I hadn’t yet seen HDTV, or watched a football game in high definition I guess. Over Thanksgiving I had the chance, and got a closeup of the Sports Center-esque after-party where guys in chip covered Barca-loungers watch suits at a conference table lend a business air to their giddy analysis. What made this so different in Hi Def? Maybe you knew it already. Each of these dapper jock-industry everymen wears a flag pin!
Pins with the American flag on them.
I know there’s a school of thought which urges us not to relinquish our patriotic symbols to the bastards making them look so horrifically bad. Might I ask hypothetically, when might we consider the symbol irretrievable? When you drop the lipstick into the toilet, public or private, I’ve learned from women, it’s irrecoverable. You have to retrieve it, obviously if it’s your toilet, but that’s it for the lipstick.
A flag is a symbol for what you stand for, by definition, a standard. When bad guys take it, do bad things with it, make it stand for THEIR ideals: rape, torture, theft, murder, mass murder, genocide, supremacy, imperialism, conquest, a new world order, wouldn’t it be fair to retire what you thought the flag meant? It’s theirs, leave it to them. This isn’t just a little shit with which they’ve desecrated the flag, this is shit with which they’ve varnished the damned thing. This is karmic shit with which they’ve DAMNED the symbol of our higher ideals. Our higher ideals used to shove immorality into innocent throats until they thought they were suffocating or drowning and for good measure until they were dead.
That is the symbol which each of those TV jocks wears on their lapels. Militant US supremacy.
GDWTF AGAIN! You are willing to fight to the metaphorical death to end the war and the surpressive government we exist with – but not for our symbols? Oh look! Some grinning fool sportscasters are wearing a flag pin on their lapels. WAAAAHHHHH. Did you think they MIGHT ALSO be AGAINST the WAR? Or are you ASS – uming they are complicant in the war crimes because EVERYONE wearing a flag lapel pin – well, they MUST BE EVIL. Let’s kill them all – just to be sure. JWPHB!!!!!
WAAAHHHH? fuck you!
If Ted Bundy wrapped himself in the stars and stripes doing his serial killing, you’d have the good sense enough not to parade the flag in the faces of those victimized. Instead of admonishing them not to feel traumatized by the flag.
The red white and blue stand for poo. And I wouldn’t care at all if it weren’t a very malignant sort.
The sportscasters want to show their allegiance to the Brownshirts? I’ll be glad to see them judged. We have to reclaim America before we celebrate the symbol of what it’s become.
Allegiance? Plueeeze – They are TOLD what to wear, how to comb their hair, and if they are smiling enough – it’s TV.
PC, most people who wave the flag are not TOLD to do so, but do it all on their own. In fact, waving the US flag has become a sort of de facto way of shooting others the finger, both inside and outside the US. It is a way of saying ‘Fuck You’ to people with any sense of decent values.
You want to ‘reclaim’ this symbol from ‘The Others’, but it’s not really all that reclaimable. No more is the US flag reclaimable than, for example, it is possible to ‘reclaim’ the flag of Britain at this point. To the world the British flag is still today a symbol of an aggressive and racist imperialism, and has little to do with decent folk today in Britain. Very little.
The American flag has little left in it that represents or is symbol of any decent folk inside the US. Today, it represents mainly the aggressive, imperialistic nationalism of The Empire, and little else. It is the flag of colonizers and occupying armies.
Similarly, the US flag is the ancient flag of murderers of Native Americans and the flag of those that would destroy all of the world today in the name of making money mainly for themselves. At one time it was the flag of those who set out to liberate Blacks from slavery, but now the racist supporters of the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy rally under The Stars and Stripes instead.
It has become the flag of those who support a dominant US culture ruling over all the rest of the world. But then again, I don’t really think that there is anything reclaimable in The Cross, either. That said, I still talk to and socialize with those that think otherwise, and respect their difference of opinion with mine.
Still, I doubt that a new and more just society of the future will have little of The Cross or The Flag about it. Do you?