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©2008 semel17 - via flickr

It took two years and a dozen friends for David Mahfouda to make the flag that formed the circus tent for Union Square’s election-night carnival.

It only took a few hours for the largely teenaged and twentysomething crowd that gathered there to tear it to shreds for scarves and headbands.

Hours before Sen. Barack Obama make his victory speech before thousands in Chicago’s Grant Park on Nov. 4, Mahfouda took up his flag, 129 feet long and 65 feet wide, and walked, Pied Piper-like, from his apartment near the corner of Myrtle and Willoughby streets in Brooklyn. There were hours more yet to go when his following — long-haired, mohawked, clad in blazers and Converse, carrying snare drums and cymbals — arrived in Union Square to set up camp, drummers beating a steady rhythm under the billowing Old Glory.

“I initially made it because I was really distressed by how the flag has been, sort of, appropriated by the American Republican Party,” said Mahfouda, almost sheepish, crouched feet away while young people ran underneath the flag. They chanted the name of America’s first black president, cutting between the dancers and drummers who had already taken up residence underneath the red, white and blue.

“Two years ago Barack Obama was not even running for president,” he added.

Right away, this millennial-brand patriotism was branded as disrespectful. When two police officers came over to break up the drum circle, ostensibly because the noise had gone on for about an hour, one of them observed with scorn that this mammoth Old Glory had been allowed to touch the ground.

In the end, neither the noise nor the flag left the square for hours. And, of course, the kids, many of whom were New York University students, would later rip the flag to pieces. But they did it singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” chanting “yes we did!” and belting out, jubilantly, Queen’s “We Are The Champions.” No observer who stayed through the whole proceedings could say the flag was torn out of disrespect, protest, or even satire — especially strange for a generation said to be irredeemably cynical after years of too much Jon Stewart.

From conversations with many of the revelers, very few of them over 30, it sounds like they tore up that flag for the same reason they gathered in Union Square, gave money to Obama and voted in the first place — because for many of them, this was the year they really felt their generation belonged in America. These were people who were first eligible to vote in 2000. The New York Times called them “Generation O;” it might be more appropriate to call them Generation Chad, after dangling chad, or Generation Swiftboat. We are a generation that grew up watching the electoral college trumping the popular vote. Many of my cohorts in this generation spent their first years eligible to vote feeling unheard in the political process.

Then Barack Obama comes along, soaks up their campaign donations, lets them help write the party platform, gives them calling lists for phone banks and addresses to canvass. Obama looked the millennials in the eye and said, “I get you.”

Whether or not he meant what he said remains to be seen. But the first time the kid with the megaphone in Union Square led the crowd in the “Star Spangled Banner” may have been the first time many of those young people sang along and meant it. Barack Obama did that.

“I guess we always had our voice,” said Meehal Lele, 25, “but now we got our way.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nation’s increasingly dysfunctional health care system, the millennial generation’s purported political apathy, “we’ve taken it for granted that this is impossible to fix,” said Noah, 21, who declined to give his last name.

“It was sad,” he later added, “because I felt that we could accomplish so much more.”

Seeing his assumptions thwarted brought Noah to Union Square to celebrate.

In his victory speech, Obama mentioned the students and instigators, Noah’s age, who worked on his campaign for little pay and less sleep.

“This election started with the young people, and it’s ending with us,” said Guy Monahan, 20.

Mahfouda watched as his American flag began to rip, as photographers poked their heads through to snap shots of the crowd, as men and women wrapped themselves in folds of fabric. Unashamedly self-aware, the revelers in Union Square were at the same time part of the spectacle and chronicling it for their friends — but the preponderance of camera lenses didn’t seem to dampen the energy.

A woman with a turquoise necklace stood next to her blazered male companion, off to the side, away from the banging of drums and the bodies getting sweaty in the light November rain.

“This is like when Stalin’s statue fell,” she told her fellow witness. “Remember that?”

Of course it’s not hard to get college students in New York to throw a party. Some celebrants walked by with the pungent aroma of weed in their wake; others seemed to spray Champagne and Bud Light on the crowd in equal measure.

“I’m drunk,” screamed one party-goer, “on Obamaaaa!”

It could easily be said it was that intoxication — on drugs both political and chemical — fueled the shredding of the American flag. But there was a palpable and very sober emotion many in that night’s crowd seemed to share: Belonging. Not just in the moment, but in the country.

Beyond the party’s fringe, the typical accoutrement of a 21st- century shindig started to form. The molten celebration accumulated an outer crust of merch booths, the typical commercial counterpart to any good time. Inside, though, there was tearful talk of hope for the future, of political involvement, of, for the first time, a belief in the power to make the change Barack Obama had them yelling about for months.

“Yes we did!” they chanted. “Yes we can!”

With smiles and starry eyes, they reached for the flag Mahfouda had made as a statement of protest, out of disillusionment, to reclaim it as a symbol of the liberal spirit as much as of the Grand Old Party. They tore off strips of that flag and they wore them, as headbands and handkerchiefs.

Reached by e-mail the weekend after the election, Mahfouda said he wasn’t sure what to make of the way his attempt to reclaim what he felt was a hijacked symbol was, well, hijacked.

“I've been working with the flag for two years now, and though Tuesday night was destructive, it was also the largest and most joyful appropriation and celebration of and with the flag I have seen so far,” he wrote Nov. 10.

As the party began to wind down — it went on well after 1:30 that night — revelers took pieces of the flag home.
Mahfouda wants them to get in touch with him.

“My friends and I will be mending the remnants of the large flag — and would greatly appreciate material donations, especially from election night revelers who got carried away,” he wrote.

They can re-make the flag.

Yes they can!

Anyone interested in mending or making material donations can reach Mahfouda by e-mail at david.mahfouda@gmail.com, or just send some fabric to his apartment:
601 40th St., Apt. B2, Brooklyn, NY 11232.