Betsy Ross, roll over

Those of you who pay attention to little details like my profile taglines over on the right pane are aware that I believe we need major changes to our Constitution — revisions and rethinking so fundamental and wide-reaching as to justify calling a Constitutional Convention in 2037, the 250th anniversary of the original.

This is no joke; it’s the cause I most passionately believe in above all others, and I am brimming with both strong convictions about the changes we should consider, and ideas for how best to frame the arguments needed to persuade the American public that this is THE moon shot for our times, and perhaps our last best hope on earth — in the face of an worldwide wave of anti-democratic winds posing an existential threat — for enduring and prevailing, as a democratic republic, for the next 250 years.

In the coming years I hope to flesh out, periodically and in this very space, some of my views on this need for a Constitutional makeover.

For now, however, in the run-up to that very serious project, I’ll warm up with a somewhat serious, if not entirely serious, re-imagining of a slightly different symbol of the American essence, namely, our beloved stars and stripes. Granted that this is done with tongue somewhat in cheek, but that’s in order to prevent me having to bite my tongue — to keep from spewing all the vile bile it would take to express how I really feel.

I wish I still had Illustrator; I’m more familiar with it and could probably have worked up something more elaborate. Unfortunately, other pursuits taking too much time persuaded me to let it go when Adobe went to a subscription model costing $600 per year — and that’s before any add-ons or plug-ins.

But I can happily report that both the app I used here, and the assault-rifle clipart I took off the internet, have served me well; each is quite affordable and, like the AR-15 the latter was meant to represent, both are readily available even to an 18-year-old, and — again, like the AR-15 — they ‘get the job done’.*

(*Historical trivia: “They got the job done”, or nearly that phrase, were the very words used by Nixon in his congratulatory toast to the B-52 pilots and bombardiers, at a black-tie White House dinner celebrating the Christmas-day air raids that were designed to ‘bomb Hanoi and Haiphong back into the stone age’ and thus induce the North Vietnamese to come to the negotiating table.)

But back to the project at hand…now, excuse me, one more time, exactly what was it that you called that piece of cloth that so proudly we hail?

“Old Glory”???

The ‘L’ with that, say I.

So, without further ado — and without further adieu to those poor Uvalde kids and the others of whom they’re but the latest droplets in a very long trail of tears — let’s run this one up the flagpole and see who salutes.