Muse – Disposable Patriotism

I had a thought as I was riding the bus to work. It was spawned as we passed a flatbed truck that was loaded down with building materials.

When we came up beside the cab, there was an American Flag attached to the side, right behind one of the vertical exhaust pipes. It was dirty, obviously. Spotted with some nameless black marks. The truck wasn’t going fast, so the flag was sort of listlessly twitching as the truck turned the corner and headed off in a different direction.

It got me to thinking about various things. I remembered one of the pics I pointed out here before. One that showed one of those little window flags that became all the rage after 9/11. It was tattered, the end of the flag frayed into raggedness by being attached to the car constantly, exposed to high winds and the elements.

Neglected. Just like the one on the truck.

Personally, I never got a flag or anything. I’ve only had a few things that were quasi-patriotic. One a simple little red/white/blue ribbon that my mom gave me. I attached it to my backpack, just because, but along the way it must have worked free and fallen away. Usually happens with pins I put on my bag. The other is my umbrella, more an accident than anything else. It’s a prominent red white and blue motif with USA prominently displayed on tow sides of it. I didn’t know it was like that until I took it out of the little nylon sleeve, after buying it. Believe me, it felt strange when I went to Canada for a festival, to have to pull that out when it started raining. :p

Anyway, the point is that it seems a strange thing to me, that people will act as though they revere the flag. Act as if they care when others burn it or mistreat it, only to mistreat their own versions of it. The small window flags I can sort of understand. They’re cheap little nylon replicas. But the one on this truck was a medium size, normal flag, like you might run up a flag pole.

You’d think the truck driver would take the flag off to run it through the washing machine once a week and take at least moderate care of it, yet it didn’t seem so. Makes me wonder just what people see as desecration and what they don’t. Where does a symbol become a cheap little novelty flag, forgettable and neglectable?

And where do ideals become so disposable, that you can laud yourself and your home for them, yet in the next breath pretend they don’t apply fully? Sometimes it seems like ideals are treated like little toy flags, waved about to prove to everyone watching that you’re normal, you belong, you’re ‘one of us’. Yet as time draws on the ideals fade. The conviction frays and becomes ragged. A shadow of its former self.

What do you see when you look at those worn little toy flags and dirtied medium flags?

Now, on with my news entry crafting.