Moral failure rocks the boat. Perpetual moral failure inevitably sinks the ship. Every flag that’s weathered down to a dusty powder throughout history knows this story. And every flag, inevitably, awaits the same fate.
Magalomania is a country that cares very little about other countries unless it can strike a seemingly benevolent but ultimately very manipulative arms-deal with them. It’s a nationstate in which many people have been struggling for generations. They live in situational poverty, but because they have been spoon-fed the fairytale that they live in the greatest nation on the planet, they are very proud of their flag. Big empty yards with eroded driveways where crooked mailboxes stand slanted next to a weathered flag that’s muttering some repetitive old heroic war-tale in the wind. Their wars are civil, though, the weathered flag insists, the good kind. Only very good wars against very bad people. No other choice, you see?
Kid’s teeth are rotting out of their mouths. The roofs of their never-weatherproof homes are leaking. The smell of old dogpiss continues to linger in the livingroom no matter how many discounted yet still overpriced faintly-vanilla scented candles get lit on the coffee table that’s always covered with ever-accumulating stacks of unopened and mostly irrelevant mail that nobody has the time to read. God bless Magalomania. Land of the faintly-free. Land of some faint memory of liberty. A fever dream in which a strangely shaped cardboard cutout of freedom is supposed to cover up a couple hundred years of systemic cruelty and exploitation. Multitudinous missteps are manually airbrushed out of the narrative by a whole army of system servants who can’t afford to lose their job, even if that means airbrushing away evidence of their own oppression. If you look very closely at its liberty fortresses you might notice deep cracks in the moldy plaster walls and frighteningly shaky scaffolding propping the whole thing up. But the hero is the hero, the fairytale implores [please, let’s not make this too complicated now lest we no longer know who we are.] The hero is the hero and the villain is the villain, and that’s not us! For we are proud Magalomanians! We can’t be. That’s not us. It’s not. Us. Is it?
Every flag, every empire, awaits the same fate. It may very well be time to build some of those communal arks, kids. Or learn swiftly how to swim.
Yvet Youssef 