Is this a burning flag?

Or a picture of a burning flag?


Oh goodie, we’re doing this again.

This from the 04/15/05 Rapid City Journal...

Thune pushes amendment protecting flag
By Celeste Calvitto, Journal Staff Writer
Following up on a campaign promise, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., introduced Thursday an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would give Congress the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the American flag."It would simply authorize, but not require, Congress to pass a law protecting the American flag," Thune said in remarks on the Senate floor. "This amendment does not affect anyone's right to express their political beliefs. It would only allow Congress to prevent our flag from being used as a prop to be desecrated in some ways simply not appropriate to even mention in these halls."

Thune joined Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in introducing the amendment."With a Republican majority in the Senate and broad bipartisan support from 47 strong co-sponsors, he feels good about it," Thune spokesman Alex Conant said Thursday of the prospects for Senate passage.

"The critical thing is that it needs two-thirds of the Senate, which is 67 votes."A constitutional amendment needs a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate and approval by three-fourths of state legislatures."In past years, the House has supported it five times, but the real hang-up has been the Senate," Conant said.
...

Thune is such an utterly predictable right-wing stooge (anti Affirmative Action, anti gay adoptions, etc.) – and flag burning is such a reliable hobby-horse for wingnuts to ride when the riptide of corrupt and evil shit that they’ve unleashed threatens to drag them out to sea – that it was probably inevitable that someone would roll out this Grand Old Strawman and see if they could get the Dems to poke at it.

And we have bigger fights to fight, so I’m not going to bitch too much about the Dems complicity in this.

Yet.

I am, however, going to take this opportunity to point out what should be glaringly obvious to every educated citizen of the United States...in the Alternate American Universe where literacy is not considered a security threat and “Evolution” is not both literally and figuratively considered a four-letter-word.

The map is not the terrain.

The word is not the thing.

The representational object is not the subject.

The Portrait is not the Man (Unless your name is Dorian Gray :-)

The dollar in your wallet is a symbol without value outside of its context.

Hares and Tortoises don’t really race.

A parable is not a newspaper story.

A Bible is not a history textbook.

Genesis is not a science textbook.

Sexy pix of go-jus women will not destroy your soul or drive “millions into eventual addiction to hardcore pornography.” (So sayeth the president of Michigan's American Decency Association about the annual Sports Illustrated "Swimsuit Edition")

And burning a flag has nothing to do with harming your country.*

It is this level of abstractional autism that makes your average Fundy Joe Christian such a hopeless fuckwad. I have talked myself cyanotic more than once trying every rhetorical trick I know to edge one of them closer to understanding that the letters D-O-G and an actual “Dog” are not the same thing.

They rock on their heels, blink reeeeeal slow, point to their old sniff hound, and say, “But Cooter’s a dawg, ain’t it?”

Then they rock on their heels again, and blink again (this has been know to take several centuries) and say, “Why don't you lurv Jebus? Jebus lurv you.”

I have found one thing that does seem to work, but you’ll need a sack, a hammer and a doll. (I use my Edgar Allan Poe Action Figure, available from, although tastes vary, and you may prefer Ludwig Van or Pope Innocent III.)

First, place the action figure in the sack and beat it with a hammer. Then ask Fundy Joe if it hurt him. He will blink for a millennia or two, and hand you a Chick Tract about them ay-rabs hatin’ Jebus, but eventually he’ll answer, “Naw.”

Good.

Now put Fundy Joe in the sack and beat him ‘til he shits his overalls. Then ask him, “OK, did that hurt?”**

Admittedly it’s not foolproof and you might not change his mind or awaken in him any comprehension of semiotics, but at least you get to hammersmack a Fundy.

For Jesus.

So you’ve got that going for you.


* (I make exception for the public display of crippled cross (Swastika), the burning cross and the Confederate Battle Flag: these three symbols have common pedigree in that they have all been used explicitly as a call to violent action, and fuck it if that makes me an apostate Liberal. America gives every knuckledragger the right to call me a motherfucker and get up in my grill over things about which we disagree. Which is fine, but the Klan, the Nazis and their affiliates are terrorist groups, or “groups with ties to terrorism”, and these symbols are – and always have been – a cue to their victims that they should fear for their lives, and their followers to start taking heads. The meaning is --- and is deliberately intended to be -- as unambiguous as a lamp in window of the Old North Church.)

**(The management would like to make clear that it does not endorse actual violence. Cartoon violence, however, I heartily approve of.)