TAKE THE FLAG DOWN. NOW.

The tournament is over. The Queen’s gone back into her ivory tower. Great Britain just grates. There is no Empire anymore. It’s time to take the flags down. Now.

The Jubilee is over. The World Cup is through. England got trounced early one morning about two weeks ago, and ever since then, a nation has apparently mourned. But there’s still far far too many people who haven’t yet got the hint. They still drive around in cars, vans, and probably shopmobility buggies, trailing their tiny cheap plastic flags around them. It’s time to take the flags down. Now.

There’s no reason to put them up in the first place. I know we’re in Britain. Everybody does. Putting a flag up is akin to pasting a sign on your forehead that indicates that both you have no taste, and a startling need to point out the obvious. It’s not as if people are going to be more accepting of you just because you’ve got a flag up on your car anyway. This is England, and I’ve felt trapped the past month in a prison, surrounded by babbling fools and loyal, jingoistic puppydogs gazing adoringly at a bit of cloth.

Take the flags down. I don’t belong to a nation. Or a sex. Or a colour. Or my sexuality. I just happen to be me. I choose to express more aspects of my personality than the fact that I’m English, or I’m male, or I’m white. there’s a lot more to a human being than that. By reducing yourself to just one aspect of yourself - your nationality - you’re short-changing yourself and exposing your prejudices. You’re no longer a person with attributes of taste/colour/sex/sexuality/etc/. You’re English,. A Limey. And those Germans that beat us in the football? They’re not human beings either. They’re filthy Krauts.

And this is how Hitler got away with dehumanising Jews. Removing their humanity in small steps so their extermination wasn’t murder. It was a ‘cleansing’. Beside, they’re just filthy Krauts anyway. Couldn’t happen here could it? Oh no. English are far too clever for that aren’t we? That’s what makes England a great place isn’t it?

Take the flags down now.

There is no such thing as an English summer - just chinks of light that somehow penetrate the shroud of grey for fleeting moments. It’s a cold land. Everything closes at about 11pm. The whole county goes into hibernation until around about 9am. Everything is uniformly dull, grey, dirty, and the general impression that one gets is that you’re bloody lucky things aren’t worse. Service is provided with, at best, a sneer. Portions of food are cold and miniscule.

And on top of this, we’re expected to wander around waving a tatty bit of coloured cloth as if England, with its errant weather, customer disservice, Royalty, obscene property prices, pre-historic closing times, amateur public transport, corrupt government system, RIP Bill, and terminal National Health Service, are a thing to be proud of.

RED WHITE AND BLUE

I find something disturbing in pride in one’s country. I find as disturbing in pride that one has to belong to a particular religion, race, or sex. All factors are arbitrary and we have no control over them. Being proud to be English and waving a flag around would to me be about as sensible as waving a flag with the symbol for the Male genitalia on it. After all, I happen to be male.

Nonetheless, every fourth summer (or every other summer for the particularly avid), this nation jettisons its grounding in common sense, and instead somehow willingly debases itself in a mire of rabid jingoism. Flags are placed on lamposts, car aerials, white van windows, PC’s, T-Shirts, Football shirts, painted on children’s faces, passersby, and any surface that they can be affixed to. Shop windows scream jingoism at me : if I ever state that I don’t like football, people in their ignorance assume I am either gay or in some way mentally deformed. I felt like a ghost during the World Cup : I didn‘t belong in the world I was inhabiting. I existed on the same physical plane as everyone else, but I just didn’t exist in the same mental state of agitation and misled hope as football fans tended to .

The only thing that appears to be of interest is our nationality, the thing that makes us feel that we are somehow better and superior than those walking monkeys from other countries. How incredibly juvenile. And the thing that makes ‘us’ superior - , and I’d like to point out please don’t include me in your pathetic little tribe and your need for belonging, I don’t need approval or herd membership to bolster my sense of self - is often the thing that makes us the exact opposite.

By this, I am not claiming to be superior to those who are rabidly Jingoistic, just different. And I’m sick of having a flag rammed down my throat every time I look out of the window. The Jubilee was a month ago. England got beaten fair and square, because they were crap, by a team that played better than ’we’ did. There’s nothing to celebrate anymore. In fact, there never was.

Englands not a great nation. It has some freedoms, and some luxuries, which I enjoy and don't take for granted, but it’s not worth waving a flag about. A flag, a nataion, is not worth dying for. And that's what flags are for. A handy banner we can attach to Great Britain Ltd : a big organisation geared towards making money where you, the public, are just staff. We are, after all, just Her Majesty's Subjects.