Its Fine Maga This Is Fine Fire Make America Great Again
Commentary
The MAGA Hat Is Not Entrada Swag. It's An Emblem Of Hate
Like others, I dismiss certain gestures every bit "symbolic:" meaning only for evidence. Yet information technology's undeniable that some symbols scrape our nerve endings. The original American flag, representing for some our noblest aspirations and for others the era of slavery, provoked Colin Kaepernick into convincing Nike to keep its flag-emblazoned sneakers on the drawing board.
Others spar over the morality of flying the Confederacy's flag and maintaining statues exalting Confederate leaders. And why do skinheads (or history-insensitive punks) deface synagogues with swastikas, other than to trigger outrage, or anti-Semitic applause, over memories of the Holocaust?
A recent court decision, buried in the avalanche of grim news well-nigh mass shootings, bolstered the case for mothballing that emblem of Trump-mania, the Brand America Great Again cap, along with those symbols of evil.
U.Southward. District Judge William Bertelsman dismissed a libel adjust by parents of a Catholic teenager against The Washington Postal service for its reporting of his January staredown with a Native American at the Lincoln Memorial. In the winter face-off that got more than attention than its summertime denouement, Nick Sandmann and Nathan Phillips stood nose-to-nose, the latter chanting and drumming, the former's smirk effulgent from below his MAGA cap.
Sandmann and fellow students from Covington Catholic High in Kentucky were in Washington for an anti-ballgame rally. Extended video and Phillips'southward testimony later on suggested that members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, some of whom constitute a hate group, had taunted the students as "dogs" and "incest babies"; Phillips said he intervened to pacify the state of affairs.
Merely Sandmann's and other students' MAGA caps bled anti-Trumpers' sympathy for them, justifiably: Unless you lot've been marooned on the International Space Station, yous know that Trumpism is racism, blatant or latent (here'due south a summary of the voluminous evidence). That makes the cap no different than a Confederate flag. It'south racial animosity woven in fabric, unwearable without draping yourself in its political meaning. It would be similar donning a swastika and expecting to be taken for a Quaker.
The court ruling reinforced the cap's unsavoriness by reminding us of its defenders' propensity to industry mythology about themselves. That's done likewise past those who display other symbols of hate and by our president himself, who has spewed near 12,000 untruths or misleading statements during his tenure.
In Sandmann'south case, he declared that the Post libeled him with no fewer than 33 statements, spread over seven articles and three tweets. The "gist" of 1 commodity, he claimed, was that he "assaulted" Phillips, "physically intimidated" him, and had "engaged in racist deport." But Bertelsman, a federal judge in Kentucky, would have none of it. "This is not supported past the plain language in the article, which states no such matter," his 36-page ruling said.
Many of the allegedly defamatory comments either referred to the students as a group and not Sandmann specifically, the approximate found, or else relayed Phillips's feeling intimidated by the students. Fifty-fifty if his fears were groundless, Bertelsman wrote, they were opinions, to which Phillips is constitutionally entitled and which the Postal service is constitutionally protected to print.
The variance from reality that the approximate found in Sandmann'south allegations reminds us of the bedtime stories concocted around other hate symbols every bit well. Defenders of the Confederate flag insist, in the words of one, that "information technology has nothing to practice with slavery." If such people had taken U.S. history, they would have learned that no less than the breakaway nation's vice president declared its founding premise to be the inferiority and merited subjugation of African Americans.
Meanwhile, some argue for leaving Confederate statues upwards as monuments to history. In fact, they were erected non as history lessons only rather Jim Crow tributes honoring the Lost Cause. A museum is the appropriate place to brandish and study such discrimination, not the public foursquare.
As for the swastika, it inspires defenses that would be risible but for the thing's grisly history. Before the Nazis hijacked it, information technology was a millennia-one-time adept luck symbol in multiple nations, incorporated fifty-fifty into synagogue designs. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, some desire to hopscotch backward over the association with vi million slaughtered Jews to that less poisonous past.
Gas chambers, ovens and firing squads volition do that to a symbol. Some things simply are across redemption.
The commonsense response came from a writer who said that even pro-swastika types "tin can't seem to talk about the symbol without mentioning Hitler — perhaps proof that it is virtually incommunicable to divest a symbol of its meaning, even when its meanings are multiple." Gas chambers, ovens and firing squads will practice that to a symbol. Some things simply are beyond redemption.
That doesn't include Nick Sandmann's case, according to his parents, who vowed to appeal the judge'due south decision. "I believe fighting for justice for my son and family is of vital national importance," Sandmann's begetter said. "If what was washed to Nicholas is non legally actionable, and then no 1 is safe."
I've no idea whether Sandmann Sr. is a Trump supporter. But hyperbolized dangers to national safety inhere in the outlook of the president and his base. (The "invasion" on our southern border, for example.) Coupled with Nick'due south MAGA hat, the family'southward grievances against the Post, deemed made-up by the judge, give this case a stench.
Every bit a Catholic, I hope Covington's teachers refer their students to the church'southward teaching about the equality of all humans. It may take been disregarded by parents who should tell their children to take the caps off their heads and donate them to a museum.
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Source: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/08/29/covington-catholic-video-make-america-great-again-hat-rich-barlow
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