On flag burning
Avedon Carol explains what flag burning really signifies:
These days I’m used to the idea that people misunderstand the point of US protests that involved flag-burning and think the flag is being burnt as an effigy rather than in fact.
But there used to be a time when every school child knew that when the flag has been soiled, you burn it. To kids in my generation, the meaning of burning a flag was obvious: It was soiled and it had to be burnt and replaced with a new one.
As a political act, the symbolism of saying that the flag had been dishonored by public officials and must be burnt was not even slightly to be confused with burning in effigy: It was not symbolically burning the United States, but actually burning the flag. The symbolic part was not that you were burning a flag, but that you were saying it had been irrevocably soiled and needed to be replaced, even though in protest you were probably using a new, unsoiled flag. The sullying had been done by elective officials in a broad general sense, and a single flag was representing all of the flags that had been soiled or rent by these acts.
So, by burning the flag, you were clearing the way to raise a fresh flag – one that had not been dirtied by the irresponsibility of our leaders – and with it the opportunity to return us to our unsullied state. But, unquestionably, to raise the US flag.
This in response to Hillary “clueless” Clinton support of new laws to criminalise
flag burning, unconstitutional though these laws may be. She actually compared burning the flag to burning a cross! What was she thinking?
Neither of the Clintons was ever a liberal, let alone a leftist, but even so, this craven sop to rightwing lunacy is mindboggling. It seems to me that she is trying, with stunts like this and her support of the War on Iraq, she is trying to present herself as “centrist” (read: rightwing) to win over Republican voters and/or build up her image as a “serious” presidential candidate, where “serious” means supporting the latest rightwing lunacies and ignoring common sense.
Now this may be a winning strategy for Joe (Democrats-Israel) Lieberman, in as far as the Republicans like to keep him around as an useful idiot, but Hillary Clinton must know she is hated far too much by the people she is trying to appeal to? She must also know she is swimming against the tide, with the majority of people in the US having long ago concluded that the War on Iraq was unwinnable and a mistake.
But perhaps all that doesn’t penetrate the Washington bubble…