Stirring Public Gesture or Over-the-Top Display?

Sometimes, it’s just not enough to hang a flag on the front porch. Sometimes, the moment demands a 200,000-square-foot Old Glory covering nine stories of your office high-rise. Or a country and western anthem so angry that not even country and western TV will play it. Or a fund-raiser for your own personal bomb.

But as the response to Sept. 11 moves into its ninth week of benefit concerts and Bin Laden bashing and “God Bless America” at seventh-inning stretches and halftimes, the first wave of voices is suggesting, ever so gently, that that moment may be ending now.

“Patriotism run amok,” East Bay paralegal Bonnie Hummel complained to Siebel Systems about the huge vinyl flag with which that firm has wrapped its building across the interstate from Hummel’s Emeryville office.

“War can bring out the best and the worst in popular culture,” the San Francisco Chronicle editorialized last week, in a sign that time has already transformed yesterday’s stirring patriotic gesture into today’s questionable outburst.

“Our hats are off to all the entertainers who have offered their time and stature to help the Sept. 11 relief efforts. Then again.... “

That editorial was aimed at, among other things, a Charlie Daniels song that has managed to become the talk of talk-radio while simultaneously offending many Americans of Middle Eastern descent. “This ain’t no rag, it’s a flag,” begins the song that Daniels was politely asked not to play at the benefit Country Freedom Concert in late October. “And we don’t wear it on our heads.”

In a phone interview from Atlanta, where Daniels was explaining himself on CNN last week, the country music star said his “politically incorrect” song, written in the first emotional days after the attack, was aimed solely at “that Bin Laden and them murderous s.o.b.’s hangin’ out with him.”

“This ain’t no time for healing--it’s a time for gettin’ madder ‘n hell,” he added, by way of explaining his decision to drop out of the televised Oct. 21 fund-raiser rather than refrain from performing his new song. Daniels said the Web site where the single is being sold has gotten some 400,000 hits in the last two weeks.

But the song is also among an increasing number of dramatic gestures that are raising eyebrows along with spirits as it has become clear that there will be no easy recovery from the Sept. 11 attacks.

The flag on the Siebel Systems building in Emeryville--visible from five miles away on a clear day--is still getting more local kudos than criticism, the company says, notwithstanding complaints like that of Hummel, who frets that the spectacle could turn her office area into a potential target. A second large flag, unfurled earlier on the firm’s San Mateo headquarters, also got mostly positive feedback, prompting the City Council there to pass an emergency ordinance to exempt flags from its signage laws.

But in Los Angeles last week, an early impulse to paint stars and stripes on the Hollywood sign was postponed amid suggestions that, at this point, maybe a nice, tasteful bow would be a more appropriate tribute.

In Houston, moderates have bashed a radio station that is selling a promotional single called “Bend Over, Bin Laden,” sung to the tune of “Roll Over, Beethoven.” In what one local commentator called a “typically loony” brainstorm, the station, KSEV-AM, wants to “adopt” a bomb by sending $18,000 in listener donations to the government.

And an Emmy Award salute to police officers that actor Dennis Franz of “NYPD Blue” was to have introduced was cut from Sunday night’s script amid producers’ concerns that such homages, while merited, are now overexposed. Nancy Snow, a Los Angeles political analyst and author of “Propaganda Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World,” says the budding backlash doesn’t mean the country is now feeling less patriotic. Rather, she said, it has more to do with the natural arc of emotion in the face of a traumatic event.

That, and the search for the bounds of propriety in an unprecedented national crisis: In an action-oriented culture, it feels wrong to do nothing, but the threat is so new to the United States and so amorphous that there is no clear script for appropriate responses.

“People know they’re being controversial, or even tasteless, but it’s a way to let off steam,” Snow said. “In a sense, it’s an effort to rally the country. It’s just that not everyone is rallied in the same way.”

As weeks pass, however, the ongoing trial and error seems to be mapping the boundaries between tasteful and tacky. Even in New York and Washington, D.C.--where no level of emotion has seemed to be too much--there are now indications that dramatic gestures are less wanted, and that the culture is feeling less dutifully reverent as it adjusts to the nation’s new reality.

“Baseball or anthrax?” a channel-surfing man asks his wife in a cartoon in the Nov. 5 New Yorker, a magazine that had omitted cartoons entirely from its first post-attack issue. At The Onion, a weekly news parody, senior editor Carol Kolb says this week’s edition will feature a news story headlined, “U.N. Study Shows Two-Thirds of World Could Use Benefit Concert”--a spoof of the seemingly endless proliferation of shows for Sept. 11-oriented causes.

“It’s not that I don’t like the flags hanging in the windows--I actually think it’s kind of nice,” Kolb said. “But the crass marketing, with the flags on the shopping bags? That’s funny. And the people doing these patriotic things, who never thought they’d be that sort of person? That’s funny.”

The other night, she said, one of her writers was in a New York bar when a man in a tool belt and hard hat walked in and spontaneous applause erupted. “Then somebody went, ‘Wait a minute, why are we applauding?’ People thought he was a fireman, until they realized that they had no idea who he was, really. That sort of thing feels funny now. I mean, the guy could have been working for, like, the phone company.”