Americans are deeply weird about their flag. No other country in the world uses its flag the way Americans do. One hundred-foot-long long American flags waft over gas stations next to highways in the middle of nowhere. American flags are flown on garages in suburbs. They sprout on poles in front of pizza shops in Brooklyn. They are unfurled on entire football fields. They fly off the back of fire trucks. They advertise chocolate chip cookies. American flag pins and pens. Flag underwear. Flags on shopping bags.
While many in the US fetishise the flag and it is ubiquitous, it is also the flag that flew over the Supreme Court that ruled in the 1857 Dred Scott decision: “There are no rights that a black person has that a white man is bound to respect.” It was the flag that the US Cavalry carried in to battle as it committed genocide against the Indigenous population. In 1925, around 50,000 Ku Klux Klansmen marched through Washington, DC carrying them. It is the flag of the only country that has ever dropped nuclear bombs on civilian populations. Millions in the US and around the world hate this flag and the country it represents.
