Flag Day was Yesterday, But...

Flag Day was yesterday really, but it has occurred to me that really EVERY day is Flag Day in New York City. They are on so many buildings, public and private, all the time...

In the months after the September 11 horror, flags began to appear REALLY all over and soon every shop and building and many apartment windows were flying American flags. This went on for a long time..

Unfortunately, most Muslim shops and restaurants noticeably at first did NOT fly American flags, though most eventually did. I remember in my uptown neighborhood of the time one big Iranian restaurant was the sole holdout on one block on Second Avenue..

One of my neighbors in the building where I lived spoke of them disparagingly, "They just don't get it, do they?"

Well, maybe they did , and there is a good explanation about what happened...Another of my neighbors was a young Iranian woman who told me the imam at her mosque told the whole congregation that NO Muslims were involved in the World Trade Center attack...that it all had been done by the French, the Americans and the Israelis who were trying purposefully to blame Muslims for it. 

I have heard that this story became widely accepted in the Islamic community in New York.

This kind of paranoid defensive attitude reminds me of how many Germans held fast to the idea that their country had never been defeated MILITARILY at all but had been "stabbed in the back" by Socialists, and, of course, Jews.

Americans like the professional contrarian and anti-American Noam Chomsky of course encouraged Muslims in this kind of thinking...

People from other countries wonder why the Flag is such a big deal in the United States. It probably just goes back to traditions that started with the need for a common emblem to bind together the 13 not-so-united colonies ( remember that New Hampshire took a hell of a long time to ratify the new country's Constitution and it was hotly debated everywhere else).

As a nation of immigrants from the beginning (but classically resistant to the newest wave of immigrants who show up) , America has always needed symbols that transcend national origin, and of course, American state origin. Some Southern states still try to fly the Confederate flag at their state houses for instance, or have until very recently..

The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag said by American schoolchildren was an invention not of the Founding Fathers but of some crusading newspaper  and other in the early 20th Century. Under Dwight Eisenhower at the height of the cold war, the words "under God," were also inserted into the pledge. One thing Americans knew about the Communist enemy was that they were Godless.

Put it all down to just a manifestation for America's need for "social glue" to bind up the country and make it more coherent...