We live near an elementary school. Every morning I can hear a young child reciting the pledge of allegiance to America. It’s odd. It’s everything I disliked when I was at school about nationalism at school. It’s everything I disliked about flags and Anzac day and all that.
I’m surprised at how much it feels like I’m in a country at war where Australia, involved in the same war, doesn’t feel that way. I see American flags everywhere, on many more buildings, on so many streets, huge flags. Yet there are actually fewer cars with American flag stickers than there were after last year’s Invasion Day when the “Australia Day” crowd sported their Aussie flags emblazoned with “young and free” on the backs of the cars. Suddenly those words meant something very different. Originally about our youth as a nation compared to the old world and our freedom as an independent land, it became a statement about hedonism and a national pride of a very different sort.
No, what’s surprising here are the yellow ribbon stickers on cars, how many people have children in the service, loved ones. But it no longer seems to be about hoping someone will return home in the sweet way I always saw it when it was a real ribbon and an oak tree. Now it seems like a statement of allegiance to an attitude of warfare in a divided nation.
And every day on NPR, there’s some new aspect of the war, whether it’s an interview about the documentary baghdad e.r. or analysis about what’s happening right now in Kabul.
Meanwhile, nothing seems to have changed in Iraq itself. The sexism and internecine religious warfare continues: this week’s horror story for me was this one: a woman converts to Islam for love and is stoned to death by her family for it, which sets off a chain of vengeance killings.
Meanwhile, Yeltsin is dead, Halberstam was killed last night in a car crash. WiFi is riskier than we thought (no, really?) (via patchworkkid) and this postsecret scared me today, even though it’s nothing I didn’t suspect:
Welcome to your nightmares, children.