The thing is, some peo­ple are smart, and some are dumb. Some use their smarts to take advan­tage of dumb peo­ple, and some use them to make fun of the ones tak­ing advan­tage of the dumb.

I guess what I’m try­ing to say is that this isn’t an Amer­i­can flag:

Nei­ther are any of the oth­er burn­able designs that John post­ed in his exper­i­ments with Crack­ing the Flag-Burn­ing Amend­ment.

Like all sen­si­ble peo­ple, I think flag burn­ing is pet­ty and child­ish, and I think John’s final point is exact­ly right, I’ll give him the last word.

“Pro­tect­ing” the flag with a Con­sti­tu­tion­al Amend­ment won’t solve the not-at-all press­ing prob­lem of peo­ple burn­ing flags for polit­i­cal protest. They’ll still do it. They’ll sim­ply do it in ways that will now addi­tion­al­ly mock the stu­pid­i­ty of those who love the sym­bol of Amer­i­can free­doms more than they love actu­al Amer­i­can free­doms. And no mat­ter how expan­sive­ly Con­gress defines “the Amer­i­can Flag” there will always be some­thing that is not the flag, but is close enough in its shape and struc­ture to feel just like the flag. And there will be the peo­ple who will use that not-quite-flag-like object to protest.