MEGA-FLAG FLIES AGAIN

As police officers and soldiers saluted and all eyes looked skyward, an American flag the size of a basketball court was draped over a Stuyvesant HS building not far from ground zero yesterday.

The Port Authority, which restored the 60-by-90-foot, 400-pound flag, said it is the largest free-flying American flag in the world.

From 1981 until it was retired in 1988, the flag waved in the wind on major holidays at the George Washington Bridge.

"The Port Authority was really devastated by the attacks. We lost 74 of our employees. We all wanted to do something to help," said Ken Philmus, the agency's director of bridges, tunnels and terminals.

Getting back into operation wasn't enough, he said. "Everybody wanted to jump on the rubble pile and try to help find our friends."

Then George Washington Bridge employees remembered the retired flag and decided to restore it. Two stars were missing, and there were rips and holes in the material.

"I did the seam on the blue side of the flag. I had my family bring my machine in from home, and, on our hands and knees, we worked the machine until it burned out," she said. "We wanted to lift spirits down here. I have a lot of friends still in the building now, and we buried two last week."

Katha Pollitt of the Nation, whose daughter goes to Stuyvesant High school, wrote the following earlier this week:

PUT OUT NO FLAGS

by Katha Pollitt

My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I'm wrong--the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way we're both right: The Stars and Stripes is the only available symbol right now. In New York City, it decorates taxicabs driven by Indians and Pakistanis, the impromptu memorials of candles and flowers that have sprung up in front of every firehouse, the chi-chi art galleries and boutiques of SoHo. It has to bear a wide range of meanings, from simple, dignified sorrow to the violent anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry that has already resulted in murder, vandalism and arson around the country and harassment on New York City streets and campuses. It seems impossible to explain to a 13-year-old, for whom the war in Vietnam might as well be the War of Jenkins's Ear, the connection between waving the flag and bombing ordinary people half a world away back to the proverbial stone age. I tell her she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits.

(The rest of the article is at The Nation site.)

See the earlier post of this article.

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