Nationality is absolute
A recent editorial discussed flag burning, the impact this can have in communities and the privilege or right to perform such an action within a nation-state (“Beware closing doors to free speech,” Feb. 16, page 6).
The editorial started by citing University of Malaysia researcher Helen Ting, who wrote that the concept of a nation is “a mental construct,” and national identity is “a dynamic, contentious historical process of social construction.”
Ting went on to say that citizens of nations conceive of a “figured world of nationhood,” then fashioned it as “only one of many figured worlds that constitute the self.”
This all strikes me as post-modern/deconstruction theoretical babble, and ignores realities of nationhood that are important in everyone’s lives.
It is all related to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (also referred to in the editorial), which, while in some ways is a useful concept, misses the bar of what nationhood and nationality actually are.
That is, my nation — my “community” if you will — is not some sort of mental construct, pie-in-the-sky, floating-in-air, abstract, make-believe concept for me.
I live in my community, I exercise my rights there, interact with my neighbors, contribute locally, work, play and relax there. It is not some fictional “construct,” much less a “figured world.” It is the real thing.
It is indeed “conspicuous” in my life and in my heart, creating a sense of pride (low key in its way), and I see myself very much as a flesh-and-blood American, with all that that means (“Taiwan a ‘city on a hill’ for Asia,” April 2, 2019, page 8).
The editorial then looks at flag burning, proper. At the highest level, I can understand how this seems offensive to some people, but I would not in the least endorse banning it, as such an action — as has been said in major court rulings in the US Supreme Court — is protected free speech.
The editorial then claims that the flag represents “group memberships and strong emotional attachments,” and further, embodies “the soul of a society in terms of symbolic representation of national consciousness.”
I do not disagree that flags are strong symbols, and in a sense represent a nation’s core values, but these ideas in the main veer into more psycho-gibberish.
We Americans do not walk around all day pondering the stars and stripes, and just how they symbolize the original 13 colonies, the 50 states, valor, purity, perseverance and justice. Yes, I had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning in school as a child, but that eventually drifted away, and the flag did not linger in my mind every day of my life.
I do not think I, or anyone I knew, was seeing red, white and blue all day; we were not “waving the flag” at every opportunity. There were realities to attend to, processes that included actual rights and privileges, which I enjoyed and practiced every day — not a world of red, white and blue symbolism and “constructions,” that which is imagined, fancied or veritably fictionalized.
The editorial concludes by stating: “There is no definitive answer as to whether people should be allowed to desecrate national symbols.”
This may be true, but there is a definitive answer to what it means to be a citizen of a nation.
This might be “one of many figured worlds,” but it is the one that really matters in our lives.
In this world, we are representatives as it were, believers in values, Aborigines and commoners, subjects of a greater body politic, voters and delegates, and emblems of a nation, our community, states and commonwealths.
The commonwealth — here is a concept that anything but imagined, it is lived, it is acquiesced to and abided by, it is breathed, it is actuated. That is, anything but “imagined.”
David Pendery
Taipei
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