Pledging allegiance to a symbol

President Donald Trump signed an executive order that criminalizes the burning of the American flag. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that burning the flag is protected speech under the First Amendment to our Constitution. What are we to make of this?

I am first reminded of a quote from columnist Molly Ivins, my favorite Tejana. She wrote, “I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps themselves up in the flag.”

Ivins’ quote assumes that there is a level of difference between our flag and our Constitution. She’s right, there is a stark difference between the two. And for those of you who just puckered up for patriotic reasons, read on.

The difference lies in the fact that the flag is a SYMBOL of the United States, and the Constitution is the real thing.

Better semanticists than I — like Korzybski, Hayakawa and Wittgenstein — can explain more clearly how symbols are not real things. The map is not the territory. The symbol is not the thing it symbolizes.

They would tell you that symbols are convenient shortcuts to thinking. That a fixation on the symbolic excuses a lazy mind from doing real mental labor. For someone to blindly embrace a symbol as if it has real meaning, and to neglect to seek the reality behind the symbol, is to fall into a comfortable intellectual trap.

Perhaps that is the reason that some folks firmly believe that the flag symbolizes them and their egos. Thus, they ostentatiously display the flag as a symbol of their own patriotism, when the Pledge of Allegiance clearly states that the flag stands for our republic alone.

Symbols like Old Glory, or a star-spangled screaming eagle tattoo, or a Harley Davidson festooned with stars and stripes are great tools for provoking emotional responses and fervid patriotic reactions, but they are not the real deal. Our Constitution is.

Symbols are easily manipulated to stir us up emotionally, but they are no help in a pinch when reality is required.

Case in point. If you are ever called upon to defend your inviolable civil rights against a government that wants to violate them, you’ll end up in a courtroom. The American flag sits idle in a corner of that room, hanging limply from a pole, while the Constitution of the United States is by your side, working. The flag won’t help you, but the Constitution, embodied in the law, will.

Do you now see what Ivins was saying?

Or consider this: The flag prompts us to think of government as “we.” Our Constitution, and everything that went into adopting it, prompts us to think of government as “they.”

This manner of thinking sharpens the dichotomy of how we think about the flag and the Constitution. If citizens accept the definition of the flag as “we,” of course, they’ll get offended when someone burns it. The act becomes a personal attack, an attack on how someone thinks about themselves, an attack on their patriotism, even if that patriotism is blind.

If, however, citizens view the flag as a symbol of government as “they,” then a flag burning will be looked upon as an affirmation of the citizens’ superiority over government. Burning the flag says that government must align itself with the citizenry, not vice versa.

The United States Supreme Court agrees with the latter view. In Texas v. Johnson (1989), the court affirmed that burning the American flag is protected speech under the Constitution. Since that decision, both sides of the political spectrum have displayed disrespect for the flag as disrespect for government. And the Constitution protects both sides.

For a president, or anyone else for that matter, to try to penalize disrespect for a symbol, like the flag, is tantamount to saying that the symbol is more important and more worthy of protection than what it symbolizes. To violate an American citizen’s right to burn the flag as a form of political expression, places a piece of cloth above the instrument that guarantees that right. It is the triumph of symbolism over reality.

The American flag symbolizes, among other rights, the right of a citizen to burn it. For Trump or any other politician to criminalize flag burning is to reduce the flag’s symbolism to the merely patriotic and, by extension, to reduce our Constitution to mere words on paper.