Friday, January 9, 2004
At this point in early January, it's too early to tell who will win the Democratic primary. Aside from the maxim that anything can happen, General Wesley Clark has been gaining some ground on Howard Dean. (He's even gotten an endorsement from Madonna!) Although it's hardly a make-or-break issue, I'll have to admit that there's one small part of his platform that bothers me. (There may be larger parts too, but one thing at a time.) It's the idea that we need to "protect the flag."
Of course, Clark isn't the only candidate who seems to think The Flag needs protecting. Gephardt and Kucinich have voted for an amendment and Dean supports some kind of measure short of amending the Constitution.
Maybe this is the sort of thing candidates have to say -- a bit sad itself, if true. But there's a serious incoherence at the heart of this idea, and it's not hard to see.
We could start with a philosopher's point, courtesy of my colleague Jerry Levinson: The Flag isn't the same as any of the pieces of cloth that fly over any building. If a worn-out flag is destroyed, The Flag still exists. In that sense, The Flag doesn't need protecting. But of course this isn't the real point. It's true that The Flag is a symbol, not a piece of cloth, but symbols can be eroded by what happens to their instances.
Let's grant that if enough people burn flags, that could make The Flag into a meaningless symbol. But while this is a bare possibility, there's no serious chance that it will actually happen. More important, people who want to ban flag burning seem to have trouble keeping in mind what The Flag actually means. One of the most important things it represents are the values of a nation that takes its values particularly seriously. Among those values, freedom of expression is particularly dear. But as any civics teacher will tell you, freedom of expression doesn't mean anything if it applies only to views we like. The real test of free expression is whether it allows for unpopular and even offensive views.
There's a sort of logical perversity here. No one is holding out for an amendment to stop people from using words, or pictures or music or any number of (otherwise legal) actions to express disagreement, resentment and even hatred of the nation. If someone published a passionate, searing broadside claiming to hate America, we might be appalled and angry. Still, unless we lost our senses, we wouldn't be calling for new laws to stop people from saying things like that.
So how is flag-burning different? Psychologically, it seems to be. People will say things like "I fought for The Flag. People have died for The Flag."
Sorry. It's not true. At least I hope it isn't. People have fought and died for what The Flag stands for; not for any piece of cloth and not for any abstract symbol. At the end of the day, confusing the two is nothing short of idolatry.
Every time this issues comes up, I recall an op-ed piece that ran in The Washington Post in the early 80s. It was written by an American officer who was a prisoner of war in Viet Nam. Like other POWs, he was treated brutally. One day the camp commander decided to try some merely verbal abuse. He came to this American officer with a picture of American demonstrators burning the flag. "See what kind of a country you're from," the commander sneered. How, he asked, could America be worth fighting for?"
The officer didn't even have to think. "You've got it all wrong," he said. He told the commander that America is a country that loves freedom so much that it's even willing to let people burn its most beloved symbol.
This American officer was a courageous man. Few of us could have done what he did. But what's almost as impressive as his personal courage is the ideal of a brave and honorable nation that he used to challenge his tormentor.
Come to think of it, maybe The Flag does need protecting. A law that made it against the law to burn a flag would actually be an assault on The Flag itself. Fortunately, we have a way of protecting our symbols from this kind of degradation -- a way that does them honor instead of shaming them. It's called the vote.