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Almost every week on this program, we look at some piece of what we call Design for the Real World. Today my focus is on a design so familiar most of us don't think of it as design. And I think for most people, it wasn't even quite part of the real world, either. Until September 11th. Clip: "Every time I see the flag, you know, you think of the 11th and I think about now as I go into the future I can't not look at the flag and not think of it, even if it's 10 years or 20 years down the road, I think." Clip: "I think it's a good thing to see the American flag so prominently displayed. I know that I fly one in front of my house now, when I usually just put it up on special days -- now it's up all the time." Clip: "Well I think I respect it more. I didn't think of it before. But now I think that I respect it more and I'm showing it more, too." On the 11th of September, without question, the American flag was transformed. Until that day, it was frankly almost invisible, part of the background, a prop attached to government buildings and hauled out on a couple of holidays every year. For a while back in the 1970s and into the 80s, in the wake of the Vietnam War, the flag became a conservative badge. But even that ideological charge had faded years ago. The flag had become just the flag. No big deal. It was quaint. It was corny. It was sweet. It was, you know, whatever. Then came the attack. And suddenly, obliviousness or indifference -- let alone condescension -- were really no longer options for any of us. Clip: "Seeing the American flag does bring back the thoughts of what happened on September 11th. The Texas flag we see a lot, it flies everywhere, lots of homes here have it, I worked for the state for nine years. And it always just had a big place in my heart, I never really thought about the American flag much, until now that I see it so much more. It just brings an emotional feeling, you know, that makes you want to cry." For two months now, the flag has been a genuinely powerful and patriotic icon for more Americans, I think, than at any moment in my lifetime. And, of course, it's been ubiquitous. Teensy flag lapel pins. Little plastic flags fluttering on cars. Flag stickers pasted on subway trains. Photocopied paper flags Scotch-taped to store fronts. Flags printed and embroidered on T-shirts and sweaters and jackets. Giant flags draped over walls and hanging from windowsills. This kind of spontaneous flag-waving has happened to this extent only once before in our history. Kit Hinrichs: "Historically the average person didn't own a flag probably until the Civil War. They were primarily used on government ships, and garrisons, that sort of thing." The graphic designer Kit Hinrichs has an immense collection of American flags and flag-themed objects -- 3000 items he's acquired over the last few decades. And he's just published Long May She Wave, a big book that shows off his collection. Kit Hinrichs: "When the Confederate secretary of war said the Confederate flag would fly over Washington in May of the following year, it so incensed general populace they began to hang homemade flags outside of the homes and it was one of those things that began what is called the cult of the flag." In other words, the first and last time individual Americans went this flag-crazy was beginning in 1861 -- the last time that war happened here. Today's grass-roots flag cult is entirely understandable and even beautiful. Regular people spontaneously declaring their authentic sorrow and hope and resolve and solidarity. But I could've done without some of the commercial, mass-media flag-o-mania. Spun out through the professional PR-marketing machines, I feel we're being sold something we already own -- that the American flag is being turned into a piece of branding. CNN's waving-flag logo in the corner of the TV screen, the magazine logos sprouting flags, the advertisements with elaborately back-lit slow-motion flags. I cheered up, though, when Kit Hinrichs reminded me that for most of its life the American flag was not some pristine, perfect, unchanging national logo. Kit Hinrichs: "Even though most of the time now we only see five pointed stars. It used to have five pointed, six pointed, seven pointed stars all within the guidelines to be able to do it because there were no guidelines. And it's been codified not until 1912. So you had 150 years, or roughly 150 years of people making their own flag based on very broad guidelines." It was conceived as an endlessly adaptable piece of folk design, a permanent work-in-progress. The flag has always been twisted, adapted and even abused every which way, again and again, and it survives. In other words, like this country. Kit Hinrichs: "Having a flag that has change built into it - as every time you change a state or you add a state you change a star. That makes an ever-changing symbol of, to me, a somewhat ever-changing country. To my knowledge it's the only flag in the world that has change built into it. "And from a graphic designers point-of-view, where we're always involved in creating these relatively tight guidelines for people to work with within corporations and institutions, to have something as loose as this and still have it retain its symbolic power is pretty magical." But of course, that magic -- the magic of the flag's physical evolution -- is now mostly complete. But what these last 10 weeks have shown is that cultural objects, even icons like the flag, don't exist independently of our eyes and minds right now. The American flag that we see today is not the same American flag that we saw on September 10th. This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.
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