Good Morning.

In lieu of AAV today, I'd like to expand upon a muse I tried to post Sunday night. It went *poof*.


When was the last time you felt particularly patriotic? Not meaning those jingoistic national holidays where we flap the flag in everyone's face, or that national patriotic porn-orgy that is now September 11. I mean honest-to-goodness patriotism.



I won't necessarily call it patriotism, but for years I had a great deal of civic and national pride, giving history tours here in Boston where the United States of America were invented. You read it in a history book; I drove past the places where it actually happened multiple times a day and told people about it.

Personally - maybe the last time I felt true patriotism was a wee little shindig on the National Mall in 2008 with a million of my closest friends.

I was ten years old in 1976, during our nation's Bicentennial. I did all the things; I was at the re-enactment on Lexington Green, and went to the famed Independence Day concert at the Hatch Shell in Boston that year. We also went to the Olympics in Montreal, but it's those patriotic things that have stuck with me.

I went to Florida that April too, to visit my grandparents. While I was away, my parents repainted my bedroom in a patriotic red, white, and blue for the Bicentennial. I grew up in that room, and still have a few pieces of furniture that bear that 50-year-old boyhood patriotism.

But what do I think today?

Nowadays, when I see a US flag flapping in the wind, I feel ill-at-ease. Those stars and stripes used to belong to us all, but today they have been hijacked by the right wing loyalists to the First Felon. It would now be ironic for me to fly a flag, but there are dozens of them strapped to every surface imaginable in Dumbfuckistan. I am especially annoyed by the full-size flags strapped to the back of big, manly, penis-compesating pickup trucks.

You might not see those "Trump" stickers, but you just know they are there.

A few years ago, there was a backlash, and I recall the liberal idea of "taking our flag back". But I never really fully embraced that. I can't actually remember the last time I flew an ordinary 50-star flag. All last summer, I had the 48-star flag of WWII flying, as I believe that represents the last time the nation was truly "The United States".

I took it down the week before the election, replaced by Ben Franklin's "Join or Die" flag.

My flagpole has been empty since that Wednesday.

I just can't. Flying the flag now feels like surrendering to the fascists. I would hope that we can fly it again one day, but given all the plans for the next four years, that would be just like flying a Nazi Swastika in Germany today, wouldn't it?