Traverse City shop flies American flag upside down after Obama win

As noted in this morning’s edition of the Traverse City Record-Eagle, not everyone in Michigan is happy about Barack Obama’s victory. A Traverse City gun shop is flying its flag upside down as a symbol of a nation in distress following the election of Obama to the presidency. An employee who spoke with a reporter used a racial epithet to describe the motivation behind the decision to fly the flag upside down.

“(The inverted flag is) an international signal for distress and we feel our country is in distress because the n—– got in,” said Hampel’s employee Rod Nyland, of Traverse City.

The employee later called the reporter back to apologize. A spokesman for the store, salesman Jack Fellows, spoke for management, telling the Record-Eagle that Nyland’s comments were not authorized or endorsed by the shop, Hampel’s Key and Lockshop, located just off downtown:

But Fellows said Nyland had it right about their display of the flag as a distress warning for the country, he said.

“It’s basically a display of alarm. The winning presidential candidate was not our choice and has the worst anti-gun record in Congress, let alone the Senate,” Fellows said. “We feel we are facing a national crisis. Fine rhetoric is one thing, but the gentleman has no executive record whatsoever. He’s not fit to be president of the country.”

Fellows went on to tell the Record-Eagle that many gun owners are distressed about Barack Obama’s stance on the Second Amendment, which establishes the right to bear arms.

Certainly it’s sad to see people against the Obama-Biden ticket purely because of race. It’s no secret that prejudice is still a part of American society. But if gun owners are getting their information about Obama from the National Rifle Association (NRA), it’s hardly surprising that hunters would be “up in arms” about an Obama presidency.

The laughably (or, tragically) hyperbolic propaganda campaign put together by the NRA this year, which includes an anti-Obama Web site and TV ad campaign, paints Obama, a onetime constitutional law professor, as someone who would attack the Second Amendment and be “the most anti-gun president in American history.” The NRA’s campaign pushed hard the idea that the Illinois senator wanted to ban deer hunting ammunition and take rifles and shotguns off the shelves.

The claims in the NRA ads are disputed by nonpartisan watchdog FactCheck.org, which described the TV ad above as one that “distorts Obama’s position on gun control beyond recognition.” Obama’s platform, which states, “Barack Obama … will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport and use guns,” is found here.

Is the Obama administration going to advocate for the repealing of this or any of the other amendments to the Constitution? No.

But if you trust the NRA — as most conservatives do — and took its ads and its Web site at face value, or you really believed some hype from your favorite political pundit that Obama was going to get rid of your favorite inalienable right, then you’re probably pretty distressed right now, too.

Complement this false propaganda from the NRA with messaging from the McCain-Palin campaign, a host of conservative 527s and right-wing pundits that say Obama associates with terrorists, hates America and is a socialist, and it’s no wonder that many Americans who self-identify as being patriotic feel that Tuesday night’s results will advent the downfall of the Constitution, apple pie, mom and the American way.

There’s no law in this country that says you have to be excited about an Obama presidency. Many have their reasons, based on actual facts, to not be, and enjoy the right to express that unhappiness.

But there’s also no doubt that the NRA, numerous conservative 527s and the McCain campaign itself have entrenched some of the country’s more traditional, more rural citizens against our new president with the irresponsible use of lies, half-truths and smears back when the election was still in doubt.

It’s this kind of divisiveness, left over in the wake of a brutal campaign season, that fails to serve our country in a time when it most needs to unify.

Dissent is healthy to democracy. But neo-McCarthyism, as this country already painfully learned once, is a cynical tool that can be used only with utter recklessness by one party in an attempt to corner the market on patriotism.

As with the fall of Sen. Joe McCarthy, let’s hope the victory for the Democrats, who are in fact not patently unpatriotic because they oppose Republicans, is a repudiation, a rejection of this tactic by Republicans and anyone else, forever and ever, Amen … as the country song goes.