The thing the symbol stands for

Jonathan Alter over on the Newsweek site has an excellent essay about flag-burning - or, rather, about the proposed amendment.

As he points out, flag burning is very rare - maybe half-a-dozen cases in the last 15 years. Even at the height of the Vietnam War there weren't 50. But even if people were burning a flag every day, no one should let their outrage at this form of protest lead them to amending the Constitution to make one symbolic act unconstitutional.

He explains his belief that this amendment is a true, valuable litmus test:

The flag burning amendment is in a category by itself: the only argument for it is based on pure emotion. But ours is supposed to be a government of reason, not emotion, especially when it comes to the most precious repository of our rights. The American Constitution, the apogee of reason in the history of self-government, is real; the American flag, for all of its beauty and deep meaning, is symbolic. For more than 200 years, we'’ve occasionally used the amendment process to expand rights. This would be the first time we would enshrine their restriction. Polluting the Constitution is far more dangerous than burning the flag.

I agree with him. But there's more.

As - what will people do instead? I mean, assuming that more flags aren't actually burnt once it becomes such a loaded and 'unconstitutional' action, of course. What will people do next to protest?

And more importantly - What will we have to do to stop whatever that is?

We've always had a fringe of people who make the symbols of our country almost more important than the substance. Torture our enemies? Okay. Warrantless wiretapping? If that's what it takes. Kick down the doors of innocent people? Omelets and broken eggs. Burn the flag? Off with their heads!

Perhaps if we spent more time making sure the country was a thing whose symbols people would cherish instead of seeking instead to force people to act as if they cherished them we'd have fewer problems.

As Mark Twain once observed, you attack the flag at your peril.

I am not finding fault with this use of our flag; for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around, now, and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag. I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so. But I stand corrected. I conceded and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted. Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration.

That was in 1901 - in 1907 he expressed the same emotion from the other side:

Yet to-day in the public schools we teach our children to salute the flag, and this is our idea of instilling in them patriotism. And this so-called patriotism we mistake for citizenship; but if there is a stain on that flag it ought not to be honored, even if it is our flag. The true citizenship is to protect the flag from dishonor -- to make it the emblem of a nation that is known to all nations as true and honest and honorable.

That's the real trouble here. We need to remember why it is that this country is different. It's the Constitution -- it's the enshrinement in Law of Reason, not emotion. It's our honest attempt to make a nation governed by Reason, by reasonable men and women extending the Rule of Law to all citizens, not just a favored few.

If we lose sight of that ideal, then we've lost much, much more than a single beloved symbol. We've lost everything that symbol stands for, and everything that makes that symbol worth defending.

Two years ago now someone I work with insisted that when Iraqi insurgents behead Americans, it gives us the right to strike back. "My country is better than that," I insisted.

We're hearing the same thing now, after two American soldiers were tortured to death, that this is so horrible that nothing excuses it - a position I agree with - and that anything we've ever done is somehow retroactively excused, or at least justified. "They're monsters," we're told. Maybe they are. And yet - as John McCain (a man I have serious disagreements with on other topics) once said, "It's not about them. It's about us."

My country is better than that.

I still insist that.

Oh, yes, it's easy to laugh at Dale Arden in the movie Flash Gordon, when she tells Ardala that she must marry Ming, because she promised to. "We keep our promises; it's one of the things that make us better than you," she says.

But there's something real and meaningful in that line. Because unless we are better than they, why do we have the right to exist at their expense? Mere might makes right? Then anybody bigger than us has the right to squash us like the proverbial bug?

Isn't there more to us than that? Isn't our embrace of liberties as important as our preaching of Liberty, of democratic laws as of Democracy? And what is that Democracy we intend to spread around the benighted world if it's just authoritarianism in pretty clothes? Why should anyone kill, or die, for that?

Our flag is the symbol of something very precious. But part of that something is allowing the symbol to be destroyed sometimes.