Ken Kesey Quotes
Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself.
Faggen, Robert, ed. Conversations with Ken Kesey. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Referring to the Supreme Court decision, Texas v. Johnson (1989), in which flag burning was held to be constitutionally protected speech:
In this case, the Supreme Court held that burning or desecrating the American flag may not be prohibited or criminalized by the government. Flag burning, they ruled, is symbolic speech and is protected by the 1st amendment just like political pamphlets.
Trump was then President Elect who already had a large staff helping him fomake the transition. He still went off on his own with this state,ment whiich runs afoul of the Constitution which he would soon sware to defend when he took the Oath of Office. The Supreme Court had unequivocably ruled that the burning of the flag was a type of political speech and as such could not be curtailed or punished by the government. The penalty of a loss of citizenship was another constitutional thicket. In addition. in the hisoty of the country,, it had never been used as a punishment for breaking domestic law.
Kenneth Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure. He considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.
