While engaged in a prodigious display of dithering this morning, I stumbled onto the news that Utah’s statehouse has approved the redesign of its state flag.
While majestic and dignified, the Beehive State’s old flag was a touch busy. The new flag’s confident simplicity is just awesome.
This development led me down a rabbit hole. Utah’s move is of a piece with Mississippi’s 2021 effort to banish the Confederate battle flag, which clung to the banner’s canton like it knew its time was short. Critics of the process fretted over the potential sacrifice of tradition and heritage, but Mississippi’s new flag sacrifices nothing. In fact, it represents a profound aesthetic improvement over the old design.
There are a number of states that would benefit from a critical re-examination of their banners.
Let’s start with my home state: New Jersey. As I wrote on Twitter, I’m a patriot with deep affection for my native soil. But no one has looked at the state’s seal — a hodgepodge of quasi-European heraldry — with affection since the 19th century. The banner features a severed horse’s head, some outmoded plows, a vaguely Iberian armored helmet, and two ladies of liberty — one of whom is holding a hat on a pole. All of this upon a field of canary yellow. The question can no longer go unanswered: Why?
Delaware’s flag could use a touch-up. It features a ship, a cow, and two guys looking at each other quizzically, perhaps pondering the circumstances that landed them both in Delaware. It sits inside a yellow diamond on a field of seafoam green. Some aspects of our collective heritage are more worthy of preservation than others.
The state of New York doesn’t fare too terribly. Its banner, adorned with an eagle bestriding the globe, portended the state’s imperial ambitions. But the state’s coat of arms also features the soaring hills of the Adirondack mountains, which Andrew Cuomo forever ruined. That hilltop is flanked by a rising sun with a smiley face. What is this, the Teletubbies? Back to the drawing board.
Whoever thought grapevines best represented Connecticut couldn’t have spent too much time in Connecticut. Yes, I know the state has some excellent wine trails. I know enough about them, in fact, to know that many of the excellent wines those vineyards produce use grapes imported from California. The Northeast is famous for a lot of things, but having a climate amenable to wine production is not one of them. This flag is a visual expression of an inferiority complex. Time to go.
The Bay State’s banner is, in fact, quite impressive. It’s hard to deny the visceral effect of a disembodied arm thrusting a saber down onto an unseen target. That arm is, however, precariously perched above a Native American in traditional — perhaps even stereotypical — garb. Massachusetts’s flag is, therefore, flying on borrowed time. Cancellation is imminent, and the state would do well to get ahead of the controversy.
There are some favorable mentions, too. Maryland and Rhode Island: 10/10. No notes. Likewise, states such as Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, California, and New Mexico cannot improve their state flags. But there are plenty of states that have shoehorned their, ahem, florid state seals into otherwise elegantly designed flags. Others, Colorado and Washington most notably, have adopted ploddingly literal designs that seem to underestimate their audience’s intelligence. And then there is Ohio, which apparently got together with Nepal and concluded that everyone in human history was doing flags wrong.
I’m sure I’ve missed some that could use updating. Let me know where other improvements could be made.