Fucked Up For Flags, and We're Still in Afghanistan

     President-elect Trump on November 29 tweeted, "Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag--if they do there must be consequences--perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!"
     On June 27, 1989, President Bush said, "...support for the First Amendment need not extend to desecration of the American flag.  Flag burning is wrong...As President I will uphold our precious right to dissent, but burning the flag goes too far and I want to see that matter remedied."
     Earlier that month, the Supreme Court had decided in a 5-4 decision that flag burning is a form of free speech.  Bush couldn't resist the opportunity to seem patriotic.  I remember seeing him standing in front of the biggest American flag I'd seen since watching the opening scene in Patton.  Using our nation's banner as a prop and a tool to get citizens riled up about something that doesn't matter, a method repeated via Twitter by Trump yesterday, the first President Bush showed he, too, could be an exploiter of basic American feelings: a demagogue.
     Trump's tweet had the effect of causing some to burn American flags in a demonstration outside New York's Trump International Hotel.  Should Trump lose his citizenship or go to jail for provoking flag desecration?
     Burning the American flag is, as of 1989, legal.  Like with Bush's effort twenty-seven years ago to change that law, will the Trump administration, backed by a majority of Republican and Democratic natural demagogues in the House of Representatives and Senate, attempt to make it the law of the nation to punish flag desecrators--because, of course, the flammable nature of our nation's prime symbol constitutes one of our big problems?
     A revival of flag-burning nerve-tingling as a topic of pundits' and politicians' conversations points out two things:
     1) Trump has inspired, journalists and other television and print contributors, with a single cynical tweet, to devote many irrecoverable hours of news time to a subject that is useless as a matter of serious national discourse, at an anxious time of domestic and international situations and crises calling for deep analysis.
     2) When the news media waste their time on nonsense (Trump's special language), he benefits (we don't) from their not better using their time (fulfilling the true function of the Fourth Estate).  His role (hardly presidential, but inevitable) as our nation's leader, will partly be that of a provider of entertainment, packaged by the news media, by Twitter or some other Internet-based medium, Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats devolved into Trump's brain-turd thoughts via social media, the system already corrupted by the surveillance state developed under Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
     As the comedian Jimmy Dore said, "If Trump had an extra inch to his penis we wouldn't be in this mess."
   
                                                                              Vic Neptune