National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru, unimpressed by several rightist arguments opposing the most recent congressional bid to spare Old Glory from pyrotechnics or other destructive theater staged by Americans in public protest, has declared himself "anti-anti-amendment." One particularly weak defense of denying the flag exclusive status was adopted this weekend by Mark Steyn who, dually wise and acerbic, nevertheless seems not to have considered the historical preoccupation with a third-paragraph throwaway line. He writes, "maybe some would think that criminalizing disrespect for national symbols is unworthy of a free society." Perhaps others would believe that material and transcendental worth, however intrinsic, is dependent on appraisal. If modern relativism was intended to make all things equally prized through the arbitrary exchange of sacred and profane, it only succeeded in multiplying what is inconsequential. Without scale, virtue recedes:

The value of the flag as a symbol cannot be measured. Even so, I have no doubt that the interest in preserving that value for the future is both significant and legitimate. Conceivably that value will be enhanced by the Court's conclusion that our national commitment to free expression is so strong that even the United States as ultimate guarantor of that freedom is without power to prohibit the desecration of its unique symbol. But I am unpersuaded. The creation of a federal right to post bulletin boards and graffiti on the Washington Monument might enlarge the market for free expression, but at a cost I would not pay. Similarly, in my considered judgment, sanctioning the public desecration of the flag will tarnish its value — both for those who cherish the ideas for which it waves and for those who desire to don the robes of martyrdom by burning it. That tarnish is not justified by the trivial burden on free expression occasioned by requiring that an available, alternative mode of expression — including uttering words critical of the flag — be employed.

Those are words from Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' moving dissent against the court's decision in 1989 Texas v. Johnson. Steyn and Stevens agree, across one-and-a-half decades, that damaging an American flag to impress or outrage is an unproductive and contradictory provocation — from under that flag is a malcontent granted the opportunity for petition, debate and reform as both a private citizen and a public official. Or is the flag just a cloth rectangle to fix on a dowel, incidental to the guarantee of rights? Association can bind an object to meaning just as easily as it can render it quaint; without transmission meaning is lost. When a martial uniform, the pride and obligation of every kingdom or nation long before elected governments, becomes just another set of clothes, we will meet those who suggest that distinctions between the civilized and the barbaric — their respective privileges and prerogatives — are meaningless, too. Subtler but more pertinently, one could examine how youth citizenship has borne forty years of the flag as Duchampian readymade, legal incineration or not. Might Steyn concede that ineffectual speech can still be determined a deleterious — and unacceptable — act?