That Patriotic Something

There’s a feeling comes a-stealing,

And it sets my brain a-reeling,

When I’m listening to the music of a military band.

Any tune like “Yankee Doodle”

Simply sets me off my noodle,

It’s that patriotic something that no one can understand.

—“You’re A Grand Old Flag” by George M. Cohan

He was a showman’s showman with the muddy feet of a vaudevillian and the stardust imagination of “the man who owned Broadway.” He is fixed forever in America’s consciousness by James Cagney, who portrayed him in the 1942 musical Yankee Doodle Dandy. Yet beyond all the artifice and acting, George M. Cohan understood that no matter how stirring the music, how fancy the dancing, and how glittery the glitz, there was nothing Broadway could conjure that could so powerfully and so directly touch the heart of an American as the proud display of the American flag in a patriotic setting. Somehow, Old Glory redeems even the evanescent silliness between the fizz and fizzle of show biz, and Cohan admitted as much, quipping that “many a bum show has been saved by the flag.”

Anyone traveling around Newtown in the past week cannot help but feel a bit star- (and stripe-) struck by the reappearance of the town’s huge 20-by-30-foot summer flag on the Main Street flagpole, by the Memorial Day display of flags at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and the tribute flags at the graves of veterans in the town’s cemeteries. But it is the 4,984 flags stirring on the lawn of the Congregational Church on eastern slope of Castle Hill that stops people in their tracks face-to-face with “that patriotic something.”

This Field of Flags, first assembled in October 2005 at the Congregational Church in Somers, has been traveling around Connecticut and several other states for the past three-and-a-half years. It presents itself, not in ceremony or song, but in silence. Information posted nearby simply explains that each flag represents an American who died while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. There is a list of the names of the dead, too-frequently updated, and a verse from 1 Corinthians about the shared essence of human suffering and honor.

The names and the wisdom of the Bible, as moving as they are, are delivered to us in the letters, words, and sentences of text that is parsed for us by the critical cognitive apparatus of our minds, giving us language to help us understand but also interposing the emotional buffer of our own rationality. It is the sight of the flags themselves that completely bypasses that critical process and conveys the clearest view of the part of that patriotic something “that no one can understand.” In the breeze, moving together (but each in its own way), the flags do not tell us, they show us, that we are one — one with the dead, one with the living, one with those who find honor and distinction in the crucible of war, one with those who think war is a bum show — forever moving together on the wind.

While flags themselves are designed to mark distinctions between countries and their peoples, the American flag, both in its symbolism and its actual history, has stood more for a gathering together than a division of different people. Fifty stars and thirteen stripes now represent 306 million people in a show bigger, more boisterous, and ridiculously spectacular than anything George M. Cohan could imagine. No matter how much we fight and squabble among ourselves, despite all the disaster, blood, and disappointment of our national experience, this flag still binds us together as Americans, each with our own distinctive sense of that patriotic something.

Now put down these letters, words, and sentences and go see for yourself. The Field of Flags will continue to stir the breeze, hearts, and minds on the lawn of the Congregational Church between West Street and Castle Hill Road until Flag Day, June 14.