Desecration: City Sues Flag Artists
Somewhere in the recesses of this city are hidden nine works of art that mess with the Stars and Stripes. You may never see this art. Its makers fear being tossed into jail for violating Chicago’s amazing new “Desecration of Flags” ordinance.
An open call went out to Chicago artists, and in mid-September the Committee launched “Inalienable Rights, Alienable Wrongs,” two months of exhibits, debates, performances, readings, and what-have-you. One of the exhibits would consist of nine artworks that put the flag to use, among them Scott Tyler’s immortal What Is the Proper Way to Display the U.S. Flag?
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We hadn’t seen any of the flag-art pieces that Grams is determined to show the city and we asked her about pictures of them. “It’s just as illegal for us to show pictures of the artwork as it is for us to show the artwork,” she said gloomily. “It’s illegal for me to have it in my possession.”
We asked Stanford historian Don Fehrenbacher the other day if the road from Lincoln to Noonan and Reagan represents a certain degradation. Not really, said Professor Fehrenbacher. “What comes out of the White House now comes out of an institution instead of out of a single man. In Lincoln’s day the White House wasn’t institutionalized. I think Congress allowed him on his payroll one secretary and one messenger.”
“But now that you mention it, it seems even Reagan wanted to be associated more with Franklin Roosevelt than with Lincoln.”
Ready for Reform
Last week, feeling like a real Chicagoan, we voted three times in one election. We voted for the local councils at the grade school and high school in our neighborhood–institutions we had never before set foot in–and also at the magnet school that our youngest daughter attends.
