Where went the flags of yesteryear?

Dave Lindorff, author of This Can't be Happening Here made a shrewd observation in a Nov. 30, 2005 Counterpunch article about the disappearance of Bush/Cheney bumper stickers: they're nowhere to be found.

Actually, campaign stickers, even for the winning side, generally have a limited bumper half-life. Time and weather take their toll. But youndo see a few still sneeringly adhering to passing Cadillacs.

What have disappeared most noticeably are the Stars and Stripes.

Immediately after 9/11 there was a run on American flags, the cloth kind to fly from flagpoles.

I was at a K-mart in Yuba City, Calif. on 9/12. The check-out lines were two and three deep with people buying flags and bumper stickers and flag lapel pins, some with their carts filled with flag-related items.

For weeks and months onward cloth flags flew from car and pickup radio antennas. Sometimes two. One baseball-capper had TWO antennas flapping from his two rear-mounted antennas and another from his CB antenna. All this PLUS the window and bumper stickers.

The flags have disappeared, except for one old guy still flying a now-raggedy US flag from his car antenna. Some Eagle Scout should explain to him it's unlawful to display an American flag desecrated by wear and tear. It should be taken down, respectfully burned and replaced, if he feels absolutely compelled to advertise his patriotism.

I live in Marysville, Calif. in Yuba County a statistically poor county that generally votes Democratic-voting county. It is separated by a river but joined at the hip with Yuba City in Sutter County, comparatively the statistically most rabid Republican County in the state. Think of these two towns it as a kind of a schizoid Minneapolis-St. Paul).

Although the cloth flags are gone from all over, and the bumper stickers have noticeably diminished in Marysville, the flag decals are still much in evidence in Yuba City, along with the bumper stickers and the prissy stylized metal I'm-a-good-Christian fish plates screwed into car trunks.

So, I wasn’t really thinking about the vanishing stickers until I drove down to LA and San Diego for a conference.

Stuck in a 5 o’clock LA traffic jam I noticed how few decals and stickers were there. But that might be expected because its a Democratic town by voter registration.

But then I hit San Diego where the flag decals and bumper stickers were equally hard to find and you didn't see many stars sand stripes waving, either.

Now, San Diego (home of the now famously disgraced Congressman Duke Cunningham)is a heavily militarized town with a slew of Navy and Marine bases scattered around and plenty of retired military types living there.

Now, if those people are taking off their flag decals, it’s a good sign the America’s look-at-me “patriots” are either going to ground, or coming to their senses.