Students and Professors of UC Irvine want to ban the US Flag

[Timsup2nothin]

The ACLU is interested in the high school case. They've clearly stated it would interfere with freedom of expression so why in the world would a school district be so stupid as to waste needless legal funds on something that will surely fail and result in no win at all for the school?

Since it prevented a fight at the time and by the time the case is settled it will be too late for the bullies to use that particular means to start a fight.

 

[caketastydelish]

http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/02/27/11-17858.pdf

There was no blanket ban on the American flag at Morgan Hill. But the media and everyone else has been wrongfully describing the situation as if there were.



Maybe. But the situation at Morgan Hill was more complicated than callous white kids offending overly sensitive Mexican students. The students in question were wearing the flags to deliberately provoke their mexican peers, many of whom would have been more than happy to answer with violence. Public schools need to somehow balance free expression with order. When students are using the american flag to deliberately create disorder, schools are justified in sending those students home.

So the bottom line is the school decided to send the "racists" home instead of defending them to exercise their "racist" first amendment right of flying the American flag. How do you even know they were trying to "deliberately provoke" their "Mexican peers"?

 

[Crackerbox]

So the bottom line is the school decided to send the "racists" home instead of defending them to exercise their "racist" first amendment right of flying the American flag. How do you even know they were trying to "deliberately provoke" their "Mexican peers"?

Because knee jerk liberals have become mind readers as well as knowing the correct response due to their political leanings. It's thought police.

This despite the fact that the overwhelmingly liberal ACLU has clearly communicated that any test to it will fail and reverse the ruling.

 

[Farm Boy]

Since it prevented a fight at the time and by the time the case is settled it will be too late for the bullies to use that particular means to start a fight.

Bullies? Maybe they were. But if you call them bullies for wearing American gear to an American high school and nothing else, boy can I justify calling a bunch of minority behavior around here "bullying" and "intimidation." Bet I could justify getting urban black culture purged entirely while hyperventilating about about the safety of and providing a free-from-harassment environment for our young women.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Bullies? Maybe they were. But if you call them bullies for wearing American gear to an American high school and nothing else, boy can I justify calling a bunch of minority behavior around here "bullying" and "intimidation." Bet I could justify getting urban black culture purged entirely while hyperventilating about about the safety of and providing a free-from-harassment environment for our young women.

No one is calling them bullies "for wearing American gear". I'm accepting that people on the scene are capable of recognizing what this "show of patriotism" was about, and what the people showing the patriotism were about. I've been that guy that works out how to 'innocently provoke' someone more than often enough to know how it likely went down.

I also know the flip side of "oh I was scared because a guy in a hoodie walked by" (and truthfully never even knew the scared person was there), so I get your point.

 

[RobAnybody]

Having read this whole thread, I'm both amused & baffled. People should be able to protest flags, in general, but "banning flags" is stupid. Do the people wanting to ban flags not realize that's oppressing free speech?!? It's a bizarre juxtaposition of "what we want" vs. "what we stand for"?

It's just the whole We Want Freedom, but not Freedom We Don't Like, that I don't get.

OTOH, I grant it was just a bunch of people who don't represent most people.

 

[Goodfella]

So the bottom line is the school decided to send the "racists" home instead of defending them to exercise their "racist" first amendment right of flying the American flag. How do you even know they were trying to "deliberately provoke" their "Mexican peers"?

They showed up to school, on Cinco de Mayo, decked in American flags. They were obviously trying to start something. Public schools can't just let students exercise their constitutional rights at all times. Schools have to somehow keep the peace. The rights of high school students need to be curtailed, at least to an extent, for approximately 7 hours a day, five days a week, and I hazard to say that it's not a grave violation of human rights either.

 

[Plotinus]

Leaving aside whether the flag worship is right or wrong, it certainly is perplexing to outsiders. I don't think there are too many other countries which treat their flag like Americans do (maybe France?). It's hard to express just how strange or alien it is to see an American's passion for their flag. There's probably a mixture of cultural misunderstanding and Stockholm Syndrome at play. On the one hand, if Americans are bombarded by the flag so much and from such a young age, the symbolism of it really will be more powerful. On the other hand, it's just a flag. I suppose if someone were to immigrate to the US having not been brought up with that same attitude towards the flag, they might be a bit confronted by its pervasiveness. If the aim is to be culturally sensitive, do you force your understanding of the flag upon them, or try toning it down a little?

I recently went to the National Museum of American History in DC, where they have an exhibit about the flag, featuring the original flag. The atmosphere was a little bizarre - comparable to something like Lenin's Mausoleum, where people seemed not to be there for historical curiosity's sake, but because it's a shrine of sorts. I would definitely describe the attitude towards the flag as religious - the flag is sacred, and negative treatment of it isn't merely wrong, but blasphemous.

I absolutely agree with this - and I don't think even the French get like this about their flag (the French shibboleth is the language rather than the flag). It's striking even in this very thread how the flag is referred to in religious language - "desecration" etc. The flag is treated not simply as a symbol of things that are important to some people, but as if it were intrinsically holy. Add in the obsession with free speech trumping everything else and you've got a volatile mixture.

 

[Borachio]

BTW, the Union Jack isn't racist either.

It's got a very mixed history to say the least.

For many people it's a symbol of Empire, oppression and exploitation.

I can't help thinking that wars would be a lot harder to begin and sustain without national flags, and the ideas behind them.

Uniforms are part of it, too. Imagine a battle with no way to tell friend from foe.

What purpose do flags serve? Seriously. I think the answer would tell us much.

 

[Farm Boy]

They showed up to school, on Cinco de Mayo, decked in American flags. They were obviously trying to start something. Public schools can't just let students exercise their constitutional rights at all times. Schools have to somehow keep the peace. The rights of high school students need to be curtailed, at least to an extent, for approximately 7 hours a day, five days a week, and I hazard to say that it's not a grave violation of human rights either.

They probably we're being rude. This is a school for teens, not toddlers. People are going to wear things that other people don't like. Learning what ''insults'' society is going to demand you live with and which ones it might censor for you should be a lesson schools are trying to teach at this age. But whatevs.

I absolutely agree with this - and I don't think even the French get like this about their flag (the French shibboleth is the language rather than the flag). It's striking even in this very thread how the flag is referred to in religious language - "desecration" etc. The flag is treated not simply as a symbol of things that are important to some people, but as if it were intrinsically holy. Add in the obsession with free speech trumping everything else and you've got a volatile mixture.

The flag as oft construed seems as if it can roughly stand in for your faith in your countrymen, hence why it's so important for it to be optimistic, not European. We're contentious enough with each other, we probably can use that reminder(there you go Sir B). Hence why burning it is so powerful. You can burn it, but we're still going to ask you to stand up when it goes by at the front of the small town's parade. You don't need to pledge, but remaining seated without some sort of special reason is going to be construed as thoughtless or deliberately rude. To everybody.

 

[Traitorfish]

re: Union Flag, the symbol is not intrinsically racist, that is true. But it has served and continues to serve as a symbol for some extremely unpleasant beliefs and practices, and not for a great deal else. Partly this is the peculiarities of British flag culture: massacring brown people carried the transcendent spirit of Empire and so had the flag bestowed upon it, while the construction of the National Health Service was merely mundane and so remained flagless. But the failure of latter-day patriots to convincingly attach the flag to anything that isn't largely build around violence and hierarchy is notable. Whether or not the flag is racist, whatever it means to say that an assemblage of shapes and colours "is" racist, there are certainly a lot of anxieties around its use.

The flag as oft construed seems as if it can roughly stand in for your faith in your countrymen, hence why it's so important for it to be optimistic, not European. We're contentious enough with each other, we probably can use that reminder(there you go Sir B). Hence why burning it is so powerful. You can burn it, but we're still going to ask you to stand up when it goes by at the front of the small town's parade. You don't need to pledge, but remaining seated without some sort of special reason is going to be construed as thoughtless or deliberately rude. To everybody.

That might be the ideal, but how does that actually hold up in practice? Americans do not generally give the impression of being any more deeply impressed with each other than other nationalities. Those who express the most enthusiasm for the flag seem to express the very least enthusiasm for their countrymen.

At a certain point, you've got to wonder if the ritual actually symbolises anything but itself.

 

[Farm Boy]

The ritual forces everybody to stand up together or face the same way for ten seconds every once in a blue moon. Then they can go back to loathing each other. Seems a pretty good exercise when our culture jokes about ''drive by disagreements'' across the pond(family guy), since we have the tendency to do that with bullets. Or courts when we're being civil. But you need some respect for the civil courts, or you get the bullets again.

 

[Traitorfish]

Does the ritualised performance of consensus actually stand in for authentic consensus? It seems like you risk making things worse in the long-run, because if people go about with the ill-founded conviction that they all agree on the fundamentals, they're going to get a lot more excited when that turns out not to be so.


edit: Besides, I think the main reason Americans love flags is because they can't have kings. They tried to have a king with George Washington, but it didn't really work; between his successors, Adams was never going to pull it off, and Jefferson was dead set against the whole thing. So the flag, the one thing that everybody agreed upon, became the vessel for divine sanction and the consequent object of worship. Even the Confederate flag is a reflection of this, a cloth king-in-exile, Charles Edward Stuart manifested in red and blue. And I don't mean to trivialise the tradition: my undergrad dissertation is actually about the American enthusiasm for kings and the abortive attempt to construct a republican kingship, so it's fair to say I take it pretty seriously. But I think this sort of thing usually plays out a less explicitly symbolic level than you're suggesting. It still brings in a lot of the concerns you highlight about collective identity and solidarity, but in a different way.

Comes of founding a republic first and converting everyone to republicanism afterwards, I think; there was always going to be a few psychological crutches along the way, and once the crutch is adopted, it's difficult to remove without some pressing need. Even the French had that, for a bit, hence Napoleon; they've just had enough opportunities to clear the table that their hang-ups refer to the last republic, or the one before that, before they refer to a monarch. Perhaps when Americans find the flag to be more a nuisance than a comfort, they'll take their king to the guillotine, but I can't see that happening for a while yet.

 

[Farm Boy]

We could go for round two, but participating at least a little in the trappings of unity seems like it goes a long way towards tolerating how annoying your neighbors are. Or Californians. And they are, btw. Especially when you're mostly obligated to stand up for them when they say stupid things and Euros start chanting about freedums and using the law to shut people up. Actually, I think we're low grade simmering about each other almost continuously. The rituals help keep us from actually flaring so often, and we don't tend to clamp the kettle shut and pretend that it isn't going to explode at some point.

 

[Farm Boy]

Per the edit: well, I guess that would probably be a step back on the path of victory for states rights and localism. So a mixed blessing all in all.

 

[Gori the Grey]

You know what this exchange between you, FB and TF, makes me realize for the first time?

I never have experienced veneration of the flag as bringing me together with my living fellow citizens, but rather with the previous generations of Americans. What I think when I see a flag in a parade is of the generations of people who've been engaged in moving this ideal of a nation-state forward through time.

It's been an imperfectly achieved ideal, or a mixed bag, as the students at UCI are right to insist.* But there's been no inconsiderable good in it, and might be more in the future.

I experience the flag as marking a multigenerational political and cultural effort.

I wonder how common that experience is.

*How does it go? There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism?

 

[JollyRoger]

Nothing beats a blonde wearing American Flag bikini bottoms. Just tell her the nation is in mourning and she should be wearing them at half mast.

 

[Borachio]

I suppose one could run that idea up the flag pole and salute it. If so inclined. As it were.

 

[Arwon]

The ritual forces everybody to stand up together or face the same way for ten seconds every once in a blue moon. Then they can go back to loathing each other. Seems a pretty good exercise when our culture jokes about ''drive by disagreements'' across the pond(family guy), since we have the tendency to do that with bullets. Or courts when we're being civil. But you need some respect for the civil courts, or you get the bullets again.

The pledge once in a blue moon? They did it every morning at the high school where I went on the States.

(And my sister and I got weird looks and even a couple of comments from a teacher for not, you know, pledging allegiance to a foreign flag...)

 

[Farm Boy]

The pledge once in a blue moon? They did it every morning at the high school where I went on the States.

(And my sister and I got weird looks and even a couple of comments from a teacher for not, you know, pledging allegiance to a foreign flag...)

There's a lot of life left to live outside of highschool. Though, yes, the mandatory is probably the only time a lot of students ever really do anything with a lot of their peers. Cliques, yaknow?