The Long Memory Brigade here at MRC remembered Flag Day with a few reminders we've published in our Notable Quotables newsletter. The Left can easily display their contempt for the American flag. For example, there's this dropping of unpatriotic nastiness from the days right after 9/11 in The Nation:
"My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I’m wrong – the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way we’re both right....[The flag] has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses." -- The Nation’s Katha Pollitt in a column in the October 8, 2001 edition.
We published another quote from The Nation (one of the year's best in 1991), which referenced the flag, but perhaps more the national anthem:
"Oh say, we've seen too much. The Star-Spangled Banner pushes like a cough through America's mouth and the twilight's last gleaming is just that, a sickly flash above our heads as we ride unsuspecting in the bellies of sleek trains, plop to our knees in churches, embracing truths that disgust us." -- Boston Globe arts critic and "poet" Patricia Smith in The Nation's "Patriotism" issue, July 15/22, 1991.
