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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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070389
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07038900.069
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1990-09-22
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NATION, Page 16The PresidencyGiving Honor to Old GloryBy Hugh Sidey
"No matter whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not,
th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns."
-- Mr. Dooley
Not this time. Neither the flag nor the returns. "That flag
decision," allowed political analyst Horace Busby, "shows that old
Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne's fictional Chicago bartender)
sometimes didn't know what he was talking about. This Supreme Court
must not even read the newspapers." Busby plans to monitor the July
4th festivities across the nation. If the flag burners come out in
force, there could be quite a political ruckus and possibly a
constitutional amendment in less time than it takes to sing The
Star-Spangled Banner.
On the morning after the court had, with great heaving and
sighing, delivered the flag decision, George Bush hit the Oval
Office about 7:l5. He did not even want to hear about the state of
the world from his CIA briefer until he had dealt with flag
burning. In the three-minute walk from his apartment upstairs, he
probably saw the flag in the Yellow Room or maybe the one in the
Blue Room. Maybe he glanced down toward the Mall and spied the 50
flags at the base of the Washington Monument. If he missed all
those flags, there was one right behind his desk in the Oval
Office.
Bush called flag burning reprehensible. He vowed that he would
say so publicly later in the day. Where he left off, his senior
staff picked up. "Seems to me," said one aide, "any virtue if
carried to an extreme becomes a vice. No right is absolute if it
is outweighed by damage to that society."
There is nothing hokey about Bush's indignation. He has carried
his reverence for the symbols of freedom on his sleeve as long as
he has been in politics and used them a time or two for political
advantage. Back in the presidential primary campaign of l988,
Bush's field surveys showed that the controversy over requiring the
Pledge of Allegiance in schools was a warm issue, the pro-Pledge
stand wildly favored in many audiences. His visit to a New Jersey
flag factory during the campaign drew some boos from the political
commentators, but Bush never blushed.
Handling the flag at that level of power is tricky. Lyndon
Johnson quite literally ground his teeth when he looked out his
White House window and saw the Viet Nam protesters desecrate flags.
But he was a prisoner of jingoism gone sour. Richard Nixon used the
Stars and Stripes as a weapon against the marchers, ordering
extraordinary displays of flags, pointedly wearing a flag lapel
pin.
Air Force One pilot Colonel Ralph Albertazzie had a better
idea. When traveling abroad with the President, he was moved by the
sight of people weeping when the plane taxied up. But he often flew
and landed at night, and the long, graceful fuselage was swallowed
by the dark. Albertazzie had small spotlights installed in the
plane's horizontal stabilizers to illuminate the flag painted on
its towering rudder. Wherever and whenever the President flies, the
flag glows; the darker the night, the more spectacular the effect.
That, in a way, is the history of the flag. It is not going to
change, whatever the court may say.