Do other countries have this sick obsession with flags?

I was checking my calendar as I do every morning, when I discovered that today, 14 June, is an official US holiday (but not a federal holiday — sorry, you don’t get to take a day off work). It’s Flag Day!

I’ve never been much of a fan of flags. I got weirded out back in third grade when I suddenly realized that the morning ritual the school put us through every day was to pledge allegiance to a flag, and I just plain stopped. I’d stand up and try to blend into the background, because I didn’t want to get beat up on the playground afterwards, but wouldn’t say any words. Why? Because they were stupid. A flag is a colorful piece of cloth, nothing more, and not a sentient being or a principle or a deity.

Flag Day has a new level of meaning this year, because flags have become a potent symbol of political disagreement. We’re a polarized nation, so why not trot out a big flag, the uglier the better, to declare your affiliation? I’ve noticed that most of my neighbors don’t have any flags at all; there’s just one house several blocks away that I see with flags tacked up everywhere. They’re all Gadsden flags or blue line flags, and they’re interspersed with Trump signs, and they’ve got “JESUS” spray-painted on their roof.

Maybe flags do have a useful function, then. They’re markers for where the town assholes live.

With that purpose in mind, then, we can see the latest scandal in a new light. Justice Samuel Alito and his wife Martha-Ann have been warring with their neighbors, waving flags to symbolize their allegiance to the Empire of Assholes.

Martha-Ann, when asked about it by a reporter, started screaming and eventually hoisted another, different, flag up the flagpole—did figure in it. It was more about how the Alitos are, as neighbors and just in general.

So it fit that, when given an opportunity or just a moment of otherwise neutral space through which to charge, Martha-Ann simply ran her mania up there in the assumption that the person who had just begun talking to her at a fundraiser would salute. “I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags,'” she fantasized, to someone she’d never previously met. “They’ll be all kinds. I made a flag in my head. This is how I satisfy myself. I made a flag. It’s white and has yellow and orange flames around it. And in the middle is the word ‘vergogna.’ ‘Vergogna’ in Italian means shame—vergogna. V-E-R-G-O-G-N-A. Vergogna.” Anyway, it’s a nice thing to think about, someday being able to raise a flag above your home that tells the neighbors that you think they are disgusting and going to hell.

I can see how flags can have some significance. I just don’t see the point of celebrating that.