Matthis and Agosto: flag burning is cool

Two new blog posts at IVAW, one by Victor Agosto another by Matthis Chiroux, explain why they’re cool to like flag burning and you’re not. First, Victor rolls out a list of terrible things Americans have done – none of them anything done by people we know, but things that happened before we were all born;

The flag represents the U.S. but it does not represent us. The flag represents the state, a tool the ruling class uses to further its interests. This state has killed its indigenous inhabitants and has enslaved its people.

Yeah, that’s not from the International Socialist Organization, is it?

It is a state which serves the interests of insurance companies rather than the interests of people who are ill. It bails out banks but not hard working people who face foreclosure. It facilitates corporate exploitation of workers all over the world. It engages in wars for control and profit.

I am for the people who live within the territorial bounds of the “republic.” I am proud of their struggles for an eight-hour work day, gender equality, racial desegregation, ending child labor, and ending wars. However, we are not better than the rest of the world’s people. We are all one human family.

That could’ve been taken from a speech by Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran against Woodrow Wilson in 1920 from prison. All of the same talking points. Now that Agosto is out of prison, he can go anywhere he wants. I urge him to go to a country that doesn’t embarrass him quite so much.

But Matthis takes his fractured rhetoric to comedic heights;

As the burning American flag clutched in my fist above me bathed my fingers in yellow flame, I felt no pain nor shame of conscience. I stared into the eyes of 5,000 people and returned to dust a genocidal fairytale. One force-fed to me since birth and later used to enslave my body. A bed-time story of epic deceptions. A lost dream groped for in the empty darkness.

What a douche. Of course, he tried to write about the flag, but, as always with Matthis, he can’t help but make himself the center of the room.

I long to take the needle off this skipping record and rest it on my broken heart.

Me, too, you drama queen. I hope your broken heart doesn’t take as long to heal as your broken leg, you pansy. I wonder if Jesse MacBeth is writing his stuff these days.

I didn’t put links in because you can’t get to IVAW from here – don’t ask me why, it makes no sense, but they blocked incoming traffic from TAH. But you can get there from Yahoo or Google.

All of the ISO members of IVAW are changing their avatars on Facebook to the picture of Chiroux burning the flag according to people who can see their profiles. Camilo Mejas is one of them.

Word on the street is that one of the board members of IVAW is planning to file a grievance with the rest of the board over this incident. Of course, knowing who that board member is, I don’t believe he has the testicular fortitude to follow through. He’ll probably be bought off by the rest of the board with the promise of a Skittles castle with a moat of Snickers bars.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Phony soldiers, Usual Suspects