Flags and Gated Communities

"I've got flags everywhere," boasts the 37-year-old truck driver...Including one on a 20-foot pole a few steps from the front door of his home in a Coweta County subdivision...And that's the problem...The flagpole violates the subdivision's policy on exterior structures — and must come down..."It's kind of a cut-and-dry case," said Stephen A. Winter, an attorney for the Avery Park Community Association. "The association said, 'No, we don't allow flagpoles.'"....Patriotic of illegal? Flag's both, Kevin Dufy, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Already you can hear the outraged shouting on FOX. But, is the dispute here really about offended patriotism? Or is it really about how private organizations have pushed public life away from an increasingly huge segment of American real estate? Many won't remember the concept of "downtown." Downtown from the founding of the Republic until the 1970s was not very different from the Roman Forum or the Greek Agora. Downtown was both the marketplace, where you'd find everything from hardware to hair salons, and a public arena where people could meet on the street, in a store, in a park, and discuss private and public business. Downtowns were noisy, disorganized, and often dirty. In part as a tax avoidance scheme, and in part as a system of social control, "a fresh place away from dirty downtown," malls were developed. In them, at least for their first twenty years, most of the public realm was barred, from displays of national and local emblems to protests to leafletting to gatherings for any purpose but shopping. The gated community was another response, not only to noisy downtowns, but to the perceived threat of integration, the more plausible threat of crime, and an unsubtle effort to suppress any reference to public (read political) life. The visible values in both malls and gated communities were anti-political; the organizing force behind them, however, was decidedly political, an effort to create the illusion of the absence of conflicting interests, an esthetic more typical of dictatorships in the old Latin America than of an open, free society. The story itself is suggestive of how far more than a mere flag Roy Johnson's violations of this esthetic are.

Their decorating motif is Old Glory and Harley-Davidson: framed Harley puzzles, Harley replicas from the Franklin Mint, a Harley clock....(Patriotic or illegal, continued...)

How gauche! Trailer trash deluxe!

The almost new Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic parked in his garage carries a full-size flag..."I've got flags everywhere," boasts the 37-year-old truck driver...(Patriotic or illegal, continued...)

And a truck driver too...But this isn't about depicting a working class saint, because there's more. You see, Roy isn't violating a condominium contract provision; he's violating a local ordinance passed by elected officials. Further, he's no victim. He's willing to bear the expense to take this law to court, even to the Supreme Court, if necessary. Roy Johnson, in other words, is acting as if political debate mattered more than a community's idea of propriety, he and his attorney presuming that no locality has the right to abridge freedom of expression. In short, Roy Johnson is an old-fashioned, downtown American. That, more than any large flag, is likely what's put this Atlanta suburb on such a state of alert. One can almost hear the chorus: we moved here to get away from this kind thing.

Luther