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Wrapped In The Flag: A Personal History Of America's Radical Right (2013)

by Claire Conner(Favorite Author)

4.26 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

080707750X (ISBN13: 9780807077504)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Beacon Press

review 1: In the grand tradition of personal nonfiction, this book weaves a personal story about growing up with rabidly far-right-wing parents with a more journalistic perspective on the history of the John Birch Society... and the two stories create something rather less than the sum of their parts. It's understandable that the author would want to avoid psychoanalyzing her parents or delving too deeply into her own shifts in political perspective, but without a willingness to cut closer to the bone the personal story provides little new insight. It does at least provide narrative structure and the history is an engaging, if somewhat depressing, little page-turner.
review 2: Wrapped in the Flag is an account of 50 years of family history told by the daughter of parents... more whose far right ideology flattens all thinking into conformity with a view that a virtuous minority is under assault from an all-powerful force that guides a foolish, ignorant, deluded nation. This is a tragic escape story, well written and persuasive.It is a horror story in that the tag-team of Mom and Dad have no emotions but rage and fear, and no plan for their children but to reproduce their rigid views into a new generation. There isn't a single tender moment between adults and children. Every mealtime is a lecture, every school book must be examined for communist influence. That Claire Conner emerged from this environment a sane person is a miracle.Since Jay Conner, the author's father, was a force in the John Birch Society, the family history offers the chance for the story of right-wing politics in the United States to be woven throughout. Only Barry Goldwater emerges unscathed in Mom and Dad's eyes. Not even Ronald Reagan could live up to the demands of the far right and the founder of the JBS even claimed Ike was a commie. Claire Conner introduces us to a rogues gallery of what would now be called wing-nuts, such as Revilo Oliver (Google him).I've known people like the ones described in this book - extremely cold, bitterly denouncing, tightly restrained but filled with anger and fearful alarm, convinced that force is the answer to anything be it foreign or family affairs. And yet these folks see themselves as exemplars of an ideal that all should emulate! There is no way to debate them because their views are fixed beyond the power of evidence to alter.A common denominator for the members of the group is being white, and this is no accident as fear and anger pervade white rural and suburban America today just as it did in the South before the Civil Rights Movement went some way to de-fang it. One of the most moving parts of the book occurs when Claire Conner happens to see ML King Jr. speaking to the March on Washington on TV. His eloquence reaches her youthful, still open mind, but until she leaves for college (paying her own way), she is prisoner in her own home. Because this far right movement is white, I am optimistic when I read of the falling percentage of Americans who are white, even though I am white. Bring on the Hispanics, the Asians, the African-Americans, the immigrants. We need an antidote to those who fear and hate and demand a rigid conformity that is bleak and intolerant and brings them no joy. All they seem to want is to judge, condemn and throw a wrench into the works, even as they get misty-eyed about Jesus.In their self-righteousness and intolerance, the far right is much more closely related to the Taliban than they are to the American revolutionaries they claim to admire; those who desired liberty and justice for all individuals in the pursuit of happiness.As Claire Conner relates, these folks have taken over the Republican Party, though the book stops before the election of Obama, we see the evidence in Congress daily. The book doesn't pretend to study the link between the John Birch Society and the Tea Party, it is after all only a family history, but the inference is clear to any reader. less

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