Nice (and surprisingly timely, given the rampant anti-Muslim sentiment in the land) quote here from an old review of Roger Ebert’s for the film Come See the Paradise:
Although we make much of our tradition of freedom in this country, we are not so clever at understanding what freedom really means. Even our president, for example, cannot understand that among the rights symbolized by the American flag is the right to burn it – or honor it, if that is our choice. I have always wondered why the people who call themselves “American” most loudly are often the ones with the least understanding of the freedoms that word should represent.
When the country is threatened, our civil liberties are among the first casualties – as if we can fight the enemy by taking away our own freedoms before the enemy has a chance to. That is what happened in the early days of World War II, when a wave of racism swept the Japanese-Americans out of their homes and businesses, confiscated their savings and investments, and shipped them away in prison trains to concentration camps that were sometimes no more than barns and stables. Later on some of these same Japanese-Americans fought with valor in the same war, perhaps because they understood better than their captors what they were fighting for.
The review is dated 1991, so the president he’s referring to would have been George H.W. Bush. And indeed, I do recall that flag burning was quite a hot-button issue back then. Simpler times, I guess. For the record, my position has always been the same as Ebert’s. I don’t approve of burning flags — I think it’s stupid and does nothing but piss people off — but cries to outlaw the practice rub me the wrong way. Naturally the senior senator from my state, Orrin Hatch, seems to propose a Constitutional amendment to prohibit it almost every year. I really dislike that man — one of these days, I’ll tell the story of the time I met him in person and he demonstrated such an utter dickishness that I’ve never gotten over it. And this was even before I started having much in the way of political opinions!
One final thought: I never saw Come See the Paradise, but it sounds good. The Japanese-American internment camps are an interest of mine; one of them was right here in Utah, only about two hours’ drive from my home, out in some of the most desolate territory in the whole damn country. And one of these days, I might write about that, too…
