Date: Tue, 12 Dec 1995 19:04:42 -0800
From: mcpherso (John McPherson)
Subject: GS: Flag Burning Amendment

  Does anyone here understand in a deep way the motivation for wanting
to pass an Anti-Flag-Burning Amendment ... as I've heard the Congressional
Republicans seem bent on doing via a Bosnian smoke screen?  I responded
to the fellow who told me about this with the following:

           As far as I can tell, a flag
        is a prettily-colored piece of cloth that serves as a symbol.
        Well, destroying an artifact which serves as a symbol does
        not in the least damage the people and property being
        symbolized ... or am I missing some kind of nationalistic
        voodoo or something?  If a person really wants to spend their
        money buying a flag, and then chooses to burn it, that's none
        of my concern ... in fact, I'd rather have them burn a flag
        than burn a building!  

  It would seem to me that both people who want to burn a flag, and 
those who want to prevent them from doing so, are both suffering from
some kind of delusion: that the symbol (flag) _is_ in some sense the
thing being symbolized (people, land, cities, crops, etc.) ... and that
the one wants to damage somehow the "system" being symbolized, and the
other wants to prevent that "damage" by banning the destruction of the
symbol.  Maybe it's just me, but I find this whole debate rather
surreal ...

  If a "flag-burner", on the other hand, does realize that the flag is
not the country, and he/she is just making a non-verbal "statement" of
how much they don't like the country as it currently is, then while I
may question their mode of communication, why do others seem to take
so much offense that they'd like to suppress that kind of communication
by force?  I must've read too much g.s. ... I seem to have lost the
ability to "get" why this issue is so important ...

John, the word is not the thing
      the map is not the territory
      the flag is not the country ;-)
--
John McPherson (mcpherso@lumina.ucsd.edu)
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