City Walks – Flags of Americans

Flying High

The New York Times Opinion Section had a typically corrosive piece on Sunday entitled Democrats Need Patriotism Now More Than Ever by a Duke Law Professor. I won’t bother to link to it.

In brief, it did the old NY Times cheap shot of acting like its assumptions were proven — that Democrats aren’t patriotic, and that the right really wants to be nice guys if given the chance, and from that idiocy came to the tired old conclusion that it’s ultimately up to liberals to change to make the world a nicey nice place.

In the end it’s not Dukey Law Professor who is the big problem — it’s the Times reinforcing for the millionth time its own ideology. And while there are endless problems with the piece, I’ll focus on just one. Dukey and the Times editors — Kathleen Kingsbury, Patrick Healy, or some other stooge of AG Sulzberger — never bother to go for a walk to see what liberals think and do.

They Don’t Know

I live in a big city which votes heavily Democratic. If Dukey and the Times were right, American flags would be burning or tagged with graffiti, if they weren’t replaced by the hammer and sickle. Brave souls daring to fly one would be hounded from home and hearth. No. Just No. Walk in my city, in almost any big city, and the truth just doesn’t fit their narrative. The problem lies with the radical right who hate America and the dolts who can’t admit what they’re doing.

No Irony, No Meta, Just Flags

This isn’t some stupid Portlandia effort at toothless, safe, smarmy satire. The flags fly all year round. In Spring and Summer:

They fly in the fall:

They fly in the winter:

Other Forms of Patriotism

Other flags proclaim where these neighborhoods stand. The motto of the United States:

The Navy Reserve:

The flag of the Irish Brigade, which held the Union line in the face of the rebellion, dividers, slave drivers and losers of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg:

City People Are the Patriots

Forget the people who fly flags of rebellion, or leave shreds of flags hanging from plastic sticks in their car windows, or raise giant flags only to sell used cars, or wave bastardized versions of American flags politicizing brutality. City people are the patriots, despite what the liars on the right and their allies in the elites will tell you.