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Every election year, America is visited by the scourge
of flag desecration.
It's one of those safe things
for candidates to decry. Being against poverty, racism or
pollution can make a candidate look suspect or squishy in
some portions of this great republic, but it's always safe
to stand foursquare against flag desecration.
The term deserves closer examination. According to the
dictionary at hand, desecrate
means to abuse the
sacredness of.
In other words, something has to be sacred before you
can desecrate it, just as a river has to be flowing before
you can pollute it. Thus, anyone who speaks of
desecrating a flag
must believe the flag is
sacred,
which means dedicated to or set apart for
the worship of a deity.
Doubtless there are people who believe that a flag is sacred and set aside for the worship of a deity. But when I was a lad in a Baptist Sunday School, the worship of emblems and images, the belief that any mere item of matter could be worthy of worship -- that was idolatry.
Pagans, heathens and infidels practiced idolatry. Good
Christians didn't. The Traditional Values Crowd is right --
America is becoming a pagan nation of idolaters and worse,
and the evidence is before us every time we hear some
heathen denounce flag desecration.
There is the argument that sacred
does not
necessarily mean worthy of worship.
It can also mean
worthy of respect.
But if our flag is worthy of respect, no amount of public burning or similar stupidity will destroy its worthiness. Things that are worthy of respect maintain that worth, whether or not people exhibit the respect.
Now, I'm all for treating the flag with greater respect. One way to increase respect would be to eliminate commercial use.
Am I the only one who gets bothered when he sees an electrician's truck going around town, tattered flag flapping from a pole stuck in one of the stake sockets in back? Are they trying to tell us that we should snap to and salute every time that electrician drives by, or are they implying that the other electricians in town are unpatriotic?
Is it an exhibition of patriotism when some used car lot displays a 60-foot flag, or is it a way to call attention to the place and circumvent a local sign code that forbids gaudy flashing lights?
And I'm never sure of the proper etiquette when a flag
passes at a parade. For the first flag, I'm sufficiently
patriotic to doff my hat and stand in honor of things like
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
and
Congress shall make no law ...
But what are you supposed to do on the 50th flag? Can't we just enjoy the parade, or do we need to look around and see whether any plainclothes agent is taping the crowd, gathering information about possibly treasonous types who failed to stand when the 47th flag went by?
And then there's the case of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the Denver Nugget point guard who didn't want to stand for the national anthem before games.
National Basketball Association regulations call for players to stand respectfully during the anthem.
I figured that if this rule disturbs Abdul-Rauf's interpretation of the Koran, then he's perfectly free to go find another line of work.
After all, I just read a laudatory piece in Reader's Digest about a young man from Brigham Young University who might have enjoyed a profitable career in pro football. But he decided against it because professional football players work on Sunday, a day he believed to be set aside for other things.
And if Abdul-Rauf wanted to give up $3 million a year because his religious scruples were troubled by the pre-game rituals of professional basketball, then he, too, deserves a place among the heroic.
But, from what I gathered, it wasn't quite like that. And then there came suggestions that maybe the national anthem doesn't really need to be played at sporting events. After all, we manage to enjoy plays, concerts, lectures, movies and other public gatherings without hearing the national anthem first, and so far as I know, play-goers are no less patriotic than baseball-game-attenders.
After further thought, though, the national anthem seems perfectly appropriate at sporting events. Often they're held in publicly-financed structures which are operated to the benefit of a few millionaires. Professional sports -- both the owners and the players -- demonstrate greed, egotism, brutal competition, marketing hustles and many other things that make our nation what it is today.
There is nothing more American, in the modern sense,
than professional sports. Almost every country offers plays
and concerts, but precious few have big-time professional
sports, and certainly not on the American level. Let's
require all four verses of the Star Spangled Banner, along
with the Pledge of Allegiance and a recitation of
Westward, the Course of Empire.
Patriotism demands
no less.
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