Our flag
: After my post on wearing the American flag — and when and whether to take it off — I got email. Charles Austin wrote that he never put on a pin: “It seems to me that wearing a pin is symptomatic of the empty belief that it is important for other people to know that ‘you care.’ I will happily hold my patriotism up with anybody’s, but that’s not the point.” That’s a good and proper reaction to the pin overreaction: yellow pins, pink pins, red pins, we all needed a scorecard to figure out who on the Oscars cared about what. Yes, this was show-off morality and I find that distasteful. That’s why I felt doubly odd wearing the pin myself: It’s a flag and it’s showing off. But I took it not as bragging but rather as defiance against those who would try to kill us just because we are American. F you, it said.
Then Daniel Hartung sent me a link to a great Doonesbury, in which the liberal berates the conservative for having stolen the flag for so many years:
You guys hijacked the flag years ago, during the Cold War, especially the Vietnam era, turning it into a symbol of unquestioning, jingoistic nationalism. Now it’s back to being a symbol of patriotism and love of country, not a particular political agenda. So thanks for restoring it to ALL of us.”
I still have my pin on.
Heroes
: They found the bodies of five Port Authority Police officers who had been in the lobby of 1 World Trade Center (and now are 60 feet and five stories underground. The NY Times reports that they appear to have died selflessly trying to carry an obese woman out of the building as it collapsed, even knowing — after the collapse of the other tower — that the danger was imminent. God bless you.
