If you're deliberately trying to provoke people, perhaps it's a tad undignified to then complain about how people subsequently got all provoked.
Flags. As far as colourful bits of cloth go, they're definitely among the most rectangular.
They look great on flagpoles – indeed, it's fair to say flags are the only thing that really suit them – and they're handy for identifying which side is winning during Olympic events and wars.
What they're not typically good for is clothing, because donning flags rarely ends with everyone agreeing about what a great idea it turned out to be.
That's because flags are about as us-and-them as you can get. That's specifically what they're for, after all: during the age of exploration they were basically a handy way to express the sentiment "this thing is mine, and if it's not also yours they you're in the wrong place, buddy breath".
That's why sports teams, corporations and terrorist groups all commission their own fancy designs as ways of dividing folks into friends and, more importantly, foes. And it's also about ownership: woe betide anyone from outside the group that dares wander about wearing a jersey emblazoned with, say, the Swans' symbol without being adequately knowledgeable of the rich history of the sportsball squadron's many competition-bouts.
It's also why people get impossibly furious about things like whether the iconography is being co-opted by groups they feel don't include them, whether it's conservatives fuming about the rainbow being hijacked by the LGBTIQ community, progressives steaming over the Eureka Flag morphing from union standard to the banner of choice for bigots, or early-00s US tourists carefully stitching Canadian flags to their backpacks to avoid being yelled at in pubs during the invasion of Iraq.
Now let's be clear: you can absolutely wear a national flag if you fancy it, just like you can play loud music on a bus or maintain unblinking eye contact with a stranger in an otherwise unoccupied lift. It's entirely legal, you have complete right to do so, and everyone is going to make the reasonable assumption that you're being deliberately, jerkishly provocative.
That's at least partially because recent history shows that the majority of people who wrap themselves in flags are seldom the best, brightest or nicest folks around. Indeed, it's worth giving a shout out to the many, many groups with "patriot" in their name who have sprung up over the last couple of years and provided a resounding affirmative to the question "these days the term 'patriot' pretty much means 'aggressive and incoherent racist', right?"
In short, no one wears a flag without being pretty determined to attract attention, since that's largely the point of flags. No one thinks "I'm just popping down the shops, my cardigan's in the wash, so I'll just throw on this national symbol loaded with all sorts of cultural signifiers instead".
So let's be clear: the nine chaps who got into hot water with authorities at the Malaysian Grand Prix for stripping down to show their Malaysian Flag swimmers (with "budgy smuggler" across the rear) and wrapping themselves in Australian flags weren't doing so by accident.
And while the official response was ridiculously heavy-handed, it's not as though Malaysia's hard-and-fast laws are exactly secret – you can get 20 years jail for homosexual activity, death penalty for drug trafficking, and detention for insulting the royal family. The Malaysian government are notorious for taking a dim view of things that wouldn't even cross the threshold of "shenanigans" in Australia.
That's why our government's own SmartTraveller website advises"There are conservative standards of dress and behaviour in many areas of Malaysia. You should find out what customs are observed at your destination and take care not to offend." You'd think that a group including a staffer for Christopher Pyne, Minister for Defence Industry, might have been a little bit across it: not least because the code of conduct for ministerial staffers is nothing if not clear about such things.
And yes, it was exuberant Grand Prix-inspired high spirits. But even so, one might think that maybe, just maybe, drunkenly nuding up in a predominantly Muslim country might be an unnecessarily silly thing to do, even without adding insult to existing insult by tucking one's genitals into the symbol of your host country.
In a nutb… sorry, nutshell, maybe it's best not to use flags as clothing at all. Unless you're deliberately trying to provoke people, of course, in which case you should probably anticipate some interesting consequences.
Except for the boot flag from that episode of the Simpsons, obviously. We can all get behind that, right?
