If and when all the dust clears, the millions of dollars are spent, and the frenzied whirlwind of emotion, rhetoric and demagoguery subsides– there, enshrined in sacrosanct parchment we’ll have our blessed Flag Amendment. There, at the tail of truths self-evident will be the Amendment that will rescue the United States from the depraved would-be Flag desecrators and take us to greatness well into the next century by allowing Congress to punish such ne’er-do-wells. Perhaps the omniscient Congress could adopt the following verbiage: Any person that maims, mutilates, mars, defaces, desecrates, soils, shreds or tramples the United States’ Flag will be maimed, mutilated, marred, defaced, desecrated, soiled, shredded or trampled– a just punishment for an attack on the very heart and soul of America!
But when it’s all done, will we have a better nation? Will there be less cocaine in the streets? Will the deficit be smaller? Will our children be more studious and respectful? Will there be less pornography? Will our landfills be less repulsive and our skies clearer? Will the nostalgic veterans and tippling warlords of our great nation be able to sleep more peacefully at night knowing that no pimpled skinhead, no nihilistic punker will dare defame the Flag that he makes his bed with?
No, No, No, No, No, No, and maybe yes. Just maybe while John Doe is tried for flag desecration on national television as the political dogs salivate gleefully and as the warlords drift slowly off to sleep with visions of 21 gun salutes dancing in their heads, Joe Blow can more quietly sell crack and pander pornography to their teens down the street. Just maybe while John Doe ties up the Courts with constitutional battles, motions and appeals, the druglords and psychopaths can stretch out their own trials and appeals for 20 years. And maybe while John Doe serves his sentence he can take a correspondence course on patriotism from Jim Wright, Ted Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ivan Bosky.
And while we’re at it, we might as well protect from calumny a few other American symbols. No longer should people be allowed to burn in effigy our Presidents or should idle children be allowed to throw darts at their photographs. Nor should we tolerate protesters making a mockery of our institutions–the Supreme Court, the Congress, the Military. But they all should be forced to kneel each morning and chant some patriotic mantra like, "Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye, I will always praise on high, the flag, President, and apple pie."
All those that refused could be sent to Iran, Syria or Lebanon as some sagacious representatives have suggested. And to finish up the job, we may as well send all the overzealous Protestants back to Europe; the Black Americans back to Africa; the liberals, socialists and utopianists to Russia, China and Cuba; the Italians back to Italy; the Asians back to Asia; all the Latinos back to Spain; and all others that have a dissenting view, culture or an "ism" back to somewhere far far away to keep democracy safe for the world. This solution, the old "send ‘um back to where they came from" solution, was taken to an even higher plane and most efficiently employed by such notables as Hitler, Stalin, Attila the Hun, and Ghengis Khan. They sure sent ‘um back to where they came from! Now we definitely won’t go as far as they did but I am sure that all our problems would be solved if we took it at least as far back as Eden or the primordial soup.
On the other hand, we could all just go back to work, balance our budgets, raise our families, and keep behaving the way a nation that is the beacon of freedom and liberty should behave to give the Flag its glory. We could also take pride in our heritage and continue to honor all those that have made contributions to this great nation by their deaths or by the way they have lived.
Perhaps we would then realize that the symbol of our nation is not revered and honored because of any laws passed to impress its importance upon the mind, but because of the living ideals of its people. With this knowledge, we wouldn’t have to worry about the flag burners–unless that is, they really had something to say. And besides, if there ever came a day when we would do well to follow the example of our forefathers who burned the British Flag, we could do so with no Flag Amendment that had been rendered meaningless by our nation’s devolution.
Loren Lambert
© Fall, 1998
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