The cowboy running this country, with his either your with us or your agin’ us mentality, would like us to believe that it is somehow treasonous to oppose sending a spring bouquet of daisy cutters Iraq’s way. But there are voices of reason in the wilderness of American media. One belongs to journalist Bill Moyers, who recently penned a piece for buzzflash.com, explaining why he was going to start wearing a flag pin.
Here’s a snippet:
“When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s Little Red Book on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.
“But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.
“So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash). I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us.”
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