Author: JAQ

Georgia

The history of the flags of Georgia is a long history of horrible, racist, and sometimes horrible and racist flags. Instead of just showing you the latest flag and my replacement, I think it’s instructive to look back at the whole history of Georgia’s flags. If nothing else, it’ll show you how little I had to work with that could be salvaged.

The state’s original flag was your standard American abomination: the state seal on a field of blue. Even in its fairly simple form, it’s an illustration of a person and several words, in a fussy mess that looks like every other crappy state flag. The fact that it was hastily created to fill the need for a state flag in the South’s war of treason against the United States just makes it worse.

Fifteen years after losing that war, the state adopted a proper flag. It’s not technically a bad design… purely as flag designs go. But it’s a little derivative, and it was adopted as a very deliberate homage to the flag of a certain federation of which Georgia was a founding member.

No, not the United States. The Confederate States. For comparison, here is the official flag of the CSA, which was nicknamed “The Stars and Bars”. You’d probably guess by now that I don’t care for the circle of stars, which is too cluttered, but otherwise it isn’t a horrible design… except that it fails the most fundamental purpose of a flag, which was to be easily recognized on the battlefield. This dumb-as-fuck design looked too much like the flag of the country they were in treason against especially in battle, which literally confused people who were trying to kill each other, and that’s why this flag never became popular, even among racists. Instead, racists fondly remember the battle flag. You know that one.

In 1902, Georgia combined their Confederacy-wannabe flag with their regiment-of-the-Confederate-army flag, by stuffing their state seal into the smaller field of blue. I’m not gonna show that one, because you can figure it out in your head. A few years later, they added the word “GEORGIA” and replaced the seal with… a worse version of the seal. I’m not gonna show that one, because I am not a cruel person. In 1920 they redrew the seal as a white circle with blue lines, and the date 1776 to pretend that they’d forgotten about 1861 and now considered themselves part of the United States.

In the 1956, the legislature of Georgia realized that they were entering modern times, so they adopted a new flag without all that baggage of the past, one that represented the future…. oh, who am I kidding? They pulled down their pants and squeezed out a turd to show their contempt for the present and the future, inserted their heads into the vacancy, and replaced the bars that were too much like the stripes of the United States flag, with the fucking Battle Flag of the Confederacy, to show just how racist the white people of Georgia still were. P.S. it’s also an ugly design, shoving two incompatible flags together.

This lasted until 2001. Incredible.

With the 21st century underway, there was considerable pressure for Georgia to give up on the fucking Confederacy and join the 20th century. The governor, bless his heart, proposed and rammed thru a replacement. Which was god-awful in oh so many ways.

The state seal was the focus again. But with the 13 stars representing the original colonies Confederate states around it. And a dumb-as-fuck, ugly-as-shit banner showing previous flags flown over Georgia. The original Betsy Ross flag. The Confederate regimental flag. The neo-Confederate seal flag. The neo-Confederate battle flag. And the U.S. flag. And “IN GOD WE TRUST” at the bottom, just to make sure that people also understood that freedom of religion is a lie. This is the flag that earned Georgia the position of 72nd out of 72 in the North American Vexillological Assocation’s survey of U.S./Canadian flags. It’s that fucking bad.

Hint: you can’t fix the problem of having Confederate symbols on the flag by making them smaller, in a design that looks absofuckinglutely horrible.

The “good” news is that this flag was so bad that the state legislature was prompted to replace it. Which could have been a happy ending. But they replaced it with this. That’s right: the actually went back to the Confederate States of America flag design, this time with the state seal and the stars honoring the 13 Confederate states.

Fuck that shit. Fuck all of that shit. I can’t even.

Georgia’s new flag doesn’t get to use the colors of the Confederate flags. Too many feeble attempts to pass them off as U.S. colors. Instead it gets the 1879 flag redone in the colors of Georgia’s most famous crop: peaches. Still leaves a sour taste in my mouth, but it’s at least a cromulent flag.

Michigan

Michigan’s is the state flag that inspired this whole project, and it’s a textbook example of how to design a flag badly.

It’s a shield-on-a-field, which is three strikes against it right there. In addition, it contains not one, not two, but three mottos in Latin: E Pluribus Unum (“from many, one” – copied from the United States), Tuebor (“I will defend”), and Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice (“If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around you”). It also borrows the eagle from the United States, to go with its native elk and moose, and that’s not even getting to the crest with an explorer by one of the lakes, blah blah, blah.  U-G-L-Y. All it’s missing to make me hate it more is the name of the state spelled out, and a smear of 26 stars somewhere.

I considered doing something with the elk and moose antlers, because both are authentically Michigany things that I like about the state. But this one’s a tear-down, for me to rebuild from the ground up.

What defines Michigan? The Great Lakes are the most obvious thing. The beaches along its extensive shoreline are legendary. The northern Lower Peninsula and the Upper Peninsula are renowned for their woodlands. And in the winter we get snow that would impress even other northerners. Blue. Yellow. Green. White. In a stylized shape suggesting a peninsula.

And it just so happens that blue-and-yellow and green-and-white are the colors of our two biggest universities, which fight over being known as “the” University of Michigan State. I was careful to give each pair of colors the same amount of real estate, because the infantile rivalry of those people is insufferable.

Police States of America

I’m going to do something a little different this week. Instead of a state flag, let’s see if we can fix another flag that’s getting a lot of attention lately: the Police States of America flag.

This flag is often referred to as the “Thin Blue Line” flag (even though the line isn’t very thin). It symbolizes the role they see for the police: as a “line of defense” between Bad People and Good People. But that’s a rather simplistic and dangerous way to view policing. The police are supposed to protect everyone. That even includes people accused of crimes, because due process is an absolutely fundamental principle of our government. Punishing people on the spot is vigilantism. It is literally a crime.

A better way to represent the role of the police in our society would be to take that blue and move it to the field of stars, to demonstrate that the police should stand behind the people, and try to bring us all together, not separate us.

But there’s something still troubling about this design, which is even more stark with that blue line out of the way. These black and white bars seem to reflect a rather (obviously) black-and-white view of the world, the kind of mindset that racists have about “blacks” vs. “whites”. Plus, it looks disturbingly like an old-style inmate uniform from a prison, or (if hung vertically) somewhere even worse.

So, I’ve changed the bars to something more colorful. Red is the color of life-giving blood, and an international symbol of the social nature of humanity. Red, white, and blue… for some reason that combo gives me a good feeling… I can’t put my finger on why, but it feels right.

I encourage police officers – and those who support them – to tear down and burn that divisive Police States flag they’ve been saluting, and embrace this replacement, which represents us all as the United States. #AllJobsMatter

Wisconsin

Why do they even bother? It’s a shield on a field. And an especially bad coat of arms at that, with obscure heraldry and symbolism shoved into every nook and cranny. There’s even a US shield shoved into the middle. Both the US motto, and a fucking state motto: “Forward”. Because “Reverse” hadn’t been invented yet. Who are those two men? No one cares.

Then in the 1980s, because their crappy flag looked like every other crappy shield-on-a-field flag, instead of fixing it, they added the name of the state spelled out in big letters at the top, and presumably the year it joined the union at the bottom. No one cares. At least they didn’t litter it with (guessing) 30 stars to show what order it joined in. Which no one cares about, I might add.

This flag is a reason for people who live in Wisconsin to regret that fact. I was tempted to chuck the whole fucking thing out and start from scratch, but then I noticed something. A germ of an idea that I could salvage.

Down in the lower-right of the state seal is a stacked array of little triangles, representing mineral mining (like little ingots). A couple of those can be rearranged into the icon for fast-forward. So I salvaged the fucking motto: Forward!

Why are the triangles yellow? It’s what Wisconsin is actually known for: cheese wedges.

The background colors were my own idea. I’ve been to Wisconsin a number of times, and I remember that it includes some beautiful woodlands, and it has more Great Lakes shoreline than any state except Michigan. So I symbolized those with green and blue.

Missouri

Sometimes there’s a good design hidden in a bad one.

Missouri’s flag is one of the many with a state seal crapped in the middle of it. The seal has an array of 24 stars at the top, to indicate that Missouri was the 24th state. But they circled the seal with another 24 stars, to indicate that Missouri was the 24th state. At least it isn’t on a plain field of blue, like most of the seal-on-a-sheet state flags.

The seal includes the motto “united we stand, divided we fall” which is fucking ironic, because one of the design elements of the seal is a belt buckle, which symbolizes the state joining the Union… but still being able to unbuckle (i.e. secede and join a racist slave-holding confederacy… which to be fair, it did not… but they thought about it).

The seal also features two bears, which a least are native to part of the state. No, wait, there’s a third bear in silhouette inside the crest the bears are holding. Give me a fucking… wait a minute.

If you magnify that crest inside the seal, there are a couple neat design elements: a bear on a red background (it’s supposed to represent strength and bravery), and a crescent moon on a blue background (representing the newness and potential of the state, which is obsolete but a nice idea).

I’ve extracted the crescent and bear, and made them the focus of the design, incorporating them into the red/white/blue stripes of the existing Missouri flag. These stripes are flipped from the old flag, to match the combinations from the crest, which is important because it keeps the crescent against a blue sky.