Clip art or national flag?

If you’re in the mood to be amused or offended (That’s a wide range of emotions, I know, but all will be made clear, you’ll see), go to your computer, hook up to the Internet and check out the website http://ahpc-jp30.st-and.ac.uk/~josh/flags/. This site gives letter grades (A, B, C, and D) to the flags of the world’s different nations and territories.

Before going any further, check out the disclaimer. The website’s author, Josh Parsons, says the contents of the site “have been known to cause offense to some people. If you are apt to be offended by sarcastic humour directed towards your national flag, I suggest you go no further.” That may be a wise thing to do as it is describes the CNMI flag in a not particularly flattering manner. That disclaimer also applies to this column, as it would be stating the comments made on the site. This site was pointed out to this paper by a reader, who seemed a mite concerned about the comments it made about the CNMI’s flag.

According to Parsons, he came up with the idea of grading the world’s flags after finding out that there is no international body responsible for setting standards for what he termed as “vexillilic aesthetics.”

“Some time ago, browsing through my friend’s atlas, I realised that there are significant differences in quality between the flags of different countries. Some are good, some are bad. Some countries have clearly taken care in the choice of colours, layout, and design. Others have been lazy, stolen the flags of their neighbours, or just designed flags that are clearly supposed to cause pain to those who look at them,” he explains on his website. (Incidentally, Parsons is from Wellington, NZ, hence the British spellings.)

Parsons said he gave marks according to his judgment of each flag’s overall aesthetic value, first assigning letter grades, then numeric grades to reflect each flag’s position within its grade. The letter grades range from A+ to D-, and F. There are distinct C-, and D+, D- grades.

“Anything lower than a C- is a fail: that country would be better off without a flag at all,” he said. “To receive an F, a flag had to be so awful that its level of badness was clearly qualitatively different from that of any flag receiving a D. I had to feel that a country receiving an F had really set out to create a genuinely horrible flag, or didn’t really know what a flag was. One prominent vexillologist I consulted put it thus: ‘Some countries’ flags look like tea towels. If you’d rather be using the flag as a tea towel, and your tea towel as the flag, give it an F.’”

Unfortunately for the CNMI, Parsons gave the territory’s flag an “F.” It is in good company, though, as only three others received such a grade and all of them are U.S. territories (CNMI, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands). Of the three, he singled out the CNMI’s flag, saying, “I wouldn’t even trust the Northern Mariana Islands flag to clean my cutlery—it’s probably not colourfast.”

In his comment, Parsons said the CNMI flag failed in his estimation because “it appears to have been constructed from clip art. Truly awful.”

Also, he said the CNMI flag runs counter to two of the criteria he set for “vexillilic aesthetics.”

First, it violates Rule 2A, which is “Do not put a picture of anything on your flag.” As he describes this “rule,” flags should have no pictures, especially not of sheep (Falkland Islands) or parrots (Dominica). “Stylised logos based on representations are OK but representational art is out.”

Second, he said the CNMI flag is “too busy.”

“Flags should have simple, iconic designs. I have marked flags with this code where they conspicuously fall short of that goal. There are many different ways in which this can happen. One is where countries get involved in drawing fiddily little pictures on their flag… The other is the kind of “more is better” mentality best typified by Mauritius and Central African Republic.”

I would not advise anyone to go apoplectic, though, as even the flag of the United States only got a C+ grade because, according to Parsons, it has too many stars and too busy. The Philippine flag? A C because, again, it has too many stars.

Examples of the 14 countries whose flags got top grades? That would be Japan, Somalia, Vietnam, Switzerland, and Canada.

(The views expressed are strictly that of the author. Vallejera is the editor of the Saipan Tribune.)