In most of the world, pretty much no one displays the flag. The only people who do are psychotic nationalist/fascists, e.g. Spaniards who want Franco back. By this standard, obviously, the USA stands out as strange. Not only do plenty of us fly the flag on our houses; up until a few years ago, politicians couldn’t even go on television without displaying the flag somewhere on their persons. So, what’s wrong with us?
One right-ish but over-simplistic conclusion to draw would be that we actually are, for the most part, psychotic nationalist/fascists. That’s true, but the value of the flag as signalling that in particular gets a bit worn down when everybody wears it. The US equivalent of that kind of flag-waving, the kind that outs you to your neighbors as someone to keep the kids away from, would be flying the Nazi flag (or the thin blue line flag, which is basically the same thing). That’ll make you stand out; just flying the regular old American flag is too commonplace to mark you as a real weirdo.
Some people might say, too, that people picked up on the flag as a sign of resistance to whatever it was that 9/11 symbolized. That gets the timing about right, at least for politicians wearing flag pins. But then, since that “trauma” has “faded,”* how come the flag epidemic just keeps getting worse? And how come people are, more and more, just openly and aggressively patriotic, like being from America should get you some kind of fucking prize?
Like most things in American life, I think this trend is generally connected to the economy and more specifically connected to the recession that started in 2008. Patriotism in the US has always been kind of a rube’s game, the thing they use to get you to die overseas so that GE can keep selling fridges on the Korean peninsula. After Vietnam, this got pretty hard to deny: from the way that patriotism got used to exploit people, people drew the correct conclusion that only an idiot would be patriotic. So why return to it? Patriotism’s a last resort when you don’t have anything else; maybe you finally would like that long shot at getting a prize just for being born in the US of A.
As long as people couldn’t see through it, patriotism was the last resort of scoundrels; now that the jig is up, it’s the last resort of losers. The new patriotism isn’t so much about getting other people to do stuff as it is about getting yourself to do stuff, like get out of bed in the morning. It’s cheaper than antidepressants. That’s the booby prize for living in a rigged economy that’s iced you out of a real wage increase for going on 50 years and is really just about to get around to replacing you with a robot.
I talk about all this like it’s a bad thing – which for me, as an internationalist and someone who clings to an ethical standard beyond “my country, right or wrong or building concentration camps,” it obviously is. But it’s not like I can’t see the appeal. If I got a little thrill of validation every time the state applied violent solutions to imaginary threats, I’d be feeling great right now. If you have no inner resources, patriotism is a great solution to the problem of being unemployed or underemployed at the end of time. And the dominant form of psychic warfare in America right now, as I’ve argued before, hinges on whether we can just ignore our neighbors’ patriotism or whether we have at least to pay attention to it, if not take it seriously. In that fight, the flag isn’t just a symbol but also a weapon.
*i.e. we’ve lost the initial buzz of national solidarity, but kept all the bad parts like airport security lines