Most flags used to be ugly. They were probably better that way.
Each autumn in early modern India, certain men drifted out of the central provinces to take up their craft. Known as ‘Thuggees’, these men were said to be inspired by a bloodthirsty goddess and would attach themselves to a caravan on the road, posing as a merchant glad of the company or a cook looking for work. Days passed, sometimes weeks. The Thuggee played his part and earned the trust of the men he travelled with, and he waited. Then one night, with the camp asleep, he rose from his blanket, strangled his companions with a scarf, knifed each one in the stomach to be sure, and vanished with the caravan's money. The perfect crime.
The modern vexillology movement works the same way. Give or take the strangling. In 2006 a pamphlet went out to the members of the North American Vexillological Association, enthusiasts who study flags. It was called Good Flag, Bad Flag, by Ted Kaye, and it laid down five principles of good design. Keep it simple, simple enough that a child could draw it from memory. Use meaningful symbolism. Hold to two or three colors that contrast and come from a standard set. No lettering, no seals. And be distinctive, or be deliberately related to flags you share something with. Like most pamphlets from fringe outfits, it sold nothing and lay dormant.
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Then in 2015 the radio host Roman Mars built a TED talk on it, ‘Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you've never noticed’. Millions watched. It remains one of the most watched TED talks ever produced. American flags were wrong, Mars said. Seals on plain fields, that isn't what a flag is for. Others were too busy. Age was no defense. A flag could have flown for a century and still stand condemned as badly designed.
His favorite target, and Kaye's, was Milwaukee. Milwaukee's flag, adopted in 1954, is an utterly mad chaos of city skyline, a ship, a stalk of barley, and various texts and numbers. In the middle, big as a sun, sits a gear. Tucked inside it is a Native American in a war bonnet, lifted more or less from the Milwaukee Braves logo of the day. But if that wasn’t enough, your eye continues to roam across the flag and finds a church, the county stadium, a factory, a lamp, a few houses, a flock of gulls. And just when you thought you had been overstimulated, you squint and realize there is a picture of another flag on it. Milwaukee put a flag on its flag.
The flag obsessives began their campaign in Milwaukee, and the city began to trust the thugs in disguise. In 2016 the city government ran a design contest, a thousand-odd entries, and crowned a winner: ‘Sunrise Over the Lake’, by a local designer named Robert Lenz. A golden sun comes up over a blue field, the blue for the lake and the rivers, three thin lines for the city's three founders. It ticks every single one of Kaye’s boxes. But hang on, could it not also be Tulsa’s flag? No, it could be Reno’s. In fact it is so similar to Reno’s that both cities believe the other stole their design.
And the city never adopted it. The council picked the fight up in 2018, dropped it, raised it again in 2024, and kept finding reasons to wait, among them that the original contest hadn't been inclusive enough. The 1954 design is still the official flag of Milwaukee. Meanwhile the sunrise spread across the city on its own, on t-shirts and stickers and bike frames and beer cans, with no legal standing at all. So upset were the thugs that they have insisted unilaterally that their design, while not official, is the ‘Milwaukee People’s Flag’.
That is the pattern wherever the redesigners get their way. NAVA grade flags like schoolwork, F to A+, and they now sort municipal flag changes into before 2015 and after, a vexillological B.C. and A.D. Pull up the twenty cities they rate highest and they are the same flag. Navy, near enough every one, carrying white and a single hit of gold. A sun or a star. Often a wavy line where a lake or a river should be, now and then a triangle standing in for a mountain. Tulsa, Reno, Topeka, St George. Twenty different American towns, indistinguishable. One flag drawn twenty ways.
Which is the joke. Kaye's fifth principle, the one the movement hurries past on the way to the part about the child, says ‘be distinctive’. Do not duplicate other flags. By the rubric these people carry into council chambers, their own redesigns fail. They have built a continent of flags so well behaved you cannot tell them apart, and they call it a job well done.
The twenty flags they rate worst are ugly. They are also, every one of them, unique. Belle Glade, Florida, painted an entire landscape into an oval. Nitro, West Virginia, kept a small red figure and a name left over from the explosives plant that built the town. Hideous, the lot of them, and not one you could mistake for anywhere else.
The movement's base is r/vexillology, half a million of them looking in each week, a fresh municipality in the crosshairs every time. A man watches the talk one evening and by midnight has drawn a new flag for some town of three thousand in Iowa he has never set foot in. The forum encourages him. The design gets refined.
And then they move like the Thuggee. Not marching on anything, just drifting in. A flag nerd turns up at a council meeting wearing the face of a concerned citizen, and somewhere between the sanitation budget and the painting of the municipal fences, asks to speak on the matter of the flag. Nobody else has come. Nobody ever does. He runs through Kaye’s pamphlet from memory, explains in patient detail why the town's flag is wrong, and the council, who have a budget to pass, defer to the helpful expert and wave through a consultation and a contest. What harm could it do? The town of three thousand never knew what hit it. Milwaukee, which is not a town of three thousand, is where the thing became a decade of trench warfare but in most of these places, the old flag is strangled in the night before anyone can realise.
A fair point cuts the other way, and it should be made before someone makes it for me. Plenty of the old flags were not like Milwaukee. But most did commit the flag obsessive’s greatest held sins, a ‘seal on a bedsheet’ (SOB), illegible from afar and identical to four hundred other city seals on four hundred other navy bedsheets. The flag thugs are right about them in theory, an SOB is never full of character but neither is the minimalist sunrise.
Paul Skallas, who writes as the Lindy Man, calls the instinct ‘refinement culture.’ He claims that our civilization has lost its nerve for making new things and instead sands the character off old ones, then calls the sawdust left on the floor progress. Once you are told about refinement culture, it is hard to miss. The car badges that all went flat and wordless within about three years of each other. Every new film in the cinema being an already exhausted intellectual property. And of course the old fashion houses that swapped their idiosyncratic and romantic logos for the same anonymous sans font.
James Scott wrote the book on it, more or less. Seeing Like a State is about taking a tangled reality and making it clean and legible from above, then finding the clean version holds none of what made the thing worth having.
Which brings us back to the Thuggee sneaking through the camp at night, because there is something about them I left out. The strangling cult, the goddess, the scripture that blessed the killings, much of it may never have existed as imperial Britain described it. The more recent histories tell us that the thuggee was a colonial construction, to cover up good old fashioned banditry scattered across central India. Tidied up by an administration into a single category with a scary backstory so it could be cataloged and stamped out. The British did to highway robbery exactly what the refiners do to flags. They took something various and local and difficult, and made it simple enough to draw from memory. Twenty cities, one flag. Stand a man from Tulsa in front of the winning twenty and he could not find his own.