flag Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

July rambling: Kalshification of news

How Kalshi infects the news (Kalshification)

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan “political polarization” and call for a politics that abandons the “tribalism of left and right.”

Incarcerated People Lose Treasured Media When Prisons Change Tablet Contracts

Why most Black Americans say they never fly the American flag, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

Charlie Chaplin – Final Speech from The Great Dictator

Capitalism vs. Socialism? Get Serious.

Texas Public School Students Will Be Required to Read the Bible. The state passed what may be the first state-mandated book list for public school students. It focuses on classic literature and includes Bible excerpts.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has called for a ban on data centers in rural areas.

Might as well

A list of resources for people and organizations involved in, or interested in, one or more operations for the 2030 Census.

May as Well Get COVID and Flu Shots on the Same Day, Study Says — Coadministration was not associated with an increased risk of side effects

The A.I.-Design Aesthetic That’s Taking Over the Internet. How Anthropic’s new tool, Claude Design, is creating overnight web-design clichés.

Street photographer Ray Di Pietro focuses his work sharply on his adopted hometown of Nashville. With little fanfare, he has attracted tens of thousands of devotees. His images are artfully composed, spontaneous, honest, and, well, kind.

George E. Johnson, Who Built a Black Hair-Care Empire, Dies at 99

What I Learned About Masculinity at Thai Kickboxing School

‘Navigating the unknown together’: me and my idiot AI boyfriend

‘Separate in name and power’: How America reinvented English

Every John Oliver Scene on General Hospital and his debut

The Empire State Plaza Fireworks show for 2026

David Brickman’s show of color photographs at McGreevy ProLab and ProPress

Witch Way to Victory? and The 18 Month Soccer Bet and Baseball’s Brady Bunch

The return of King George III

Forget Project 2025 — he is following the royal’s playbook

Declaring War on The Declaration

Justice Department subpoenas New York Times reporters over Air Force One reporting

From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday and Fireworks Fiasco Descends Into Chaos

Arsonist in chief

Plans for racist renovations to the Smithsonian

Propaganda history trucks may soon visit your neighborhood

“Islamic Republic of Japan”?

DJT airport could spell doom for Palm Beach. Via Heather Delaney Reese: The agreement gives the Trump Organization control over which vendors can manufacture and sell merchandise at the airport. It gives Trump veto power over any biographical material displayed inside the building. A non-disparagement clause bars the airport from publishing anything that could tarnish his reputation. His own staff writes the version of his story that travelers see. And the trademark applications cover watches, jewelry, collectible coins, cufflinks, purses, backpacks, suitcases, umbrellas, tote bags, clothing, robes, neckties, belts, and plastic slippers designed for use at security checkpoints. They trademarked slippers at a public airport.

Air Force officer arrested at Capitol after calling for FOTUS impeachment, a civil-disobedience story

He Bought Hundreds of Stocks the Day Before He Paused Tariffs and Sparked a Historic Rally

His Dubious Promise to End Birthright Citizenship

Caught by gangland-style squeeze play/ Damned if they do, damned if they betray. (poem)

JD Vance appears most agitated because he believes America is engaged in a civilizational struggle — and it is losing.

MUSIC

The Washington National Cathedral marked the 250th anniversary of the United States with an interfaith service on July 3. Lifting themes of pluralism and the common good, We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident celebrates the nation’s ideals alongside an honest reckoning of its history and unfinished work.

250

Total Eclipse of the Heart (Turn Around) – Bonnie Tyler, described as a “husky-voiced powerhouse vocalist” who died this month.

Ballad of Orin score by Toru Takemitsu

Favorite Songs By Favorite Artists (Series Four) #8: Eric Dolphy

Overture to Pique Dame by Franz von Suppé

The New Christy Minstrels: The folk group that lasted for centuries

Coverville 1584: The Tears For Fears Cover Story III

My Life -Billy Joel (From the 100th — Live at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY-March 28, 2024)

Burn The Other End – Billy Strings

Feller From Fortune, set for chorus by Harry Somers

A sizzling mix for summer listening

Redesigned the flag

the red, black, and green flag

This past week, someone asked my wife about the red, black, and green flag that represents Pan-Africanism/African Americans. From here: “African Americans have long reimagined the American flag. Marcus Garvey famously redesigned the flag with three symbolic colors: red for the blood of Black people, black for their skin color and racial identity, and green for the verdant lands of Africa.”

So, who was Marcus Garvey? I was asked this. From PBS: “As the leader of the largest organized mass movement in black history and progenitor of the modern ‘black is beautiful’ ideal, Garvey is now best remembered as a champion of the back-to-Africa movement. In his own time, he was hailed as a redeemer, a ‘Black Moses.’ Though he failed to realize all his objectives, his movement still represents a liberation from the psychological bondage of racial inferiority.”

I’m surprised – OK, not THAT surprised – that more folks don’t know who Garvey was. I probably read about him in Ebony and/or JET magazines when I was a kid.

“Garvey was born on August 17, 1887, in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica. He left school at 14, worked as a printer, joined Jamaican nationalist organizations, toured Central America, and spent time in London. Content at first with accommodation, on his return to Jamaica, he aspired to open a Tuskegee-type industrial training school. In 1916, he came to America at Booker T. Washington’s invitation, but arrived just after Washington died.” That last piece, I did not know.

UNIA in the US

“Garvey arrived in America at the dawn of the ‘New Negro’ era. Black discontent, punctuated by East St. Louis’s bloody race riots in 1917 and intensified by postwar disillusionment, peaked in 1919’s Red Summer. Shortly after arriving, Garvey embarked upon a period of travel and lecturing.

“When he settled in New York City, he organized a chapter of the U.N.I.A. [Universal Negro Improvement Association], which he had earlier founded in Jamaica as a fraternal organization. Drawing on a gift for oratory, he melded Jamaican peasant aspirations for economic and cultural independence with the American gospel of success to create a new gospel of racial pride. ‘Garveyism’ eventually evolved into a religion of success, inspiring millions of black people worldwide who sought relief from racism and colonialism.”

Garvey was a leading intellectual of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Other flags

I became curious about how similar the Pan-African flag is to the current national flags. It looks most like the Libyan flag, except that on that latter one, the black is wider and there’s a star and crescent. Here are the red, black, and green flags.

In 1990, David Hammons (b. 1943) created African-American Flag. From MoMA: “Hammons created this version—one in an edition of ten—for an exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City.” I saw it at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in August 2024.

The last CHQ 2024 post

furled

Here is the last CHQ 2024 post. I did not realize I would write quite as much about the place, but it wasn’t easy to encapsulate it.

Often, I would wake up at about 3:30 in the morning and wander into the Presbyterian House library. I would check my e-mail, complete my Wordle, etc. It’s a small but interesting room, which has an array of significant photos on the walls, such as one of Thurgood Marshall at a podium in 1957, a few years after he was the primary lawyer to litigate Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court, and a decade before he was named to SCOTUS.

Many presidents and future presidents appeared on the walls, and at least some photos were taken in Chautauqua. The picture above of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Al and Tipper Gore was taken before the 1992 election.

FDR was there in 1917, 1919, 1929, and 1936; the picture was of him standing before a crowd, which suggests earlier in the list. His cousin Teddy was there in 1890, 1894, 1895, 1905, and 1914, before, during, and after his presidency. William McKinley was there in 1895 before he took office.

For some pictures, it was more challenging to ascertain if they were taken there. Ulysses S. Grant visited Chautauqua as President in 1875. Rutherford B. Hayes visited in 1889, well after his term in office. Garfield’s stop in 1880 was a year before his Presidency and death. Gerald R. Ford’s picture was a government issue; his appearance in 1964 was a decade before he became Commander-in-Chief.

Furled flag

When I wasn’t attending an event during the day, I often sat on the back porch of the 2nd floor of the Presbyterian house. It’s a lovely space with a small table. To my left, I could see Chautauqua Lake, which was lovely. Often, I could hear music from the amphitheater; sometimes, it was from a worship service, while other times, it would be the rehearsal for a show that would take place that night. Once, a program for kids took place, with young adults performing short plays the kids had written.

I would talk to the staff, mostly young people, who would clean the windows, sweep the floor, and unfurl the flag. This particular American flag on this porch got wrapped daily. Once, when my wife came out and unfurled it after it had been wrapped twice, a couple of hours later, it had furled five times. Meanwhile, the Presbyterian flag, made of a much heavier material, only furled once that week.

I have never seen so many American flags in a small community as in Chautauqua. CHQ considers itself part of a great American experiment, so one expects to listen to points of view that are divergent from one’s own.

This is not to say that everyone is on board. The Daily Chautauquan, which comes out six days a week and covers (previews then reviews) most of the significant events, carried a letter to the editor blasting CHQ for inviting former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy to be in conversation with Julian Castro, HUD secretary under Obama, the day before my wife and I arrived.

There were many discussions about politics at mealtimes, largely because Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he wouldn’t run for re-election. A guy named Bill and I mused over Kamala Harris’ VP pick.

The penultimate day

My favorite time at Chautauqua was on Friday afternoon in the main quad. My wife told me there would be a Pete Seeger tribute on the green, which reminded me of a college main quad. It turned out that the performance was the day before. A couple, a guy on guitar and a woman on fiddle sang folk songs, and I sang a little harmony with them.

Then my wife and I returned to Presby House, where they served wine – before supper! – and a couple of young adults, the male clearly the son of a woman staying there, sang some songs. Eventually, they performed Country Roads, Take Me Home, and I sang harmony in the chorus, which made them happy. Then, someone else sang a Fleetwood Mac song. It was a fun time on our last afternoon at Chautauqua.

Reclaiming the American flag

More personal context

I’m working on a project, and that project is me. I’m working on reclaiming the American flag.

It isn’t easy, though. My family, to my recollection, never hung the flag outside the house. And there was never one outside of my grandmother’s house either.

Though I don’t recall ever discussing it with my parents when I grew up, I got the clear message from my father that the overt signs of patriotism were not his thing. I’m convinced that it was a function of bigotry he experienced in the military in 1945 and 1946 and dealing with racism subsequently.

By the time I was in high school, there was an “America, love it or leave it” mentality, which I associated with literal flag waving.

The BCHS incident

When I was in eleventh grade, there was about a week when we didn’t have the Pledge of Allegiance over the loudspeaker. So one day, my homeroom teacher, Harvey, decided our class should do so. I refused to stand. That “liberty and justice for all” stuff, I felt, was a lie. The face of the homeroom teacher grew increasingly red as he repeated the request, and I remained seated.

During the first period, trigonometry, this burly adult sat a couple of seats behind me. I figured he was evaluating the newish math teacher. In fact, it was the new principal, Dr. K.

I met with him and my father, who he had called, either during lunch or after school. Dr. K asked if I were an adherent of the Jehovah’s Witnesses since the Supreme Court ruled in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette that “expelling a student who doesn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance … violates the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech and religion.” That ruling, coincidentally, was eighty years ago on this very date. (It reversed a SCOTUS ruling in Minersville School District v. Gobitis only three years earlier.)

No, I said. We worked out a compromise that I would stand for the Pledge but didn’t have to say it. Oddly, in twelfth grade, as president of the student, I recited it over the loudspeaker. By then, I had decided the words were aspirational rather than factual.

I like red, white, and blue.

I should be clear that I’ve always liked the actual flag. They were going to add a star and stripe for every state that joined the union. The fact that they pivoted back to thirteen stripes, I thought, was very clever.

I’ve been to Arlington National Cemetery and the military cemetery in North Carolina where my parents are buried, and I find the rows of flags quite moving.

SCOTUS has recognized flag burning as protected speech. While I agree with the concept philosophically, it bothers me when I see it, and I would not do so myself.

Indeed, I’m more aware of 4 U.S. Code § 8 – Respect for flag than most people who claim to revere it, for instance:

d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. (i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. I came across this pin of a flag with a cross on it; this Christo-Americanism I found highly unsettling.

And the literal embrace of the flag by djt I find utterly grotesque. (Does the fact that his birthday is June 14 somehow create a rationale in his mind?)

And yet

When the US was preparing to go to war in Iraq, and I actively opposed it in the six months before I began, the peaceniks were dubbed not “real” lovers of their country.

Still, if I Google “liberals reclaiming the flag” I find articles like this from USA Today (2018) and this from Politico (2020) and this from the New York Times (2022). I agree with most of the sentiments contained therein.

Maybe this would work for me. From NPR: “Many have chosen to fly the flag next to other symbols to give it more personal context. For some, that means raising the Stars and Stripes along with a ‘Make American Great Again’ banner. For others, the American flag is flying alongside a gay pride banner or Black Lives Matter sign.” OK, not the MAGA sign, but…

Imgur as a source of information

Martha’s Vineyard immigrants

In late September, I was perusing a friend’s Facebook page who had posted, “I stand with the Iranian protests.” One of their friends indicated that they had gotten their information about it from TikTok and Imgur because they didn’t trust news outlets.

Oh, I’ll own it. I had no freaking idea what Imgur was. It “is an image hosting and sharing site, favoured by users of social media and social news sites including Reddit, Twitter, and Digg because of its ease of use and flexibility.” At first glance, it looks so… random. Pets, ads, dance videos, and various tweets.

I searched Iran and #Iran, but found nothing pertinent. But Iranian gave me 118 hits, only some of which were relevant.

Still, this fascinated me. I had seen several pieces in the New York Times, such as this one. Women Take Center Stage in Antigovernment Protests Shaking Iran. “Women have been casting off their legally required head scarves, forming the primary image of the protests. But grievances against a repressive regime go far beyond the hijab.”

This is not to say that one can’t find important stories almost anywhere. I just don’t see myself using Imgur as my go-to for the latest news.

DeSantis

On the other hand, Imgur is the answer to the question, “How did an image of a fake Massachusetts flag end up in a brochure for Martha’s Vineyard migrants?”

From the Boston Globe. Two summers ago, Will Bodine of Pittsfield, MA whipped up a flag redesign in “‘upwards of 10 minutes’ on his computer. The concept was simple: a blue shield emblazoned with the official state flower — the mayflower — encircled by six blue stars, all splashed against a white backdrop.

“Bodine… shared it on Facebook. He also uploaded it to Imgur, an image-hosting website, where, until recently, it had only been viewed a few times.

“Before nearly 50 migrants arrived from Texas on planes chartered by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, lawyers said they were handed brochures containing erroneous information about cash assistance and other benefits they would receive in Massachusetts.

“While it remains unclear who created the pamphlets, they included a rudimentary map of the state, a picture of a lighthouse, a photo of a sign reading ‘Massachusetts Welcomes You’ — and Bodine’s obscure reimagining of the state flag, rather than the real one.”

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver noted this event in the first five minutes of his 9/25/22 program.

I suppose this gets to my point about checking reliable sources of information. As Bodine noted, “’No one had seen this flag until some idiot staffer for DeSantis or whoever’ stumbled across it… ‘I cannot fathom why they would use the wrong one.'”