Sorry that I've been kind of gone from this discussion after posting the photo. Yesterday kept me pretty busy with some work I had to finish for a paying client. Here's why I made the picture:
I've noticed a huge increase in patriotic displays in Fort Wayne in the last year. This had happened right after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks too, but had died out soon after. Now, suddenly, I am seeing a lot more flags flying, more signs like the one in this house's window. All have one thing in common: They're in poor and working class neighborhoods in the city, some on recently abandoned homes like the one in this photograph. Patriotic displays are nearly non-existant in middle class areas, and are completely absent in wealthy areas of Fort Wayne.
Given that this mainly industrial city, Fort Wayne, has real unemployment approaching 30% due to so many factories moving to Mexico and China, I am fascinated that those who have been hurt most still love their country, while those who have benefited most, do not display any patriotism. I believe that the patriotism of the working class and poor here is genuine. The feeling among them is that America is a great country whose leaders are destroying it. The patriotism is not love of the government, it is a love of what the United States could be if we had leaders who worked for the good of all of our people.
That is something that is within living memory of even relatively young men like me. My father graduated from high school at age 18 and immediately got a job, as a lineman for the telephone company, that paid a middle class income. Today, such jobs no longer exist for the young. The jobs that young people can get pay $8 an hour. Education doesn't solve the problem, as those with degrees are often unemployable here. Nobody that I went to college with at Indiana University's Fort Wayne campus ever found a job unless they left Indiana, as I did when I moved to New Mexico a few years after I earned by bachelor's degree. My generation has been left to die, and no one here cares. The older people didn't care because at first it was only the young who couldn't get decent jobs, but now they're being thrown out of work and told to take $8 an hour jobs too...which is why you now see so many empty houses like the one in my photograph.
I have actually been photographing a lot of these patriotic displays in Fort Wayne over the last year or so. Its becoming a project.
I disagree with all those who say that patriotism is bad or fascist. It can be twisted by cynical politicians, as has happened a lot in the last decade here, but the people who are putting up these signs in Fort Wayne are not rightwing nutjobs or cynical politicians. They're ordinary Americans who think that our country really is great. Maybe they have been manipulated into thinking that, but I know that the USA can eliminate poverty and elevate the lives of those who are being hurt by our government's economic policies if we had the will to do so. Why don't the middle class and the wealthy show the kind of patriotism our working class and poor do? Some have been brainwashed into thinking that only idiots fly the flag, as so many in this thread have asserted. I think most just don't give a damn about anyone but themselves, and REAL patriotism means sticking together as a nation and working together to eliminate the problems that our country clearly has today.
My picture was not a slam on the poor; I was not making fun of the unfortunate people who lived in this house. It was a comment on the death of the 'America' that i knew where poverty was the exception, not the rule. People in places like New York disparage places like Indiana as 'fly-over country'. A place full of people to look down on for their ignorance and poverty. Th real ignorance is found in THOSE people, who have forgotten that all Americans have the right to live decent lives, and the poverty is in the souls of our cynical and morally bankrupt rulers.
