I see that Paul Begala has taken to wearing an American flag on his lapel, as has candidate John Kerry.
What do you think of the American flag? Could we, should we take it back from the right-wing ideologues?
Or has it been so distorted by the right-wing that it's lost to us forever?Bill Moyers offered this commentary at the end of his February 28 show:
http://www.pbs.org/now/commentary/moyers19.html “I decided to put on my flag pin tonight.
“So what's this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo -- the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. And during the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao's little Red Book on every official's desk, omnipresent and unread.
“But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.
“So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing -- after they first stash the cash.
“I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it's not un-American to think that war -- except in self-defense -- is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomatic skill. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.”
And this. Just for fun:
Through A Glass Darkly- An Interpretation of Bush's Character, by John Chuckman
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2003/05/60778.phpBush never goes anywhere where his stage crew has not first assembled giant flags as background. He always wears a sizable American-flag pin on his lapel. This kind of totemic, obsessive use of flags was absolutely characteristic of Hitler. While I find those images on the Internet of a blunt little mustache digitally-scribbled onto President Bush's upper lip feeble and unhelpful, still, there are parts of Bush's character and behavior that strikingly resemble at least one major biographer's interpretation of Hitler. Ian Kershaw's two-volume life of Hitler puts great emphasis on his being a driving high-stakes gambler - with innate, animal-cunning about human psychology, few gifts of statesmanship or strategy, and little systematic learning - attributing most of his success and all of his failure to his compulsive quality.
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