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Please, America, Hide Your Flag! Barry Farber It probably didn't affect you as much as it affected me. If it did, I excuse you for throwing the piano through the plate glass window. I'm talking about the upcoming World Cup in Berlin, at which time soccer teams from every country in the world will be there driving around in their team buses festooned with the flags and colors of their respective countries. Every country, that is, except the United States of America. German security has asked the American team to use unmarked buses for fear of violence against any vehicle displaying the American flag. Just America was asked to slink around Germany anonymously. Not Iran. Not North Korea. Not Libya. Not Communist China. Not Syria. Not even countries that have almost as many torture chambers as we have voting booths were asked to strike their colors and go bland. To me this was like the woman leaving you. I mean REALLY leaving you. No games. No ploys. No angling for an apology or a nice gift or some flowers. No game of love-chicken to see who will break down and reach out first. It was like the definitive walkout as described by comic Jimmy Durante in the 1940s: "She didn't leave a note on the pin cushion. She didn't even leave a pincushion!" As a young boy shortly after World War II I hitchhiked with another American student from Norway to France wearing the good old backpack – the "rucksack – bearing the American flag, which we made sure all passing motorists could see. The sight of two young men holding out their thumbs by the side of the highway with American flags on their backpacks drew laser-like beams of love from almost everybody who drove by and everybody we met. Cars would come to a stop, sometimes dangerously abruptly, to offer us a ride. The love for America was especially fierce in Norway, which American might helped liberate, and only slightly less so when we crossed the border into Sweden, which had been neutral and, truth be told, rather pro-German until the Nazi debacle at Stalingrad. When the youth hostel we wanted to bunk down in, in Gothenberg, Sweden, said it was closed for the night, an angry Swedish woman passing by cupped her hands to her lips and yelled, "These young men are Americans – get down here and let them in, and I mean right away and no backtalk!" Like Joshua at Jericho, her angry voice was the trumpet that may not have caused walls to crumble but did cause Swedish doors to open.
Story Continues Below Once we got to Denmark, it was more of that fierce, Norwegian-style love. We stayed for a few pennies in American money in the home of a Danish woman who kept replenishing that rich, radiant Danish butter on the breakfast table. We were politely grateful, but then overwhelmed when she explained that, even though Denmark was famous for butter, it was extremely hard to get inside Denmark. Almost all Danish butter was exported to earn hard currency for postwar reconstruction. But with AMERICANS at the breakfast table, Danish refrigerators opened wide to share their rare treasures. Our biggest surprise was Germany, a country we'd reduced to rubble so few years earlier. We didn't expect as much love as we got from the Germans, until a few Germans explained that they didn't love us for bombing them into ruins, but for staying on as an occupation force and protecting them from the Russians. We arrived at the German border with Holland late at night. The Dutch bus driver from the border into the northern Dutch city of Groeningen asked us where we intended to spend the night. We told him we'd get off when he reached the middle of town and look for a youth hostel. He said nothing, but he stopped at the very first phone booth in town and made a call. He then told us to remain on the bus until he got to his last stop. His wife was fixing sleeping accommodations for two. The Dutch have beds that come out of the wall like big drawers, and two of them opened up for two young American strangers passing through. Breakfast the next morning was the best since Denmark. Belgium was happy to see us, too. France was a little low key, showing not quite as much love for the American flag as the Norwegians and not even as much as the Germans, but even in France at that time there was plenty enough love to do us proud. And now they fear the sight of the American flag will trigger violence at the World Cup! Here comes the hard part. Back to the pincushion lady who storms out of your life. You need make no admissions, no explanations, no rationalizations. You don't have to hold a press conference and answer questions. You just have to face yourself and ask: "Was I guilty? Am I to blame? Did I bring this upon myself?" Air and ink, not just around the world but also all across America, pour out lamentation and denunciation of the Bush administration for ruining the good name of America. I cannot join that bitter parade. Four times since my father was in high school, four times in less than a century, America has been called upon to (Forgive the grandiosity, but this is pretty grand!) save civilization! In World War I, America was the tipping power that defeated Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. In World War II, America was again the tipping power that turned tired British and Russian blood into sparkling burgundy and rallied the necessary millions in Allied uniforms and additional millions under Nazi and Japanese occupation onward to total, unambiguous victory. The Cold War against communism didn't end just because President Reagan went to Berlin and said, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" There were more than forty years of American blood, treasure and resolution that had to come first. And now the War on Terror sees all the scurrying barnyard animals pushing the red-white-and-blue American hen to the forefront of this latest threat to civilization. Who will fight the Islamofascists? Not I, says the pig. Not I, says the duck. Not I, says the goat. Ahh, but they'll all rejoice when American decency prevails over jihad. Iraq is the easy, automatic answer when you ask why the world hates us. Not so fast. If America in a unilateral lunge were ever to invade and topple the government of, say, a Greece or a Malawi or a Costa Rica or a Finland, I'd be marching with the anti-war multitudes and carrying a banner. But come on, now, Iraq?! Saddam Hussein?! Have they forgotten his invasion of Iran, his invasion of Kuwait, his use of gas against his own Kurds, his brutal slaughter of the Shiites after Desert Storm, his torture chambers, his many executions and mass graves, his son's torture of Iraqi athletes whose Olympic performances disappointed him, not to mention his shooting at American planes enforcing the no-fly zone, the flouting of seventeen United Nations resolutions and the mocking diddling of the international inspectors? There's no denying that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in the not-too-distant past and was in the act of developing nuclear bombs until Israel turned the (French-built) plant at Osirak into a smoking crater. Saddam Hussein is a very bad man. The world used to rejoice when the likes of him fell, or were pushed! Can the overthrow of a tyrant like Saddam possibly explain the tsunami of antipathy against the one nation that rose up to do the job? I think not. I think the world has a bad case of hating the one who stands up and does what your conscience tells you is clearly your work that you haven't got the guts to do. What country ever amassed more power and abused it less than America? What country ever amassed more wealth and distributed it more fairly than America? What country, after being attacked, rallied and beat both enemies on the other side of both oceans and, instead of rape and plunder, lifted their former enemies up and gave them a democracy transplant that led to their continuing and abundant freedom and prosperity? And what country ever had the nuclear weapon exclusively for four solid years and never once used it for intimidation or blackmail? America has out-justiced, out-freedomed, out-invented, out-helped, out-healed, out-immigrated, out-innovated, out-stimulated and out-liberated every other country on earth. They should like our flag. Hey, World: We Americans may not like it, but we understand. You look down on America with the utmost guilt, the utmost self-disgust and the utmost envy. If I were an American soccer player, it would take more than an unmarked bus to make me ashamed.
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