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| Fifth Column |
| Katha Pollitt on the flag |
| 2001-09-24 |
"Out Out No Flags" is the title of Katha Pollitt's latest diatribe in The Nation, and the title pretty much tells it. Pollitt begins with a heartwarming anecdote: "My daughter," she writes, "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." Then, a concession: "In a way, we're both right," because the American flag is "the only available symbol" and must 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." (Reading writers like Pollitt, one would think that angry mobs were putting Muslim neighborhoods to the torch while the police looked on.) In the end, mercifully, a mother-daughter compromise ensues: "I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |