Joel Stein, writing in the LA Times, gets upset because a well-meaning person placed an American flag in his front yard on the Fourth of July. He writes:
Even though I've seen tons of neighborhoods [where people display flags], I've never actually lived in one. I've also never lived in a neighborhood that had those flags reminding you of the holidays and seasons. In fact, I've always looked down on those places. If you need semaphore to inform each other that it's going to get hotter in the upcoming months, nobody is putting a magnet school in your community. So the reason I didn't want to put a flag outside wasn't because I disapprove of our international policies. It was because I didn't want to associate myself with the other people who put them up, and with their unquestioning, tribal, us-versus-them, arrogant mentality. Though I love being American, I don't want to proclaim it as the sole basis of my identity.
Hmmm..., "tribal, us-versus-them, arrogant." Sounds a lot like the guy Stein sees in the mirror each morning. I was going to write more about this sterling example of terminal twerpdom, but Lileks beat me to it.
[W]hat amused me was the sight of a writer who’d burrowed so far up the aperture of his warm narcissistic cocoon he has no idea how he comes across.Read it here.
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