Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Since I started writing this blog, I've visited a number of Web sites that no sensible person would ever look at, except in the line of ineluctable duty. Web sites like Third Way's. Don't follow the link: I just want to show you their logo:

Here's one from the DLC (look carefully at the mountain; does this qualify as subliminal advertising?):

Bernie Sanders contributes this one (and boy, does he need a new designer):

Heeere's... Hillary!

Same motif, rendered in the pukey palette of Daily Kos:

You look at this stuff for a while and you start to think you see patterns. Is it significant, for example, that both Third Way's and Daily Kos' flag stream from right to left, rather than the canonical left to right?

If you're ever unfortunate enough to travel to Our Nation's Capital, one of the things that strikes you as soon you get off the train -- surely you weren't masochist enough to fly? -- is this same red-white-and-blue, stars-and-stripes motif slathered over everything in sight: the cocktail napkins, the strippers' G-strings, the Chamber of Commerce signage, the taxi drivers' turbans, you name it.

The fact is, I've gotten really sick of The Flag. What is it about this American flag worship? You can drive from one end of France to the other, and never see a tricolor waving in somebody's yard. In the little town where I grew up, down South, there was one guy who had a flagpole on his lawn, and he was considered quite eccentric. A spin through American suburbia nowadays will show you every other house impersonating a post office.

And that unspeakable little flag pin, invariably stuck in the lapel of every politician's sincere blue suit -- it makes me want to jump 'em and tear the thing out with my teeth. Doesn't anybody remember that it was Richard Nixon who started that fad? Doesn't that tell you something?

All this over-emphatic demonstrative patriotism seems highly suspect to me. I wonder if it doesn't conceal a deep ambivalence. French people, who are not lacking in national amour-propre, take patriotism for granted -- of course you're a patriot, mon ami; you're French, aren't you? What French person would not be, sacred name of a blue belly of a Ruppersburger?

But not us top-nation Amurricans. Hey buddy, nothing unpatriotic about me. No sir. I'm an even bigger chauvinist asshole than my next-door neighbor. My flagpole is ten feet higher and my flag is the size of Dutch Ruppersburger's bedspread.

I wonder whether, on some level, we don't resent the crushing burden of our top-nationhood, and, finding this a horrifying, unacceptable impulse, seek to convert it into its opposite with shrill, hysterical, suspiciously over-emphatic manifestations of Americolatry?

Anyway, let me get this back to the site's purpose. Call me a shallow, flighty aesthete, a butterfly-like creature excessively swayed by the semiotics of decorative trim, but for me, the way our Democrats feel they need to maintain flag parity with the Jingo Party demonstrates, as plainly as any more substantial metric can do, how thoroughly un-oppositional they are -- how completely committed they are to complete agreement with the Greater Evil on every important premise and theorem, and all but a few trivial lemmata.