Recapture the Flag: The Real Appeal to Heaven
On Independence Day, we have a duty to call the MAGA movement what they are: a gang of modern-day monarchists itching for crowns, coronets and Royal pardons, perks and plunder. They want a king and they can already taste Donald Trump’s restoration to power.
Back in 1775 Tom Paine observed a lot of such power-worshiping sycophants, the forerunners of today’s Martha-Ann Alitos, Mike Johnsons and Lindsey Grahams. Here’s what Paine wrote about them: “Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.”
In their mad rush to turn everything upside down, from the flag and the Bible to the Constitution and the rule of law, Donald Trump and his followers have also captured this honorable flag and tried to twist it into a symbol of right-wing extremism. This is grand theft historical.
The Appeal to Heaven flag is arguably the most radical democratic flag in American history. It was flown by “Washington’s Cruisers,” Yankee privateers who practiced hit-and-run raids on British shipping during the Revolution. They used fast, lightly armed sloops to disrupt General Howe’s supply lines when he was close to crushing the American revolt. The people who flew this flag fought against everything MAGA stands for today — one-man rule and a mystical cult of personality, state-enforced religion, and the power of financial oligarchs over working people. These Revolutionaries fought for the ideas that Trump’s monarchists detest: liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy.
Unlike Southern colonists, they weren’t slavers or white supremacists and many of them weren’t white. The New England maritime trade was the natural refuge of Black freedmen, the seafaring cousins of Crispus Attucks, people like Cesar Tarrant, a formerly enslaved man who rammed his schooner into Royal frigates twice his size. Washington’s Cruisers were manned not just by Yankee Quakers but by Wampanoags and Pequots, immigrant Portuguese, Africans, Malays, Maltese and Polynesians. Consider the demographics of the New England maritime trade represented in Melville’s Moby Dick.
The “Appeal to Heaven” flag was flown for years by the city of San Francisco before it was recently coopted by the white Christian nationalists. It was also flown by Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020. But then the insurrectionists who attacked and wounded more than 140 police officers in the January 6, 2021 Trump insurrection have worked to turn the Appeal to Heaven flag into a Christo-fascist symbol of white nationalism. The theocrats who have hijacked it are ignorant of the flag’s history but brandish it because they fancy the word “Heaven.” But that slogan came from John Locke, the champion of reason and founding father of liberalism, not the Spanish Inquisition or Salem witchcraft trials.
How dare the traitorous thugs of January 6 fly this freedom flag next to their Confederate war banners and bloody Trump flags?
Happy Fourth of July to the real patriots of American democracy and freedom who fly their American flags right-side up and have every right to reclaim the venerable Appeal to Heaven flag. Tom Paine is always there to cheer you on: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
