Hey, no worries as far as I’m concerned. I took your posts as a opportunity for some fun geographically-based teasing. Thus the “So there”, and calling you a redcoat. I was having fun, and assumed you were, too. You owe me no apologies, my friend. But you still have an ugly-ass flag!
And you did raise an interesting point that might - true - be something of a hijack: when are the historical connotations of a design sufficiently obscure to say that it no longer has them? I’m a fairly historically-minded person, and a liberal Southerner as well, but I had never before considered that Florida’s and Alabama’s saltires reference the Confederate Battle Flag. (And per Wikipedia, they actually go back to flags of Spain, the original colonizer of what is now Florida and Alabama.) Nor, until it was pointed out in a thread a few months ago, did I see the Confederate symbolism in Arkansas’ or Tennessee’s flags. I suspect it’s equally invisible to most Americans, even the frothing racists. That’s how most of Georgia’s black legislators felt when we adopted our current flag in 2004:
[QUOTE=The New Georgia Encyclopedia]
Ironically, the new flag recognizes Georgia’s Confederate heritage by placing Georgia’s coat of arms and “In God We Trust” on the first national flag of the Confederacy. This legacy did not go unnoticed by African American legislators and others—but most expressed a willingness to allow this tribute because they did not see it as a symbol widely associated with racist groups.
[/QUOTE]
*Bolding mine.
For what it’s worth, when it went to a referendum, Georgians black and white overwhelmingly supported the 2004 flag:
On the other hand, it affords some great urine-based Joisey humor. Hey, New Jersey foisted that ass Chris Christie on the rest of us; y’all got to pay!
They could always try and make it look even more like thealleged reference source (especially the version you see when you scroll 3/4 of the way down that page); however the National Park Service already uses that one as their house flagfor the old Spanish fortresses at San Juan, St. Augustine, and other locations.
Maybe they should do like New Mexico and use red-on-yellow or yellow-on-red to evoke Spain. Or throw in some castles and lions. Alabama may want to do something in crimson and orange ;)
As a native Californian I am relatively satisfied with our state flag. It’s not great, but it beats the hell out of at least forty other state flags. I would like to see the red stripe at the bottom made blue as a reference to the Pacific Ocean, though.
And dump the “CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC” which is not needed and which refers to a quaint effort at creating a political entity at a time when any bunch of liquored-up ignorami could claim their piece of real estate as a republic. It only lasted for a week and a half as I recall, and I don’t think anyone outside of California noticed it. Or cared.
They’re not off-centre but on their side. What happens is that those flags were born as pennants: when flying as pennants, they’re Latin Crosses. Turn them on the side and the Cross goes to bed.
I wish Vermont would either drop its commonplace shield-on-a-blue-field flag for the much more distinctive flag of the Green Mountain Boys, or at least change the field of the current flag to green. Washington has the only green state flag at the moment.
