The American Flag is Hip Again
It’s cool to fly the American flag again. So sayeth the NY Times:
WASHINGTON is suddenly hip again, infused with the heady double-barreled combination of a new crowd of idealistic young political worker bees, who actually believe they can change the world, and the arrival of America’s first black president. It’s even cool to wave the Stars and Stripes.
Some of us thought it was never uncool.
Let’s go back in time for Katha Pollitt’s classic column on not liking the Stars and Stripes (emphasis mine):
My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I’m wrong–the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way we’re both right: The Stars and Stripes is the only available symbol right now. In New York City, it decorates taxicabs driven by Indians and Pakistanis, the impromptu memorials of candles and flowers that have sprung up in front of every firehouse, the chi-chi art galleries and boutiques of SoHo. It has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses. It seems impossible to explain to a 13-year-old, for whom the war in Vietnam might as well be the War of Jenkins’s Ear, the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away back to the proverbial stone age. I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.
“It’s Okay to Fly the Flag Again!” [via Instapundit]
[picture via respres]
Well, I definitely agree that many patriotic Americans have felt some reluctance to fly a flag because it does seem in the past few years to come to represent jingoism and militarism. And I also agree that the election of Obama to the white house makes me feel better about it.
If you want to take this as proof positive that I’m unpatriotic or a fair-weather American, fine. But I think you do better to try to understand where folks like myself are coming from. We are not the “my country right or wrong” crowd. We are thoughtful–and yes, patriotic–Americans, seriously concerned about the direction our country has been going for the last few years.