NY, USA; Flag Burner Pillaried

[MustavaMond]

...To be tarred and feathered later?

Suspected flag burner pilloried -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY:1884:


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Alleged offender hunted down, ridiculed after incident at VFW post
By BOB GARDINIER AND HUMBERTO MARTÍNEZ, Staff writer

It was the third option that would still have the small town buzzing a week after a 21-year-old was hunted down and forced to endure a public humiliation with its roots dating to the Middle Ages. Members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1938 were incensed enough to tie up the man last Sunday after they accused him of setting the flag in front of their building on fire.Post Commander Nick Normile, a Vietnam War veteran, said the man came into the post's bar Sept. 18 on Poplar Avenue and was eventually turned away for not having a proper ID.
Apparently angered, the young man, who Normile did not want to name, cut the rope of the American flag flying overhead and used a cigarette lighter to set it on fire, Normile and others said.
The man sat pilloried as the village had its fall youth soccer picnic with a long parade of children passing in front of him.
"He'll never disrespect the flag again, I can tell you that," Normile said.
Normile said the flag had at one point flown over U.S. troops in Iraq had special significance.
Veterans, both local and nationwide, responded to the event as accountings were posted online to the official VFW Facebook page and national Web site. Comments posted supported the act and added ideas for further punishment.
Other nearby business owners said they knew of the event but refused to give an accounting. Unconfirmed reports by citizens said the alleged flag-burner was a relative of a previous commander of the post.
Calls made to the alleged flag burner and a spokesman for the national VFW organization for comments were not returned. The Rensselaer County Sheriffs office confirmed knowledge of the event, but said they were not involved. State Police in Brunswick were contacted, but a trooper said no record of the event could be found.
The flag will be disposed of at a formal ceremony, Normile said.

Read more: Suspected flag burner pilloried -- Page 1 -- Times Union - Albany NY:1884:

[blackgang]

Good for them, if thats what they want in their town, it is their business and no one else's.
If you do not approve of it then stay out of their town, they have sovereignty over their own town and state laws.
Thailand has some laws I do not agree with either but, as long as we live here we will have to obey or get out.

[robuzo]

The young man did agree to it, so not much to be said. Probably better than getting a criminal record or another arrest if he already had a record, which wouldn't be a surprise. He sounds, shall we say, troubled- an asshole with control issues. Public shaming might not be the worst thing.

[BobR]

Idiots still having respect for a fading symbol such as the American Flag. There are no laws against burning you own flag, but burning one that belongs to someone else is the same as burning anything that belongs to someone else. That's all he can be charged with.

[baldrick]

fcuk that - should have bombed them back to the stone age - nuked em into a glass parking lot etc etc

[melvbot]

I think Americans have a stronger bond with their flag than most. I think they do that pledge thing every day at school which seems a bit weird to me.

Personally if someone burnt the English flag or Union Jack in front of me I wouldnt bat an eyelid, its just a piece of cloth with a print on it.

[blackgang]

I think Americans have a stronger bond with their flag than most. I think they do that pledge thing every day at school which seems a bit weird to me.

Yes, we do seem to, and we did say the pledge every morning, and Thai children sing the national anthem here too.

So it is how you are raised I guess.

[Rural Surin]

Fcuk me! It's only a flag.....and an illusional symbol at best.

[pickel]

Fcuk me! It's only a flag.....and an illusional symbol at best.

I agree, but it wasn't his property to burn, it belonged to the club.

[Dan]

The flag will be disposed of at a formal ceremony, Normile said.

A flag funeral? It gets more bizarre.

[Scandinavian]

Flags, coins & bills, passports, all these will be gone in the future.

[blackgang]

Flags, coins & bills, passports, all these will be gone in the future

I have to agree with that too, Tri-Laterals are getting closer.

[robuzo]

Americans diss their own flag all the time, they just aren't aware of it most of the time. They wear it as an article of clothing, even underwear, fly the flag when it is in disrepair, drape themselves in it at athletic events- even well-known politicians like Sarah Palin do it Sarah Palin Breaks "Flag Code" In Runner's World Magazine - sarah palin - Jezebel
Americans are some of the most ignorant people in the world when it comes to their country's history and traditions.

The issue with this asshole is he committed vandalism and violated public safety by lighting a fire in an improper location, possibly while intoxicated. He chose to be pilloried rather than handed over to the cops. Presumably assaulting someone pilloried by consent at a public event is no less a crime than assaulting someone not being pilloried, so he was safe from violence, more or less. I think it is a novel approach to punishing a crime under the circumstances.

It probably wouldn't work in a much broader context, but I find this kind of thing a lot less unsettling than US incarceration rates compared to the rest of the world, even if it is nice that we are still number 1 (!) in something. When the people who have served their time but have a felony record, or are on parole or awaiting sentencing, are counted the US has a truly astonishing percentage of its population "in the system." Americans really seem to like to lock each other up, and now that the system is becoming privatized, judges may turn out to be even more likely to be persuaded to do so; even when it comes to locking up kids:
Pennsylvania Judges Plead Guilty in Juvenile-Center Kickback Scheme | Prison & Crime News
I oppose the death penalty, but in the case of these judges I could be persuaded.

[AntRobertson]

The flag will be disposed of at a formal ceremony, Normile said.

A flag funeral? It gets more bizarre.

It's a cliched and hackneyed expression granted, but 'only in America'.

[genghis61]

I think Americans have a stronger bond with their flag than most. I think they do that pledge thing every day at school which seems a bit weird to me.

Personally if someone burnt the English flag or Union Jack in front of me I wouldnt bat an eyelid, its just a piece of cloth with a print on it.

Won't comment on Americans and their flag as haven't been there just a 'television & movie' education on their culture; but having lived long-term in both NZ and Australia I admired what i saw as the Oz pride in their flag/nationality at a far greater level than NZ.

Guess it depends how one was brought up, my father was a WWII vet and spent much of his working life, and into retirement right till death, working with veterans ensuring they were getting corrct pensions/welfare etc, so the NZ flag was something of pride in my own family.

On that basis I'd object to any flag burning, whatever the country; if the act is not intened to offend/upset, then why burn it?

fire away . . . expect to get shot down/burned over this one.

[AntRobertson]

Won't comment on Americans and their flag as haven't been there just a 'television & movie' education on their culture; but having lived long-term in both NZ and Australia I admired what i saw as the Oz pride in their flag/nationality at a far greater level than NZ.

Actually I was reading rubuzo's post above yours about inappropriate use of the flag and was thinking of the Australian examples: specifically the 'drunken yobo' drapped in the flag at sports events but also how it was used during the Cronulla riots.

It also made me remember the following article which is a good read if you can be bothered. You may not agree with it but to me in nicely touches on this whole weird 'flag thing' and the larger issue of nationalism/patriotism (both of which I find to be odd concepts):

It was on one of those blue-sky, Sydney summer afternoons early last year when I first realized something had gone awry with the Australian flag.

The date was Jan. 26, 2008 — Australia Day. I'd just returned to Sydney as a freelance journalist after some years in New York City and was having lunch at a pub in the beachfront suburb of Newport when an uneasy, skin-prickling moment dawned. Around me were hundreds of young white men and women, many of them drunk, chanting the national war cry — "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi oi oi!" Almost all were sporting the Australian flag. It was painted on cheeks, tattooed on backs and chests, worn as a sarong, bikini top, scarf or bandana, wrapped around shoulders and emblazoned on T shirts and baseball caps. I'd never seen so many manifestations of it. Was this a new fashion accessory, or some kind of political statement?

My husband, a white Australian who grew up in Sydney in the 1970s, was bemused. It would have been "absolutely unthinkable" for him, or any of his friends, he said, to have gone out to a pub wearing a flag or chanting nationalist slogans as young men. I knew what he meant. I grew up in Sutherland Shire, in Sydney's south, where my family — South Indians from Malaysia — had settled after immigrating in 1988. And although the Shire, as it's called, is one of the most Anglo-Saxon regions of the country, it was like the rest of Australia in its laid-back attitude to national sentiment. Sure, it was good to be Australian, but the rest of that stuff — the flag-waving, the chest-thumping — was the province of those jingoistic Yanks. When I was a teenager, the flag fluttered benignly on national holidays. There were occasions on which it flew prolifically, such as the 1988 national bicentenary celebrations or the 2000 Sydney Olympics. But generally it was not hawkishly displayed on front lawns, from cars or on bare flesh. My husband asked one of the revelers why he was wearing the flag. He grinned and drawled, "Why? Because we're Australians, mate. We're proud of it, and we're not afraid to say it."



Australians never used to have to say it. Pride in the country was largely unmentioned, taken for granted. In recent years, however, there's been a surge of racially tinged nationalism, particularly among the young and coalescing around the Australian flag, which has become the symbol of a new tribe of über-patriots up and down the land. In 1997, anti-immigration politician Pauline Hanson draped herself in an Australian flag for one of the country's most notorious campaign photos — a testament to her "Australianness," and specifically her white Australianness. In December 2005, during the infamous Cronulla Beach race riots, thousands of youths draped in flags rampaged against nonwhites; just a few weeks later, at a large music festival in Sydney, flag-waving revelers were at it again, harassing nonwhites and prompting the event's organizer to decry the "racism disguised as patriotism" that such behavior represented.

On Australia Day this year, for the fourth time in a row since Cronulla, violent nationalism came to the fore. The flag — my flag — was the emblem of choice for drunken nationalist outbursts across the nation; in Wollongong, south of Sydney, Australia Day violence was the worst police had ever seen, with mobs of drunken, flag-clad teenagers brawling in the streets. In Manly, in north Sydney, an 80-strong flag-waving mob harassed and assaulted nonwhite passers-by and shop owners, jumped on cars and chanted "Aussie pride."

In the few years away, I'd missed this rise of ultra-nationalism and somehow not noticed the way the Australian flag had become embedded with a silent message for nonwhite Australians: "You're out, and we're in." It's a message that affects a large proportion of the country. Since the removal of the last vestiges of the White Australia Policy in 1973, Australia has become markedly multiracial. The 2006 census showed that of a 20 million – strong population, over 40% were either born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas. After English, the most common languages spoken are Italian, Greek, Cantonese, Arabic and Mandarin.

That hot afternoon at Newport showed a far different Australia: not a rainbow mosaic, but the monochromatic world of the John Howard generation. These white youths had grown up during the decade of the former Prime Minister's conservative administration — they had witnessed the tacit acceptance of Hanson and her divisive politics, and had been caught up in the panicky xenophobia that swept the nation in response not only to the arrival of asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, but also to the growing visibility and affluence of Australia's nonwhite communities. All this went through my mind as I watched them dance, sing and wave their new battle standard in the sea breeze.

Get Lost, Mate - TIME

[English Noodles]

People from the US are way to nationalistic.

[genghis61]

Good points/article, thanks; yes I'm aware of the Cronulla business, used to live/work in Caringbah (one or is it 2 train stops from Cronulla?) mid 80s and when those first scenes were on tv - nationalism gone wrong. Hadn't kept up with news on more recent events; Pauline Hanson's version of One Australia was a sad concept.

[blackgang]

On that basis I'd object to any flag burning, whatever the country; if the act is not intened to offend/upset, then why burn it? fire away . . . expect to get shot down/burned over this one.

Why?
It is your opinion and good enough for me. Very sensible post.

[melvbot]

if the act is not intened to offend/upset, then why burn it?

Answered your own question, thats why they get burned.

[britmaveric]

Good for the lads at the VFW - sorted out the lad - guess he figured far better than being fined and thrown in jail. What goes through someones mind to do such a thing anyways?

[chitown]

Does putting Mustabeinsane on ignore cause his threads to not show up. I seem to always click a topic and then realize I am reading his crap.

[blackgang]

Does putting Mustabeinsane on ignore cause his threads to not show up.

Yep, but it will still show the posters name but once you click on it you will not be able to see what they posted without bypassing ignore.

[The Ghost Of The Moog]

Weren't flags burnt in the US if they had touched the ground? There was a constitutional kerfuffle about it as it was a subject that caused a lot of emotion.

[blackgang]

Weren't flags burnt in the US if they had touched the ground?

I am not sure about that, but there is something about the proper way to dispose of them tho.
We has a goofy welder came to work on the Dredge in Manama Bahrain when I was there that had some screws loose and was jumping on the night boatman's ass over the flag flying at night on the tug, and he was always going on about the CIA this and that and that guys CIA,, he did have some clothing articles that were fatigue looking and some form of BDU. so I really do not now what his story was as he didn't last to long.