Editorial excellence: a sampling.

As noted in last winter's Masthead, NCEW's 1995 president Tommy Denton appointed a committee to screen and showcase examples of excellence in opinion-writing. A few submissions dribbled in, and some of them are published on the following pages.

If you like the idea and welcome this as a regular feature in The Masthead, please help the cause by sending along editorials or columns that you think deserve consideration.

That's all the more important now because of an executive board decision in October, during the Baltimore convention, to broaden the effort by publishing another volume in the sporadic Editorial Excellence series. (NCEW published handsome volumes of outstanding editorials in 1982 and 1988.) Don Coe's Journalism Education Committee plans to produce the new one as soon as suitable submissions are obtained.

We also welcome comments on this broadened effort to display some of our best work for fellow practitioners as well as aspiring editorialists and others interested in our craft.

As Denton emphasized in 1995, this isn't a contest, and don't let modesty deter you from sending along your own stuff if it's good. But do be a bit selective, since even editors have their limits.

For the moment, until we work out the mechanics of a two-track effort, we suggest sending submissions to either of us at the home addresses below, and we'll share them with discriminating others.

What follows are several examples of effective commentary in the opinion of the Editorial Excellence Panel, with my introductions.

The one I liked best by Paul Greenberg - a column on flag-burning - is both thoughtful and contrarian (Greenberg trademarks), and I'd comment it to anybody.

The Stars and Stripes forever 

The flag amendment is back. And well on its way to becoming the 28th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. What's this? It was supposed to be dead a couple of years ago, remember? But last week the House of Representatives voted in favor of a simple declaration that, once upon a common-sense time, would scarcely have attracted notice, let alone controversy: "The Congress and the States shall have the power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States." The vote was 312 to 120, easily more than the two-thirds' vote (280) required to propose a constitutional amendment. The prospect for Senate approval is good, and the states are primed to ratify.

But didn't our intelligentsia explain to us yokels again and again that burning the flag of the United States is not an action, but speech, and therefore a constitutionally protected right? That's what the Supreme Court decided too, if only in one of its confused and confusing 5-to-4 splits. But the people don't seem to have caught on. They still insist that burning the flag is still burning the flag, not making a speech. Stubborn lot, the people. Powerful thing, public opinion. Congress certainly seems to be reflecting it.

It isn't the idea of desecrating the flag that the American people propose to ban. Any street-corner orator who takes a notion to should be able to stand on a soapbox and bad-mouth the American flag all day long - and apple pie and motherhood, too, if that's the way he feels. It's a free country. It's actually burning Old Glory, it's defacing the Stars and Stripes, it's the physical desecration of the flag of the United States that oughta be against the law. And the people of the United States just can't seem to be talked out of the notion - or orated out of it, or lectured out of it, or condescended or patronized out of it.

Maybe it's because the people can't shut their eyes to homely truths as easily as our Advanced Thinkers. How many legs does a dog have, Mr. Lincoln once asked, if you call' its tail a leg? And he answered: still four. Calling a tail a leg still doesn't make it one. The people seem to be holding on to this stubborn notion that calling something a constitutional right doesn't make it one, despite the best our theorists and pettifoggers can do.

The people are told that the flag is just a symbol.

Just a symbol

"We live by symbols," said a justice of the United States Supreme Court (Felix Frankfurter) when the standards for appointees, whether liberals or conservatives or neither, were considerably higher. And if a nation lives by its symbols, it also dies with them.

To turn aside when the American flag is defaced, with all that the flag means - yes, all that it symbolizes - is to ask too much of Americans. There are symbols and there are Symbols. There are some so rooted in history and custom, and in the heroic imagination of a nation, that they transcend the merely symbolic; they become presences.

Many of us may not have the words to express it (which is why nations wave flags instead of computer print-outs) but we know it's right to protect the flag - by law. To do nothing when that flag, that presence, is desecrated is not simply to let the violent bear it away; it is to join the mob, to aid and abet it by our silence, our permission, our unnatural law. It is to become one more accessory to the general coarsening of society, to the desensitizing of America, to the death of the symbolic.

No, this is not an argument over who loves the flag more. Patriots can disagree; American ones almost have an obligation to. This Republic was not conceived as some kind of manufactory for robots. And those on the other side of this issue have every right to resent it if somebody wants to turn this disagreement over law and the role of the symbolic in American life into some kind of loyalty test. No one political persuasion has a monopoly on the American flag. May it long wave over every kind of political rally.

But this also isn't a fight over who loves the Bill of Rights more. And those of us who favor a simple, limited, constitutional amendment to protect the flag have every reason to resent it when others try to monopolize the Bill of Rights, or confuse it with the Supreme Court's confused reading of the First Amendment where the flag is concerned. Burning the flag is no more speech than vandalizing a cemetery, or scrawling slogans on a church or synagogue, or spray-painting a national monument - all of which are acts properly forbidden by the laws of a civilized country. Not to mention simple public decency.

Even if no flag were ever burned, or no cemetery or church defaced, laws against such acts would be proper, and should be constitutional. Because the law is a great teacher, and one thing it needs to teach a less and less civil society is a little respect.

The great Italian - what? historian? philosopher? philosopher of history? proto-anthropologist? - Giambattista Vico spoke of a barbarism of the intellect that confuses concept with reality (speech with action?) and so loses touch with the sensus communis, the common-sense values of language and custom in which nations are rooted.

Today's strange arguments from our best-and-brightest against protecting the national emblem are not symptomatic of any kind of treason-of-the-intellectuals, but of a different malady: an isolating intellectualism cut off from a sense of reverence, and so from the historical memory and heroic imagination that determines the fate of any nation.

NCEW member Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock.