Ah, Summer, Time for That Old Flag-Burning Amendment

You know how I can tell for dead-bang certain that it’s summer?

The weather? Please. Weather. We have June gloom in August now. Next year it’ll be snow flurries by Labor Day.

So no, not the weather.

I can tell it’s summer because some member of the House of Representatives--this time, Randy Cunningham, Duke Cunningham, the honorable gentleman from north San Diego County--brings for the high and solemn consideration of Congress and the nation a constitutional amendment to protect from “physical desecration” the flag of the United States of America.

The drawling days of the calendar are the silly season for news. Crop circles, Heidi Fleiss, royal weddings--summer stories all. The news bar is lowered; anything can get in.

And now this, an amendment that’s been sent up and shot down way more often than a dummy missile launched out of Vandenberg. Summer 1997. Summer 1995. Summer 1990. Summer 1989.

Duke Cunningham, the co-sponsor of H.J. Res. 36, was born the day after Pearl Harbor--a Navy man, a Vietnam man, a Top Gun man.

Cunningham sticks up for the military in his own fashion, trashing Commander in Chief Bill Clinton, chewing out an Army official for the “b.s.” of trying to stop sexual harassment and discrimination in the armed forces.

Duke Cunningham fervently believes in this amendment. (Just as fervently, Colin Powell, Army man, Vietnam man, does not. “I will not,” he wrote in the summer of 1999, “amend that great shield of democracy to hammer a few miscreants. The flag will still be flying proudly long after they have slunk away.”)

But a dozen years ago, the Supreme Court filed flag desecration under the heading “free speech,” and that pretty much settles it.

The court held that the 1st Amendment trumps any law intended to protect the flag from desecration. Only two-thirds approval by the House and Senate--and the Senate has consistently turned this away--along with three-fourths of the state legislatures, would turn the idea into law by putting it in the Constitution, 27 amendments behind the one with which it conflicts.

In the years since the Supreme Court acted, flag protection amendments have come and gone, but have never come close to mustering that level of support.

Still, it’s summer, and politics, like the movie business, can sell almost anything when it’s summer. The flag-burning amendment, like one more dinosaur movie, is back. It passed 298 to 125.

A flag-burning amendment is political junk food. It does nothing to bootstrap the poor, nothing to get kids to put down a joystick and pick up a book.

As a law, it’s a loser. Oh, but as politics, it is sure-fire, a bully-boy tactic, baiting and taunting, and it never fails.

With a flag-burning amendment, you can draw out the opposition, and then draw a bead on them, and fire. Does my opponent, by voting against this amendment, favor burning the American flag? Pow. Just what kind of American is my opponent? Pow. Does the honorable gentleman who votes against this amendment think the mobs in the streets of (your favorite messy Third World city here) aren’t insulting Americans when they burn our flag? Pow. Pow. Pow.

And then this summer catalog arrives, AMERICA!--their capitals, not mine.

For a very reasonable sum, here’s what you can do with the American flag, courtesy of the made-with-pride-in-the-U.S.A. merchandise of AMERICA!

You can wear the flag on your legs as pantyhose. You can have it on your computer mouse, and download porn with it, if you so wish. You can wipe your feet on a doormat of it. You can set your glass of Stoli Russian vodka on it. You can sleep on it as a hammock, wear it as a party hat, blow it as a noisemaker.

Oh, so that’s all right? Mopping up spilled booze with a flag napkin? No offense meant? So it’s the intent, not the nature of the desecration? How about defining “physical desecration.” Does it only apply to real flagpole flags? Or do we need to amend the amendment to exempt sodden cocktail-napkin flags and muddy welcome-mat flags? How about sticking a knife into one of those Martha Stewart flag sheet cakes with raspberry stripes and a blueberry field of white-chocolate stars?

Then let’s run it all up the flagpole, shall we, and see who sets it on fire.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Wednesdays. Her e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com