Word: flagging
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...dispatch him on missions of good-natured political slumming. He sang along to country music. In every public square, he hammered away at big, cheap themes: 1) Willie Horton, the Black Monster on Furlough; 2) Read My Lips, No New Taxes; and 3) Uncouth Radicals Want to Burn Your Flag...
...generation passeth away, and a new generation arriveth to make the same mistakes, as if they had never been made before. I guess I had gone to sleep on the subject of flag burning. I was astonished to wake up, these 12 years later, to find that the Senate has been seriously considering an amendment to the Constitution to prohibit flag burning. I thought we had evolved beyond that...
Then, and now, and for the foreseeable future, a flag-burning amendment is a terrible idea. Why does it keep coming back...
...thing, flag burning (even though it occurs rarely) originated as one of the vivid, button-pushing ur-outrages committed during the great '60s deconstruction of American authority (which some boomers consider to be the beginning of the world) and engraved on the national memory by photographs of the time - merging with black-and-white shots of an Abbie Hoffman type giving the finger to "Amerika," or of the student radical Mark Rudd smirking and smoking a cigar with his feet up on the desk of the president of Columbia University. Burning the flag has a force of primal, even Oedipal...
...Americans. It is intended to. It is not difficult to sympathize with the anger. Vietnam outraged people, too - just as World War I outraged the poet e.e. cummings, who wrote, in "The Song of Olaf": "There is some s--- I will not eat/I will not kiss your f------ flag...