state flag.

     Look at the lead image. At first, it looks benign until one observes over the Indian's head a disembodied arm brandishing a Damoclean sword as if in eternal warning to toe the line or else. I suppose it's an improvement over the original state seal from 1629.

 

 

     The quasi Middle Ages artwork and iconography aside, the dialogue balloon of the Indian saying, literally, "Come over and help us" could perfectly serve as caustic satire. But the "artist" who'd been commissioned to create this seal, and those who'd commissioned it, were quite serious in their belief that the native Americans who'd been living in peace here until the late 16th century had actually called us over to help lift them out of their primitive state.

     

 

     Hardly better is the 1896 seal of Andover, MA, which depicts an Indigenous leader who'd allegedly sold a large parcel of land to the town fathers for a simple change of clothes, bringing to mind the equally apocryphal story of the Native Americans who'd exchanged Manhattan island for strings of beads.

     And anyone who'd driven on I-90, better known as the Massachusetts Turnpike or Mass Pike until 1989 couldn't have helped but seen the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority's sign depicting an arrow piercing a pilgrim hat while simultaneously remaining blind to the racist message of white grievance behind it. And that only came about after a letter-writing campaign by a group of second graders (No doubt, if this had happened nowadays, their teacher would've been hounded into an early retirement under charges of teaching Critical Race Theory).

     The state flag allegedly features Metacom, the Indigenous leader and sachem of Pokanoket Tribe and the Wampanoag Nation who was killed by colonists in 1676 in Rhode Island and was then subsequently decapitated and his head placed on a pike for two decades. Yes, we called them "savages".

     So Rhode Island doesn't escape its guilt, even if it had last year removed "Providence Plantations" from its official name, the first of the 50 states to do that.

 

     And in the northern city of Haverhill, Massachusetts, right on the state line shared by New Hampshire, stands a statue dedicated to Hannah Duston (or Dustin) who was said to have been captured by Native Americans for ransom in 1697, a common occurrence in those days, and whose newborn was allegedly murdered by them. That account is, as is much if not all of colonial history apocryphal, largely on account of the official narrative being written after the fact by professional asshole Cotton Mather, he of the recent Salem Witch Trials of 1693.

     Local folklore still lionizes Duston as a more modern day Judith, the Biblical Jewish warrior who was seduced and had led a bloody rebellion against the Assyrians and decapitated King Holofernes. Such ancient tales of feminine vengeance are practically legion. Not much later comes from Great Britain the tale of Boudica, the Iceni warrior queen whose daughters were murdered by the colonizing Roman forces. Boudica responded by essentially burning virtually all of Britannia, including Londinium, to the ground.

     The problem with Haverhill's own female insurgent is that there's strong evidence to more than suggest that Hannah's deeds resulted in murdering almost exclusively old men, women and children, presumably in their sleep. Still, despite all this, the Haverhill City Council voted to keep the statue where it was, agreeing only to change the inscription.

     Oh, yeah, and they also voted to remove the hatchet, allegedly the same exact one she'd used to scalp nearly a dozen defenseless Native Abenakis and that she'd exchanged for 50 pounds, which only makes her pointed finger of accusation look almost risibly toothless in hindsight.

     So, change is coming, in the Bay State, in Rhode Island and all over the country. But, as the nation is still essentially run by wealthy white people, exactly the type that founded our colonies and constituted our Continental Congress, they are putting up institutionalized resistance. Indeed, the change, to a casual observer looking on from a bird's eye height, has a halting, reluctant feel to it. It took decades of protest before the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians officially changed their names, to the usual right wing howls of protest, to the laughable Washington Football Team and Cleveland Guardians, as if, denied the opportunity to create mascots out of Native Americans, they literally had no better ideas for names.

     But if activists could remove the confederate flag symbol from the Mississippi state flag, anything's possible.

     However, the full reckoning and historical clearing of the air won't come in any of our lifetimes.