To be honest, flag-motif t-shirts are kind of garish and not ‘real American’

I have no doubt I’m going to see more than my share of people Thursday clad in t-shirts bearing the red, white and blue colors – if not depictions of the U.S, flag itself.

A symbol of our national pride

To be honest, a part of me is going to be shuddering at the very sight.

BECAUSE I HONESTLY think that it’s kind of tacky and garish, if not quite unpatriotic, to have to see someone wearing the U.S, flag, particularly if they’ve let the image get all faded and wrinkly.

Or worse yet, if it’s a hot, humid summery-type day and they’re covered in sweat.

How disrespectful to the image of our nation to reduce it to an article of dirty laundry.

To be totally honest, I’d find it more respectful if they were to literally wrap themselves up in a real flag – which technically would be an act of desecration. U.S. flags are not to be used for clothing!

WHICH I’M SURE every single one of the ninnies who are going around on this Independence Day will be able to shout out at maximum volume to everyone who manages to offend their sensibilities of what is appropriate.

 

Bordering on skanky

When in reality, I’d argue it is their choice of attire that ought to be considered bordering on desecration.

And as far as any women who choose to wear a skimpy bikini in a pattern of the stars and stripes, all I’d have to say is that is nothing but skanky. How cheap to reduce a field of blue stars to the bikini bottom that covers up the part of her that prevents an arrest for indecent exposure from being made.

It never fails to amaze me whenever I walk into a clothing store of any type and see the assortment of red, white and blue themed shirts or articles of clothing. Meant to be sold to people who think they’re showing off just how “real” of Americans they truly are.

People most offended by sight of this … 

WHEN IN REALITY, I’d argue that they’re showing a level of gaudiness that probably illustrates just how little they truly comprehend what “patriotism” truly is and what “America” is truly all about.

The ones who probably think the day is solely about a summertime barbecue and watching a pyrotechnics display come the evening hours.

Or maybe you’ll get into a local municipal parade that is bound to have somebody clad as “Uncle Sam,” and probably far too many people wearing their “Make America Great Again” caps in bright red.

Which amuses me because I’m sure many of them are old enough to remember the meaning of the phrase “Better dead than red.” Now, they can’t get enough of the color.

BUT BACK TO the t-shirts, most of which are usually in patterns so tacky that I’d be embarrassed to wear one. Which is why I don’t actually own one.

The only red, white and blue banner I possess is an actual U.S. flag – which actually is one of those flags that is certified to have once flown over the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

 

… might well be proud to wear this

Yes, I realize its moment of being the actual “Old Glory” on Capitol Hill may only have lasted a few seconds long. But it somehow seems like more of a legitimate gesture of patriotism than wearing a t-shirt being an assault rifle image superimposed over a U.S. flag. (No, I'm not kidding. You really can find them for sale on the Internet).

Even though I suspect the kind of people who’d actually wear such a shirt are probably the grand-children of the ones who, a half-century ago, got most offended when activist Abbie Hoffman wore his American flag motif shirt in public. Now, such a garment likely would only be worn by someone of the “far right.”

  -30-

War of the honored symbols; or are they really nothing more than mascots?

The baseball fan in me noticed the reports that the Cleveland Indians are removing (finally!) the Chief Wahoo logo that has been a part of the team culture for some 70-plus years. A good thing to see the absurd, cartoonish image no longer linger.

Which of these will have louder, ...

Or maybe it won’t be that simple.

BECAUSE I ALSO noticed the reports about the ongoing dispute over Chief Illiniwek; the alleged honored symbol of the University of Illinois who was formally abolished years ago – only to have certain ideologically-inclined fans of the Fighting Illini act as though they’re engaged in a noble cause by retaining the chief’s memory.

... more obnoxious proponents?

I won’t be surprised to see Indians fans and conservative ideologues go out of their way to snatch up the remaining supply of Wahoo-logo merchandise (the team will drop the symbol come the 2019 season) and wear it as a measure of spite.

Which in a sense would be a good thing – we’d now clearly be able to identify the idiots in our society. They’d be the people wearing Wahoo-emblazoned caps, t-shirts and jerseys.

Just as we can tell the people at the University of Illinois who are determined to live in the past when their silly image of a native chief was regarded as dignified – rather than as the cartoon it truly was. In one sense, no better than that of Wahoo.

Am I only one who sees similar grin?

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE reported Monday about a recent incident where a professor opposed to the chief imagery went into a restroom at what used to be called Assembly Hall, found an alumnus in chief regalia who apparently planned to make an unofficial appearance during a basketball game, and videotaped him.

The professor was arrested for supposedly violating laws against recording someone in a public restroom (a law intended to keep perverts from taking pictures of women during their private moments), but the state’s attorney for Champaign County refused to prosecute.

Of course, the chief backers are trying to portray the professor as some sort of pervert for using his camera in a restroom. Although it could also be argued that people determined to keep the chief image alive aren’t exactly the most rational of human beings.

Spokane Indians baseball figured out way to pay tribune

In short, the fact that the University of Illinois did away with Chief Illiniwek back in 2007 hasn’t brought this particular battle to a close. I expect that people on the Ohio scene will soon have similarly-absurd images to counter with.

PEOPLE DECIDING TO turn up at ballgames with their faces painted red and white to make themselves appear to be Chief Wahoo. An image that was officially commissioned by the ballclub back in 1947 by then-owner Bill Veeck (yes, the very same) who said he wanted something that, “would convey a spirit of pure joy and unbridled enthusiasm.”

Which strikes me as being as ridiculous as those Illinois alumni who argue on behalf of Illiniwek that he was an “honored symbol” who portrayed the people of the Illiniwek Confederation of old with dignity.

Is there really a difference?

He wasn’t a mascot, they’d argue, like Bucky Badger of the University of Wisconsin. You’d never catch the chief dancing with cheerleaders or giving a football quarterback a high-five following a successful touchdown pass.

They’d claim the dance he’d do at half-time of football and basketball games was actually authentic to the peoples who were native to what is now Illinois. I’ve known students who portrayed Illiniwek who claim that such clownish behavior would have got them in trouble.

NOT THAT ANY of that really matters. Throughout the years, it has adapted to being a caricature, one possibly just as ridiculous as that cartoonish Indian face with its ridiculous grin (so reminiscent of the “sambo” images that black people find so offensive) that some Indians fans will want to cling to.

Perhaps they will think this is part of their own ongoing fight to “Make America Great Again.” As though the idea of our society is based on images that kept certain peoples in their place and let them know they really didn’t fully belong.

Is calling this State Farm Center the real offense?

Not that I think there aren’t respectful ways of teams incorporating imagery of native tribes into their marketing. Although I suspect that many of the people who want screaming, screeching savages would consider those images dull and confusing.

Some people will fight for anything, no matter how ridiculous. Personally, if I were a Fighting Illini fan (my brother went to school there, I didn’t), I’d be more offended by the notion that the basketball team let their long-time home ditch the Assembly Hall moniker for State Farm Center. Now that’s something tacky.

  -30-

Will dumping the Confederate battle flag really change anybody’s attitude?

What should we think of the fact that many people are stepping up the rhetoric these days following the shooting deaths of nine black people at a Charleston, S.C., church to dump the old Confederate battle flag?

For only $59 (plus $6.95 shipping), you can pretend to honor the South

There long have been those who argue the Southern cross flag of the Confederate armies is merely about “heritage,” the notion of a flag that depicts pride amongst those who grew up in that part of the region that once tried to break itself away from the United States.

BUT IT WAS pointed out that when South Carolina state officials last week had the flags at the Statehouse lowered to half-mast out of respect for the dead, the battle flag flying over a nearby Confederate soldier memorial still flew high and proud!

I have heard the official explanation that the flag was incapable of being lowered without someone physically climbing to the top of the flag pole and removing it by hand.

But I really wouldn’t have cared if a battle flag had also been lowered to half-mast. Its very presence some 150 years after the attempt at creating a new nation based on using state’s rights to justify slavery and segregation is what is offensive.

Which is why there are those who are hoping that South Carolina state Rep. Norman “Doug” Brannon, R-Spartanburg, is successful with his rhetoric that he will push for changes in state law to remove the battle flag from having a presence in the state that thinks it’s a point of pride that it provoked the Civil War.

NOT THAT I think it matters much. The kind of people with the racial hang-ups so intense that they’re willing to take up arms are going to keep that symbol no matter what anyone else says.
 

Take Dylann Roof, the barely-a-man who last week went into that black-oriented church and decided to kill a few people – but not all because he wanted witnesses as to his act of what he thinks is manliness (even though I wonder if that girlish haircut of his will make him a prime target in prison).

His Internet-published manifesto that has since been deleted included the photographs of himself waving Confederate battle flags and wearing a jacket depicting emblems of the apartheid-era South Africa and its neighboring nation of Rhodesia  (both of which tried to exist as white-only nations with European roots in portions of the planet where native Africans ought to have been the majority).

Now known as Zimbabwe to those of us who live in the real world.

Do you really want to see someone wear this?

THEN AGAIN, PEOPLE like Roof don’t live in our world. They live in their own world, and think the rest of us ought to have to live there with them. In a legally-mandated subservient position, of course.

So it really doesn’t matter if the symbols get banned. The crackpots amongst us will still feel the same way. Their real punishment is that they’re forced to live in our world – where they amount to a batch of nobodies.

Heck, the swastika of Nazi-era Germany has been an illegal symbol in Deutschland since the end of World War II, yet those Germans who still fantasize about the resurrection of the “Third Reich” are able to get them symbols – usually made right here in the U.S.A.

Insofar as Confederate symbols, we have generations of southerners who were taught a take on the Civil War (the War for Southern Independence, the Second American Revolution, the War Against Northern Aggression, to name a few) that totally justifies the idea that continued use of the battle flag has nothing to do with showing hostility toward the idea of black people being people just like anybody else.

THAT’S NOT GOING to go away any time soon. Knuckleheads will be knuckleheads, no matter what!

If anything, we need a better education process so that people realize what the Southern Cross truly stands for. Because it will only be when people recognize for themselves how tacky a symbol it is that people will relegate it to the dustbin of history.

And how President Barack Obama’s suggestion of retiring the battle flag to a museum (just like the Smithsonian Institute has Ku Klux Klan robes on display as physical evidence of this nation’s racist past) could someday become a reality.

  -30-
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: My own experience with the Confederate battle flag was spending one year attending a high school where the sports teams were “the Rebels” and the flag flew over the school’s football field – along with being painted onto the basketball court. I remember thinking of it as being a silly symbol; one that has since been retired. Of course, I later transferred to a high school where the symbol was a generic Indian chief (think the University of Illinois’ Chief Illiniwek without the pretentious talk of it being an “honored symbol”). I wonder at times which symbol was more ridiculous.

Innocuous images can take on bizarre meanings in street gang-land

I kind of wish I could have attended the session held Wednesday by city Clerk Susana Mendoza that related to the new city vehicle stickers that will soon go on sale.

The infamous vehicle sticker

Because Mendoza had to have a serious sit-down with the Police Department and the researchers who spend their time studying the routines of street gangs – all to figure out if the city was about to pay tribute to them.

THE NEW CITY stickers have a design that shows a heart with the Chicago city skyline imposed over it. Reaching above the heart are hands of various races – all trying to grab at symbols for the police and fire departments, and for paramedics.

It was meant to be a tribute to the support we all are to feel for public safety employees who try to protect us from the dangers of daily life.

To make it even more cute, it was designed by a 15-year-old boy as part of the city’s annual contest that is meant to make the vehicle stickers something more than a cold cash-grab by the city for those of us who operate a car and live within city limits.

But there are those people who see something sinister in this, and their view ultimately prevailed as Mendoza announced Wednesday afternoon that the design will not be used.

THERE ARE THOSE who are convinced that this new city vehicle sticker is loaded with imagery meant to promote street gangs. There are those who say the boy who won the city’s contest is actually a gang member himself, and that he managed to pull off a big con against the city – making us all look stupid for the next year as those stickers are forcibly displayed (unless a motorist is willing to risk a significant fine) on local automobiles.

One website written for police officers (Second City Cop) speculates that this may cause the annual vehicle sticker contest to end. You just can’t trust these young people.

Another website that is much more graphic in its content (written apparently for those police who want to believe all the conspiracy theories being touted) seems to think that this was inevitable and we should have known better than to ever let certain types of people try to express themselves.

This particular website (check it out for yourself) goes into details about how the heart-shape of the skyline can be a street gang symbol, and how the hands that reach above to the police symbols have their fingers positioned in ways that could be interpreted as pitchforks – which also can be a symbol.

OR MAYBE IT isn’t. The boy's mother is now saying there's nothing gang-intended about the design.

Personally, I think these symbols are rather innocuous. There may be some people who wish to interpret them in a gang context. But then again, there will be others who won’t.

If anything, I wonder if giving in to this interpretation gives them some legitimacy. I can’t help but think that we’d be better off if we delegitimized anything that is gang-related – taking their alleged symbols and turning them into a meaning that has nothing to do with the gangland life.

Ultimately, that is how those gangs will die off – turning them into nothing. They exist because they provide a sense of something, of somebody, to people in our society who have nothing else to turn to.

NOW I DON’T have any evidence to indicate that this particular teenage boy had any particular motivation with his design. Maybe he did pull off some sort of scam on city officials. Maybe he didn’t. Nobody, except for the kid, really knows.

I suspect the people who are getting the most into this conspiracy of vehicle stickers loaded with gang imagery are just the kinds of people who want to rant and rage about everything surrounding them. Mendoza seems to think that by scrapping the stickers, she can avoid the argument -- which is quite a bit of a distraction from a government that should be focused on serious issues.

For all I know, perhaps their real objection is the multi-racial collection of hands that reach out to public safety people for protection.

Maybe in their world, the police and fire swat back at the hands whose colors don’t match their own.

  -30-