Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

With 30% of US children not graduating from high school,
http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/06/us_graduation_r.html
it may be getting easier to convince them that this is the most important issue facing the country.

Perhaps the crisis in education is the real problem.

When I saw them debating this yesterday, I felt that they have more important things that they could be spending their time on.

This post should be in the dictionary under the definition for irony.

It's like the old magician trick - hey, look over here, folks, so you don't see me flipping the scarf out of my sleeve....ta-da!

Wave a burning flag and the war goes away, the deficit goes away, the illegal spying goes away...but I don't think this crap is working anymore. People are on to it.

i want to burn a flag simply because this frigging ammendment "debate" made it to the senate floor.

jeesh!

Steve, I am never ironic.

I see the germ of a contest here, David.

If you consider the ground of politicians, this is not an ironic post at all; rather it is a cynical one.

To a career politician, what is the most important priority, above all others? Getting re-elected. Any of those more substantive, more controversial, and more important to the survival of the nation and the world issues are not going to wind up the emotions of the thinking-impaired masses, who continue to vote for many of those in power today. Rather it is an image of Old Glory surrounded by flames that does it, and if the flames are those of the hellfire that befalls abortionists and same-sex couples, not to mention the Volvo-driving liberals, so much the better. Yee-haw.

(And Harold, even for those that graduate, in many states they graduate not knowing the differences among scientific theory, hypothesis and opinion, in a country led by a man who doesn't bother himself with troublesome nonsense like facts, or history.)

(I somehow managed to replace the body of this post with one about Dan Bricklin's post about StyleFeeder for about 5 hours. So, if you could have sworn that that's what this post was about, you're not going crazy.)

Years ago I saw a promotion for British bacon with the slogan "Fry the flag!" I remarked on this at the time, commenting on how relaxed we Brits were about our symbols of patriotism and so forth. My wife pointed out I was drawing a false analogy, as the flag isn't at the centre of British patriotism - the monarchy is. So the slogan that would prove my point would be "Fry the Queen!" I'm not expecting to see that any time soon.

Proposition 1: every nation has shibboleths - symbols which are so deeply and pre-rationally embedded that deliberately challenging or violating them is a waste of time, even if it can sometimes be productive in the short term.

Proposition 2: shibboleths like these have no need to be protected or actively (non-ritualistically) celebrated; if significant amounts of time and attention are being devoted to doing so, something's wrong.

Phil,

In its day, didn't this qualify?