I own a flag. It's a big monster, and it holds the distinction of having been flown over the United States Capitol for me on 10 July, 1998, at the request of Sen. Jesse Helms.

It didn't fly for very long. There's a little man in blue slacks whose job is to raise and lower flags over the dome at a rate of some hundreds per day. The ten or so seconds mine spent in the D. C. wind jacked its value above twenty dollars and earned it a smart certificate. I bought it to use as a tablecloth, but it fits so nicely in the open doorway of my bedroom that I use it to provide that sense of useless privacy that all occupants of studio apartments crave. The bottom drags on the carpet, which I know it's not supposed to do, and the thing is getting kind of dusty. You can swat the bunnies off with a sharp shake, but if I want to clean it, I'll have to stuff it into the washing machine down the hall. There's no laundry instructions, like on the tag of a sweater, so I can't be sure it won't bleed, the stars running into the stripes and the thing coming out one big mess. It's a fate I wouldn't mind for anything so closely associated with the Distinguished Gentleman from North Carolina, but if I'm going to fuck it up--even unintentionally--I may have to do it quick.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Flag Amendment is back in town.

The House is again expected to approve the Amendment which would allow Congress to enact legislation against flag desecration, but both the Washington Postand Associated Press predict it to fall short of the 67 Senate votes needed to progress to the states--just barely, but also consistent with previous attempts. Two potential swing votes, those of Kent Conrad and Byron L. Dorgan, both Democrats from North Dakota, were lost when the two Senators chose instead to support S. 931, "The Flag Protection Act of 1999". Like its House companion, H. R. 1081, the Act would skirt First Amendment conflicts by focusing only on those aspects of flag burning which fall under current federal legislative jurisdiction, to wit: "incitement; damage or destruction of property involving the flag of the United States." The fate of both bills remains uncertain, but their appearance and the support they have gathered among potential pro-Amendment voters signal the end of another chapter in Congress' Sisyphus-like struggle toward amending the Constitution.

The last big push for the Amendment was in 1995, but another campaign was waged in 1998, due mostly to the efforts of organizations such as the grassroots Citizens Flag Alliance. After hearings, H. J. Res. 54 was sent to the floor by the House Judiciary Committee and passed a House vote. The Senate Judiciary Committee, in a novel variation on parliamentary procedure, chose to hold its hearings on S. J. Res. 40, its version of the Amendment, after forwarding it for a vote, lending to the proceedings the air of a victory celebration, a party at which Chairman Orrin Hatch served as gracious host and master of ceremonies for a parade of beaming speakers like Tommy Lasorda and self-proclaimed "entertainer" John Schneider. (Schneider, former actor and star of "The Dukes of Hazzard", certainly owed his appearance before the Committee to his recording of "I Love Old Glory," an oppressively patriotic ballad with lyrics penned by Hatch. It is generally assumed that the flag Schneider referred to in his testimony as "a symbol of honor and respect for those who died for our freedom" is not the confederate flag prominently featured on the roof of the "General Lee".) Despite the support of Majority Leader Trent Lott and the declared intentions of an overwhelming majority of state legislatures to ratify it, S. J. Res. 40 failed to beat the Senate calendar and died with the adjournment of the 105th Congress, the Senate--and the Judiciary Committee in particular--having ... other things on their mind in those days.

So now we have the 1999 showroom models, H. J. Res. 33 and S. J. Res. 14, virtually identical to their predecessors. Hatch's Senate resolution, sent to the floor on 29 April, reads as follows:

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembles (two-thirds of each House concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within 7 years after the date of its submission for ratification:

"Article--

"The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.".

A popular argument of the Amendment opposition is that the current language of the legislation is too vague, leaving lawmakers too much room to interpret the meanings of "flag" and "desecration." This position is largely disregarded in serious considerations, due mostly to the ridiculous conclusions to which it is taken. Harvard law professor Richard Parker would describe the scenario in his 1998 appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee: "Often, the imagined application involves damage to an image (a photo or a depiction) of a flag, especially on clothing –frequently, on a bikini or on underwear. And, often, it involves disrespectful words or gestures directed at an actual flag or the display of flags in certain commercial settings – a favorite hypothetical setting is a used car lot."

The argument is tailor-made for the legislature, however, appealing to Congress' distaste for the court system. In this arena, any failure to be thorough and exacting--any "vagueness"--contributes to a perceived shift in control of the law from the black-and-white domain of legislative prescription into the gray areas of judicial interpretation. "Until somebody," snorted Rep. John Conyers, Jr. during the 1997 House subcommittee hearing on H. J. Res. 54, "some smart guy in the Congress or the Senate, writes this so that it is not so vague that a law student could figure out that the Supreme Court would have to knock it down, we’re going to all be doing this little thing for a long time to come."

The severity of this attitude is most clearly seen when it is trained upon something as accommodating as current versions of the Flag Amendment; it is here where proud men like Conyers and Subcommittee Chairman Charles Canady, the muscles in their eyes fixed into a squint, struggle to wrap their gazes around a shadow--and it is these contests which reveal the absurd comedy which underlines all bureaucratic operations. Consider this interrogation of Parker by Conyers, as remembered by Samuel Beckett:

Mr. CONYERS. There are things underlying this proposal that I think the more people look at it, the more trouble it may create in the minds of not only people in the legislature, but in the country as well. And I don’t think that, you know, what I’m hearing from you is going to help it very much. I mean, if I’m talking to a Harvard law professor who teaches constitutional law, and he doesn’t see any vagueness, then I don’t know how you’re going to sell anybody on why this should be a better deal than it was 2 years ago.

Mr. PARKER. Could I respond?

Mr. CONYERS. Yes, sir.

Mr. PARKER. On one hand, of course, all language is vague.

Mr. CONYERS. Oh, OK.

Mr. PARKER. So, of course, if that’s the way you’re putting it, sir—

Mr. CONYERS. Right.

Mr. PARKER [continuing]. There’s vagueness.

Mr. CONYERS. Yes.

Mr. PARKER. There’s not a problem of vagueness because, by comparison with other provisions in the Constitution, this proposed provision presents no problem of vagueness. The great—

Mr. CONYERS. Well, OK. All right.

Mr. PARKER [continuing]. Old provisions are far vaguer—

Mr. CONYERS. OK, all right. You know, I don’t think that you—

Mr. CANADY. The gentleman’s time has expired. Without objection, the gentleman will have 2 additional minutes.

Mr. CONYERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don’t think I’ll use them all.

But I don’t think the fact that you don’t see vagueness and others do means necessarily that you’re right. I’ve been listening to other law professors who happen to see vagueness. I don’t have any—I try to make the laws in this country to the best of my intelligence and ability. I’d be very happy to support any restrictions on the contemptible act of flag burning if they didn’t go into protected actions, protected speech, that the opening-up of which could have some very grave ramifications. And so you’re here as a witness, and you’re an excellent and able witness. Your testimony has been studied in this other body and now in this one, but I don’t think you explaining to me that all language is vague is going to sell—is going to move anybody in my position off of it. And I don’t believe you telling me that you don’t see vagueness, when many others see it, is going to make a lot of difference. That’s differences of views, of course, that bring us here in the first place.

Mr. PARKER. Just one response, sir?

Mr. CONYERS. Yes, sir.

Mr. PARKER. The Congress has the power, under Article I, Section 8, to regulate commerce among the several States. That is a vague phrase, I suppose.

Mr. CONYERS. Well, no, I don’t—you may suppose it is, but it hasn’t been found to be vague legally or constitutionally. It’s vague to you, but then all language is vague to you.

It may, in fact, be true that the legislature's distaste for flag burning has to do with the "vagueness" of the act itself. "Flag desecration is a particularly inarticulate way of expressing an idea," Canady reflected, "because you really don’t know what is being said, and it could be any range of things that they’re trying to communicate."

Though Parker is one of the most erudite and reasoned of those demanding protection for the flag as a "national symbol", he seems painfully ill-equipped in finding precedent for such a beast. He told the House Subcommittee that "the framers of the Constitution, put symbolism of our unity at the very beginning of the document, invoking, 'We the People of the United States.' And, very near the end, they required that all officials, high and low, be 'bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution'--a provision that, surely, is less functional than symbolic, yet whose symbolism fulfills, nonetheless, an important function. Animating the whole Constitution of 1787, after all, was the aspiration to call into being a new sense of commitment to a broad and deep national unity--despite difference. What was it, at the beginning, but a bold symbolic effort?"

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One less versed in legal matters might assume that the framers of the Constitution had in mind, at the beginning, not a bold symbolic effort, but the task of devising a system of government for their new nation; and here they might wonder further whether any member of the delegation was aware of his own nature as a symbol of the People of the United States. It is likely such a thought occurred to him only during the most divisive moments of that bold symbolic effort, when, listening to a heated debate over whether a slave was a symbol of a whole person or merely a symbol of three-fifths of a person, he would sink his face into his hand and wonder how the people he symbolized had suckered him into this.

If elected officials--the cornerstone of representative democracy--are to bear the additional burden of being national symbols, then where are the amendments protecting them? Sure, we have laws to protect the burning, theft, and vandalism of a government employee, but what of the intangibles? What of the lack of respect visited upon them in the form of campaign mudslinging and poor voter turnout? What of the blight of scandal and federal inquiry? Who will protect them from desecration--even that which is self-inflicted?

Luckily, this last one is covered, if only because their oaths to uphold the Constitution of this country are "less functional than symbolic", no more binding than a child's pledge to the flag at the start of a school day--or even less so, we are told.

"When we walk past a copy of the Bill of Rights, we don't stand at attention," observed Tommy Lasorda before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1998.

"Those are documents," John Schneider later explained.

Fellow document The Washington Postresponds in a recent editorial: "To authorize Congress to ban flag burning, as the amendment would, is to place within the Constitution itself the idea that the First Amendment's hallowed phrase--'Congress shall make no law'--does not quite mean what it says." The Post further accuses legislators of using the Amendment "to score a cheap political victory against the most marginal of political expressions." This is just the latest rocket's red glare in the continuing blood feud between the conservative grassroots culture behind the Amendment and their sworn enemy, The Media, a.k.a. The Liberal Media, which they regard as something of a Zoroastrian dark force in the universe. The Media sees flag burning as contrary to First Amendment, almost exclusively, and that is how flag desecration statutes have fallen in the courts. Why, then, does the Amendment surface each year? Why does it remain a "political victory" no matter how cheap? CFA polling states that fully two-thirds of "liberal Democrats" do not believe the Amendment would limit free speech. "What we do not understand," Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, CFA Chairman, states, "is how defecating on our flag can be speech."

S. 931 begins with a list of "Findings":

(1) the flag of the United States is a unique symbol of national unity and represents the values of liberty, justice, and equality that make this Nation an example of freedom unmatched throughout the world;

(2) the Bill of Rights is a guarantee of those freedoms and should not be amended in a manner that could be interpreted to restrict freedom, a course that is regularly resorted to by authoritarian governments which fear freedom and not by free and democratic nations;

(3) abuse of the flag of the United States causes more than pain and distress to the overwhelming majority of the American people and may amount to fighting words or a direct threat to the physical and emotional well-being of individuals at whom the threat is targeted; and

(4) destruction of the flag of the United States can be intended to incite a violent response rather than make a political statement and such conduct is outside the protections afforded by the first amendment to the Constitution.

Stand or fall, the statute offers perhaps the most reasoned summary of the issues involved yet presented, certainly the most thoughtful to appear in recent legislation. As if in answer to Conyers and Parker, it attempts a comprehensive definition of "flag" and, what's more, does away with any mention of "desecration", favoring "destruction". The choice is not insignificant.

My battered Webster's has desecration as "to take away the sacredness of; treat as not sacred; profane"--the kind of language one encounters more regarding a holy relic than a flag; if we are to ponder desecration, we must also wonder at how the flag became sacred in the first place. In the centuries since Jefferson et al decided against the divine privilege of royalty, have we retreated to the cool comfort of a talisman? Adrian Cronauer, CFA board member and subject of the film Good Morning, Vietnam, writes: "I have come to the conclusion that the flag has a 'secular sacredness' which entitles it to a special form of constitutional protection.... By joining the House in passing the amendment, the Senate can protect an honored symbol while preserving our First Amendment rights. It can also send a very important message to the young people of this country -- that the ideals of this country, such as patriotism, sacrifice and love of country, are basic to what our nation stands for and are ideals worth honoring and protecting."

"Amending the Constitution," Brady states, "is the only protection the majority have from a minority who have a very different vision of America."

And there it is: not a different vision of the flag, but of America.

"Symbols are only the vehicles of communication," wrote the late mythologist Joseph Campbell; "they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding." The convenience of flag burning is part of what angers Amendment supporters and disappoints its detractors; it's quite possibly the easiest way to convey unfocused rage, be it at your government or your parents--and it gets a reaction every time. But its power is only felt in those for whom the flag is taken to be that final term of its reference, and here there is an equal measure of convenience, this time for the flag wavers. By viewing the flag as America incarnate, the distillation as if by alchemy of patriotic virtue into the form of a banner, they mistake two symbols: the flag is not allowed to represent the sum of a nation, burning it not allowed to express contempt for national acts, but a very real and corporal act of "violence", as Brady has said, against an object now thought to contain the measure of men.

This kind of short-sighted attachment to symbolism is what Campbell called "engagement". When, according to Campbell, "the symbol is functioning for engagement, the cognitive faculties are held fascinated by and bound to the symbol itself, and are thus simultaneously informed by and protected from the unknown. But when the symbol is functioning for disengagement, transport, and metamorphosis, it becomes a catapult, to be left behind." By making of the flag a sacred thing, we deprive ourselves of all that which we forfeit to it; then, we can only hide behind it, no matter how much we may claim to be protecting it. We deny ourselves that disengagement, that "transport and metamorphosis", the means by which we might otherwise think to examine what is really happening when a flag is burned, what is said in such a wordless act, but wordless as a tribal dance or a cave painting. Only when we can disengage ourselves from the sanctity of the American flag can we start to understand what America has become, and only then see the flag not as the chamber portrait of who we would like to be, but as the mirror of who we are. Only when we leave it behind will we hope to see how it can mean so little to those who would destroy it, so much to those who would enshrine it.

This is an uncomfortable place, this unknowing, this place beyond the flag, but if the flag can feel sacred to us, it will be because of its "vagueness", the same brand that Congress cannot abide, because it speaks to us--if it speaks to us--of that which is now present to us only in our best hopes and dreams, like a faded letter from a lost love. This, finally, is the reason why so much of the Amendment rides on the shoulders of the veterans: those who risked their lives for ideals which they can no longer find in their country, but only in a symbol. This, then, is the reason that so many "liberal Democrats" can sanctify the flag: because it has become unrecognizable and, so, engaging; because it can be every prayer for peace writ simple and stand for all that our best intentions cannot claim to realize. "The American flag symbolizes the love of liberty that Americans hold so dear in their hearts," opines Orrin Hatch in an April statement. "It is the government's special responsibility to foster and protect that love of liberty. When, however, the American government itself sanctions the physical destruction of the American flag, it also sanctions the destruction of Americans' love and respect for liberties the flag stands for. The picture of the American government sanctioning the destruction of its own preeminent symbol is worth a thousand shameful words. If the government sanctions the destruction of the flag, the government destroys, little by little, the love of liberty that the flag instills in us all.

"Without the crucial love of liberty, the flag could become a mocking reminder of the freedoms that a people used to hold dear and a country that a people used to believe in. "

If there is a consensus--among a group as politically diverse as "Stormin'" Norman Schwartzkopf and uber-jackoff Ron Rosenbaum--that things are not as great as they used to be, that America at the end of its own private century is not as great as it used to be, that we are not living up to the "values of liberty, justice, and equality" symbolized by our flag, then it can only seem reasonable to make an idol of that flag. We cannot be great, nor can America be great, but our flag can be sacred and stand for us; and because we cannot be great, but because we can ache for greatness, we can save the scrap of cloth which is become all that we've lost.