American Beat: The Rite To Bear Arms

Is there anything more pretentious than a coat of arms?

I'm willing to make exceptions for people whose families have coats of arms that go back to the Magna Carta. But, seriously, if your neighbor called you up and said, "Hey, come on over and see my new coat of arms," you'd think he was pretentious. And if you actually went over and found that he had redecorated the family room in a Scottish motif and was wearing a kilt as he hung the coat of arms on the wall, you'd think he was not only pretentious, but weird too.

Which brings us to Colin Powell.

The world--or, at least, the world of people who are obsessed with coats of arms--was stunned by the news last week that the U.S. Secretary of State had applied to the official Scottish authorities for an official coat of arms to celebrate his previously unheralded British Empire ancestry (Powell's father was born in Jamaica and his mom's family hailed from Scotland).

Now, I'm not calling the Secretary pretentious, but get a load of this guy's proposed design for his coat of arms: "azure, two swords in saltire, points downward, between four mullets Argent in a chief of the second, a lion passant Gules." To translate from the pretentious Scottish, that means a blue (azure) shield with two crossed (in saltire) swords, a silver (argent) bar (chief) with four stars (mullets) and a red (Gules) lion with his right paw raised and his head facing to the left (passant). Powell's motto will appear in a fake parchment banner underneath all the other artwork. The motto he's chosen is "Devoted to public service"--not, as many others had suggested: "A powerless pawn of the Bush Administration."

The symbolism is obvious--swords, stars, lions, fake parchment. It all speaks of a man who is either very proud of his military heritage or auditioning for a much-needed makeover on "Queer Eye." But why were the points of the swords facing downward? I'm no expert on coats of arms (my own personal coat of arms would depict a chicken, a knife and fork, and a bottle of barbecue sauce), but was this Powell's way of saying that he had put his fighting days behind him? Perhaps he was even showing overt disapproval of the war in Iraq.