Liberals and the Flag

At the time I had my reservations, but I was going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

It's been over ten months now, and I've got to say, I still have my reservations.

I still find the haphazard waving of the Old Glory both haughty and self aggrandizing - an old school liberal stance, to be sure.

My dad reminded me recently of the Samuel Johnson quote "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Now just as I don't feel any pride when people sew on labels like the "USA Patriot Act" to jam some bill of goods down the public's throat, I don't feel pride for sniveling politicos who wrap themselves in the flag when backed into a corner. And I equate casual waving of the flag with those people who desperately have something that needs covering up.

But even with all that I can't see the ground that Coulter is standing on (1) when she claims all liberals hate the flag. There are plenty of places that I find it not only appropriate to fly the flag, but there are several where I take great pride in the waving of the flag.

The first place that the flag should be is on anything we, as a country, own. It's obvious, and there for a reason. Every uniform of every soldier in our army sports an American flag, and rightly so. Do I think our military budget is a bloated, money devouring chum-flow for the majority of our nation's corrupt graft? Yes. Do I think we need a large military? Hell yes. I might be a liberal, but I'm also a realist. If we're putting our forces in the field, there's no two ways about it - those are our forces, and they're there to make a statement with either force or a presence. The flag is there to say who's presence that is. I'm one hundred percent behind Old Glory being part and parcel with everything we have out there in the field.

I'm also very happy to have it flying above our schools, libraries, local governments, and every place we've instituted a public works that helps out the people of our fine nation. In the very early days of the internet one of the biggest FTP sites for useful utilities was a military site -- if that site could have put an ASCII American flag up every time you logged on, I would not have minded that one bit.

But when we're talking depths of my heart proud -- the single proudest image of the flag that I can think of, to date, would still have to be the shot of it there on the moon. We're talking about an event that happened when I was two years old - something that happened in history. There was no magic of the moment for me watching Apollo 11 land, everything I know about that moment is dredged out of books and films and the chalkboard of scientific history. But that event... that's something that's an indestructible nugget of colonial pride. Damn it, I'm grinning at it even now.

The simple truth of the matter is that I feel it's perfectly justified to fly our flag over something that we can all feel pride over. I don't feel pride over someone's Ford bronco, I'd rather not have it encrusted with our flag. But if we can nationally back a cure for cancer, I certainly wouldn't mind the final product given out in little red, white and blue pills.

i,jasona

1) In fact, given that I haven't seen the ground for any of her arguments, I'm beginning to believe she just hovers from place to place, like the vampires of old that sustained both their existence and their mobility through malignant force of will alone. But let me not start up on Coulter - I will run out of room before I run out of rant.