"Flag" Burning as Symbolic Speech

Many of my critics will point out to you that no one will be arrested for simply disparaging the flag. Only the rascally Communist flag burners are going to go to jail. Here are two points I like to make to them. First, many First Amendment scholars believe that if that is the case, arrests will be overturned until every possible non-political flag desecrator is in jail -- only then will protestors be prosecuted. So I won't go to jail for my political beliefs until Barbara Bush goes to jail for her flag hair bandanna. (That's one way to ensure that no freedom of speech is quashed by this law.) Second, Jehovah's Witnesses and others who refuse to salute the flag are committing a desecration (failure to give the flag the respect the law commands.) This desecration is just as illegal as any radical flag burning. These people will all go to jail under the new Constitution. Refusual to salute the flag is considered desecration, but acceptable under the current First Amendment. Any new change to the constitution will supercede the original.
{Warren S. Apel}
Extracted from:http://www.esquilax.com/flag/define.shtml

Legionnaire's Disease
An art exhibit featuring Old Glory has city and state officials scrambling to do
something BY MICHAEL KIEFER
Last Friday at the Phoenix Art Museum, a group of ladies on a tour stood around the infamous U.S. flag on the floor, peering over the edges, their faces frozen in smiles, looking for the emperor's new clothes. The work in question, Dread Scott's 1988 "What Is the Proper Way to Display the U.S. Flag?", along with a 1970 piece titled "The American Dream Goes to Pot," by Kate Millet, which features a flag in a toilet in a jail cell, has been all over the news. Angry World War II veterans have twice yanked the flag from the toilet; others picked the flag from the Dread Scott piece off the floor and properly folded it.
[...]
The show at the Phoenix Art Museum, "Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art," sets those obvious patriot-baiting works in a context that is lost to the TV audience watching American Legionnaires tussling over the flag. And, unfortunately, the context was also lost to state and city officials who are seriously considering ways to censor the show and censure the museum for daring to show it.

Extracted from: http://www.esquilax.com/flag/artexhibit-04041996.pdf

Reported by the Associated Press on 3-23-97, American Indian artist Steven Leyba experienced first-hand governmental censorship of his work, Wounded Knee Decomposition I, which was on display in an Albuquerque art gallery. The mixed-media work, which commemorates the 1890 massacre in South Dakota, includes two mutilated American flags. City officials asked the artist to remove it from public view, and when he refused, they erected a partition to cover it from view. The artwork was eventually moved, and the partition was taken down. Another fine example of an obtrusive government meddling in affairs which would be better decided by healthy public debate.
http://www.esquilax.com/flag/culture.shtml

symbolic speech : conduct that is intended to convey a particular message which is likely to b
e understood by those viewing it
Example: it is well established that wearing certain clothing can be a form of protected symbolic speech -- City of Harvard v. Gaut, 660 N.E.2d 259 (1996)
(compare commercial speech pure speech)
Note: Symbolic speech is entitled to free speech protection under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution unless its regulation is within the constitutional power of the government and is justified by an important government interest, and the restriction placed on it by regulation is no greater than is essential to the furtherance of that interest.

Extracted from: http://dictionary.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/results.pl?co=dictionary.lp.findlaw.com&topic=bf/bf7657c95bca28020ec9503b1c50a000

Street v. New York, 394 U.S. 576 (1969)

With this case, the court overturned the conviction of veteran and Bronze Star honoree Sydney Street, who burned his flag in protest after learning that civil rights activist James Meredith had been shot. Although the case marked the first opportunity for the court to deal with the actual destruction of a flag, the justices declined to consider the legalities of flag desecration. But the court determined that the New York statute under which Street had been convicted was unconstitutionally applied because it permitted the veteran to be punished merely for speaking defiantly about the American flag. Among the dissenters: Hugo Black, one of the court's leading champions of the First Amendment. "It passes my belief that anything in the Federal Constitution bars a State from making the deliberate burning of the American flag an offense," he wrote. "It is immaterial to me that words are spoken in connection with the burning." http://www.freedomforum.org/packages/first/Flag/sctcases.htm#street

"Blind Panorama of New York" by F. G. Lorca

If it isn’t the birds

covered with ashes,

if it isn’t the cries beating on the windows of the wedding,

it must be the delicate creatures of air

that pour out new blood in the unending night.

But no, it isn’t the birds

because the birds are ready to be oxen;

they can be white rocks with the aid of the moon

and are always wounded youths before

the judges raise the sheet.

Everyone understands the grief that comes with death

but true grief is not present in the spirit.

It isn’t in the air or in our lives

or in these terraces full of smoke.

True grief that keeps things awake

is a small infinite burn

in the innocent eyes of other systems.

An abandoned suit weighs so much on the shoulders

that many times the sky gathers them in rugged herds.

And the women who die in childbirth know in their final hour

that every rumor will be stone and every footprint pulse.

We ignore that thought has outlying boroughs

where philosopher is devoured by Chinamen and caterpillars.

And some idiot children have found in the kitchen

some swallows on crutches

that knew how to say the word love.

No, it isn’t the birds.

It isn’t a bird that expresses the clouded pond-like fever

or the longing for murder that oppresses us each minute

or the metalic suicidal rumor that gives breath to each dawn.

It’s a capsule of air where the whole world hurts us,

it’s a small living space to the crazy unison of light,

it’s an undefinable scale where clouds and roses forget

the Chinese clamor that bustles on the docks of blood.

Many times I’ve lost myself

in order to search for the burn that keeps things awake

and I’ve only found sailors leaning over the railing

and small creatures of the sky buried in the snow.

But real grief was in other plazas

where chrystallized fish agonized inside the tree trunks;

plazas of a strange sky for the ancient untouched statues

and for the tender intimacies of volcanoes.

There’s no grief in my voice. Only my teeth exist,

teeth that go silent in the isolation of black satin.

There’s no grief in my voice. Here only the earth exists,

the earth with the doors of forever

that lead to the shame of fruit.

Federico García Lorca, taken from "Poet in New York: III Streets and Dreams"

(renovacyoun)

Part of Speech: noun

Pronunciation: [ren-uh-'vey-shun]

Definition: Restoration, the process of renovating, refreshing.

Usage: The noun renovation refers to the physical (or, in its original sense, spiritual) act of restoring something to a new condition. Renovation is most commonly used in reference to houses or buildings, which undergo a process wherein the structural and cosmetic deficiencies are repaired like new. Until recently, the word was more commonly used in reference to the heart, "renovated" by the grace of God in the Christian world.

Suggested Usage: Nearly anything can be renovated, not just the houses on Extreme Home Makeover, and the word deserves to be used as such. Your car can undergo a renovation, it's true. But your elderly grandfather can experience renovation as well. Give him an iPod, a pair of skinny jeans, a Guitar Hero controller, and an earring. Let him keep his browline glasses, though. They're coming back in a big way.

Etymology: Used in the early 15th century, the Middle English word that eventually became renovation (renovacyoun) referred exclusively to the spiritual rebirth experienced in Christianity. It is derived from the Latin past participle renovare, as re + novare means to make new. The term "renovate" was not seen in print until some time later

Extracted from http://www.yourdictionary.com/wotd/renovation.