For the love of God, people, do not allow your city government to create a committee to redesign the Madison flag.
No committee has actually been proposed yet, but you can feel this coming. And it must be snuffed out before it consumes us.
If you haven’t been paying close attention, here’s what’s going on. Our city flag was designed in 1962 by a couple of local drum corps members. A white stripe runs from the lower left corner to the upper right with fields of light blue on either side. Lake Mendota. Isthmus. Lake Monona. Pretty clear what it means and it looks nice too.
The trouble comes with the last element on the flag. It’s a symbol at the flag’s center meant, apparently, to represent the state Capitol, but it’s also pretty much an exact reproduction of a Pueblo Indian sun symbol.
And that’s the problem. Native Americans are claiming this is cultural appropriation, which means taking any form of cultural expression from a group without its prior approval. Now, in my view, the entire concept of cultural appropriation is problematic. Writers, musicians and other artists and intellectuals have been criticized for it. Publishers have balked at taking on projects where the writer is not a member of a group she is writing about.
The respected novelist Lionel Shriver told National Public Radio recently, “And this whole business of editors sending out manuscripts to be read by so-called sensitivity readers to make sure that they don’t offend anyone, that they don’t promote stereotypes, that does inhibit creativity. And it does discourage writers from using characters from specially-protected groups. If you include a black or a Chinese character in your cast, then you’re going to be specially scrutinized. And [it] naturally leads to a kind of fictional apartheid.”
One of the best things about America is that we’re a place where cultures get blended. Writing, music, food and all kinds of creative expression get recreated in interesting ways as people borrow from other traditions. Claiming cultural appropriation can have the effect of freezing everyone in place, making our culture a lot less rich.
But I digress. The real threat we must focus on is not cultural appropriation, but committee proliferation. Vexillologists (flag experts — there, you learned something new today) have five guidelines for making a good flag: keep it simple; use meaningful symbolism; use two to three basic colors; no lettering or seals; be distinctive or be related.
By that measure, Madison’s flag comes out well, especially compared to our state flag where there’s just way too much going on. The same applies to our license plates, which many of us refer to as the flying barn. Give me simple, classic red letters on a white plate. Less. It’s more.
But the simple solution is not the Madison way. No, committees and public hearings are what we are about. Nothing good could come of this. In 2006 I appointed a committee to choose a city song to celebrate our 150th anniversary of incorporation. Members met for months and then, the deadline approaching, they went into their final meeting with four choices. And they narrowed them to five. I am not making this up.
A committee would just find so many, many ways to go wrong in this task. Once you’ve acknowledged one group or interest or historical moment, how do you say no to the next one? On and on it goes until the thing is just an incoherent mess.
So, in Madison you’d have to include the iconic Wisconsin fist designed to protest Act 10. And these days the word “resist” would have to be in there someplace. A marijuana leaf would honor its role in our past and present. Ardent Badgers fans would insist on Bucky. A rainbow would symbolize our embrace of diversity.
And after a year or more of work, the committee’s design would land with a thud at the Common Council. Somebody would be offended. Maybe Bucky would be too close to the marijuana leaf suggesting something less than wholesome about our mascot. The council would debate late into the night. Amendments would be offered. And as the sun peeked above the shores of Lake Monona they would vote… to create five flags.
So my solution? Just get rid of the symbol at the center of our city flag and, it turns out, at the center of the current controversy. It works perfectly well without it. And, bonus, what’s going on inside the Capitol building these days is not anything we want represented on our flag anyway. By just taking the Pueblo/Capitol symbol off we could both honor Native Americans and snub Republicans at the same time. It’s a win-win. And you don’t need a committee to do it.
