I read an article on CNN that was like “it’s normal to see our national flag here in the US, but in the UK it’s controversial”. This was sort of true in the 2010s, for a certain value of “normal”.
In my time in California in the mid-2010s I always knew I’d wandered too far from the Bart station when I started seeing flags. When you get too far from a dense population centre, the settlement quickly starts to lose its coherence and has to loudly assert its own existence. It’s as though the imagined community of the nation is fragile and contested in the context of all the wildfires and raccoons.
I had the same feeling when I was briefly an artist-in-residence in Belfast in 2019. Back then there were very few flags in England, so all the flags on houses there looked weird and ominous, especially with the police there being more visible and heavily armed. The hyper-visibility of flags doesn’t communicate that the identity of the place is stable, but the contrary: they’re artefacts of a decades-long conflict that isn’t fully resolved.
England now is like California was then. Flags are normal, in places burdened with the maintenance of this fragile sense of normality. City centres are eager to communicate many different things to you visually, but wander too far from a major rail interchange and you will find yourself in flagland, where the only thing any house seems to want to say is “England!” It’s the visual equivalent of Pokémon just saying their own name over and over again, but without the natural biodiversity. If the house values are high enough you do get some nice hanging baskets as well, but mostly it’s just cars and flags in front of boxy brick houses.
Defenders of the flag frenzy say things like “we should be able to be proud of our country”, but flags don’t solve that problem. The threats to that sense of pride in the imagined community come from failures to make the community real: why feel pride in an imagined community, when your daily life witnesses so much evidence of that community’s failure to care for people who need it? A flag doesn’t rebuild a community, it only makes its fractures more noticeable.
