As an untravelled kid growing up in 1970s /80s Southern England, everything I knew or imagined about America was encapsulated by the opening credits of The Rockford Files. Fast, flash, exotic and….big. I was fascinated by the minutiae of US life; the roadsigns and traffic lights on those wide, wide roads, the cars, the advertising billboards, the bar, the phone booth, the huge supermarket ,the lot. I didn’t want to be Jim Rockford – but I’d have been quite happy to have lived in his town.

The USA was also represented by a couple of old (late 60s) National Geographics that we had in the house. It wasn’t so much the articles – it was the advertisements. There were a window into a kind of life that just wasn’t what mine was. A whole way of living that seemed to actually describe what the American Dream was in reality…And there were some great pictures of whales and stuff too. Obviously,

Getting older, America was Blondie, Coke (the soft drink, again, obviously) and the taste of what the land of the brave must be like when McDonalds starting opening UK restaurants.

The Monkees, Scooby-Doo, The Banana Splits, Mork and Mindy, M*A*S*H, Starsky & Hutch, The Dukes of Hazard, Happy Days, Cheers, Hill Street Blues, The A-Team, Fame, all variously left their mark. Never watched Dallas. Well – only once. It was Kristen.

Once ZZ Top, Van Halen, The Blues Brothers, Beverley Hills Cop, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver & Bill Hicks had all added to the mosaic – and then some – I finally got to see it for myself.

In February 1998 I arrived at Boston Logan. It was dark and so very, very cold. The wind was painful on the face and numbed the toes. I’d love to say that I then Jack Kerouac’d my to a nearby bar before meeting interesting, exciting and dangerous people. Fact was, I was staffing a school ski-trip to Vermont. Hardly ‘On The Road’.

As the kids were being gathered together prior to boarding the onward coach, I slipped out of the door and onto the street. I just wanted to somehow relive a little bit of those Rockford Files moments. There was a black and white police patrol car parked across the street. Perfect.

In praise of my first US experience…Ever taken a bunch of school kids skiing? Ever had to take a kid with a broken ski-binding to a ski-hut to get it fixed? Try that in France or Italy and you get ‘the shrug’. The international gesture of ‘I don’t give a shit’. Don’t get me wrong, if it wasn’t for school ski-trips (and the increasing affluence of the working class parents of offspring I taught) I would never have gone. But it was in my holidays, it wasn’t a holiday – and if you’ve never had to ring a parent from a foreign country to inform them that their child is about to go into theatre in an Alpine hospital because they’ve broken their leg in a gazillion places and you have just taken full responsibility for their health under a general anaesthetic..it’s not all a jolly.

Back to the point. Ask anyone at a US ski resort for help and you are instantly their only priority. Broken binding? No problem, Sir. Wrong skis? Take this pair; have a good day. Everyone – literally everyone who was paid to in some way look after us – literally did all they could to help. Have a good day? Don’t mind if I do….

Since then, I flew to NYC on 31st December 1999 because thanks to ‘Millennium Bug’ lunacy, I got a return ticket for £100 and welcomed in the new millennium in Times Square and was the first tourist to travel to the summit of The Empire State Building of the year 2000. No bullshit – it was me.

I’ve done The Florida thing. Two weeks of the theme parks with the family. One afternoon, I left them all at the villa and took the Chevy Suburban hire car to an shop alone at an Orlando mall. Hit the freeway just after a storm. The asphalt steamed, cruise control on and the FM station blasted out The Eagles. Take it Easy? Don’t mind if I do,,,

A grown-ups only trip to Cape Cod & Matha’s Vineyard (because despite being adults, we’re obsessed with ‘Jaws’) Full on diner breakfasts in Boston, defying the Great Whites and the warning signs by paddling on a Cape Cod beach and in a clapper boarded souvenir shop in the genteel town of Chatham – the whole focus of this piece…

So we are walking through the town and keen to shop. We had already loaded-up on Red Sox gear in Boston – and had got as many Great White Shark momentos as could be considered reasonable. We entered a store that wasn’t really our natural habitat – more soft furnishings and tasteful lamps than T-shirts and ornamental fish, but when in Chatham…

On a table was a US flag. Heavy cloth, beautifully made – and just the kind of thing that one might expect to see gracing a suburban front lawn or civic building. It seemed to be the perfect souvenir – but surely, this would be an item beyond the budget and, as I was about to leave..’May I help you, Sir?’

It was something like $60 and I couldn’t believe I could take something so quintessentially American home for such a modest cost. I took it home.

What to do with it on return? The glass Great White sat (and still sits) on a table in the living room – but then it’s only 10cm long. This flag would not be so easy to place. Initially, I wanted it in my office – but no wall was big enough to accommodate it, so after a little consideration it went on the wall in my ‘Man Cave’ and it’s still there 6 years later.

But only just…

Here’s the thing. By the end of 2017, the Trump administration was casting a longer, darker international shadow than perhaps many Americans realised. Trump’s election victory was never disputed – he won it fair and square but the rules and protocols of international diplomacy and the way the America’s traditional role of a legitimate leader of the Free World was being ripped-up.

I understand that change in itself was an attraction to Trump voters as is would have been to those supporting Brexit in 2016. That’s fair enough – a legitimate reason as any to exercise your democratic right. The problem was that it seemed that in Washington, liberties were being taken with the power of the office and the aggressively insular, ‘America First’ policy was destabilising the west and doing little else but stir fearsome rhetoric from the likes of North Korea and Iran.

It wasn’t just geopolitics that were the issue, though. Attitudes to the environment, the marginalisation of minorities and the enabling of the intolerant was starting to have an unhealthy impact abroad.

I was beginning to think that my own star-spangled banner was beginning to represent a country I could no longer be happy to be associated with. It got to the point that I was genuinely worried that if my house was burgled, I wouldn’t just lose my prize possessions, but the thieves would see my flag and then take a giant shit on the floor in protest.

November 2018. Trump is mid-term and I’m in mid-Europe at a trade convention in Vienna and the delegates are invited to a plush reception at the Opera House. If I’m honest, I find these things hard work from a social point of view. I’m not great with small talk and while I am honoured with the environment and grateful for the food and drink, I’m not the networking type. So a bunch of us somehow gravitate to a quieter spot. It’s like the start of a bad joke: ‘There was an Englishman, a Scotsman, a Belgian and an American – and there were all drinking free wine and eating canapés in an opera house talking about stuff’.

Almost inevitably, the conversation turned to Trump. It was the day of the Kavanagh Supreme Court vote and it seemed that another act of political chicanery was afoot. I told the group about my flag and my growing antipathy (as I had just met them, I didn’t mention the shitting burglars anxiety) and then this guy said…’Leave it hanging there for the democracy it represents.’ I have no other memory of the man. Literally nothing – but the words stuck a profound chord.

Of course it represents democracy. It represents freedom. It represents the growth and maturity of a great nation and the union of fifty states, all magnificent in their own way.

And yet…

Everything above, up to the first mention of the shitting thieves was written before so many of those flag were held in contempt toward the values it holds as the were carried to The Capitol by people who, no matter what they say, so not believe in freedom, do not believe in the rule of law – have no respect for the rights and freedoms enshrined in the US Constitution.

I’m not naive – I get it. Flags are ultimately just another symbol and it can be claimed by pretty much anyone or any group and its meaning subverted for whatever purpose you like.

Amongst the Trump banners, the MAGA flags and the ‘Fuck Your Feelings’ T-shirts, was the Stars and Stripes. It was undignified – wrong, inappropriate. It had no place at that act – it was above such things.

Fortunately, today – as Biden takes office, it literally is above such things. It flies, proudly and we can only hope, securely.

My flag will still hang on my wall – and the fact that it so nearly was removed seems a very small scale metaphor for recent events.
There will be much that the world expects and hopes for from the Biden administration. Trump’s term of office may have achieved stuff, but his own hostility towards truth and honesty makes his claims that much harder to believe.

What is sure is that he leaves America worse-off than January 2017. If there is something that can unite a fractured nation, if there is a symbol needed, something to rally around – the flag seems a decent place to start. Every US citizen is on it by virtue of those 50 stars; the challenge is now how to learn to share the space and remember that it is democracy that it represents – not self-interest and hatred and the sooner this can be re-established and it’s beauty fully reclaimed the happier we all shall be.

Visiting my house? Leave nothing but footprints…