Hello, Voltaire!

"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it!"




I'm reading Voltaire's Candide and Other Tales now. Not that anyone cares.

I'm not so sure.

I think that the stars and stripes is a much more potent symbol of America to Americans than, say, the Union Flag is to the British, the German flag is to Germans, the Tricouleur to the French, and so on.

Burning the Union flag arouses indignant and injured patriotism (rightly or wrongly) in far fewer Britons than the same combustion of the Stars & Stripes does in Americans.

The Union flag is no less a symbol of Britain than your flag is of America, but it is far less PERSONAL. In the USA, the Stars and Stripes is seen as a far more potent symbol and is more often seen as "my" or "our" flag. I get the feeling that in other countries it is more often seen as "the" flag of the USA because we think of our own flags more often as "the" flag of our respective countries.

To evoke the same patriotic effect, the flag alone has to be augmented by, say, the playing of the national anthem on a big sporting occasion, or other event of perceived importance.

In another seeming peculiarity to American sensibilities, most Europeans generally do not feel patriotic until they compare themselves with other nationalities. Hardly any domestic occasions that do not involve monarchs or national politics require standing to attention while the national anthem is played, because it never gets played unless two national teams are playing against one another. In a peculiar twist of history, the most popular team sports in the USA ("Football", baseball and basketball?) are not the most popular team sports in the rest of the world (soccer, cricket and rugby), so international sports rarely show Americans what Europeans are like when we are being patriotic. (The Last Nigth of the Proms, which you may have seen, is something of a British peculiarity and isn't typical).

Also, I don't think that other nationalities see "respect" as a particular virtue, certainly not in the same way Americans do. Compared to European nationalities, you do not laugh at one another nearly as much as we do. The British in particular have a national sport we call "winding people up" or "taking the Mickey" (sparing the intervention of the language police by using the rhyming slang). It isn't reserved for polticians and celebrities - just go to an aaverage British pub and listen to the banter.

Generally, we do this most often for people we have some liking or affection for - we tend to give people we don't like the cold shoulder or ignore them altogether. The closest equivalent in he USA is "busting balls", and generally does not get given, or received, with anything like the same good humour.

An example - the British know perfectly well that America "gets" irony. We just keep winding you up about it because we are guaranteed to get a po-faced response listing all the examples of irony in American comedy. It's almost Pavlovian - and you certainly don't get the irony of this particular instance. It works on the Germans, too, when we say they don't have a sense of humour. (They really don't have a word for fluffy, you know.)

In this context, I think that when foreign protestors (at least) burn the American flag, you shouldn't think that they necessarily hate everything about America. Maybe they do, but I'd say that the main reason they do it is to get America's attention. The best way to guarantee that images of your protest get plastered all over the American media is to burn the US flag.

In other words, people burn your flag because they know it winds you up and, even if indirectly, draws your attention to what they are protesting. Nobody really bothers to burn the Union flag if they ever have a problem with us Brits, because burning our flag is not something that evokes passions in us the way it does in you. It's that simple.