Come, come. Americans need no help from biased foreign news coverage to look ridiculous. It's their birthright.
>To someone who lives here, and has lived here all his life, it's not as
>prominent as it looks to outsiders, I think.
Well I too have been planted in the US since birth, and in all the many decades since then -- including the Vietnam period -- Americans in general have never seemed more a pack of patriotic saps than they do now.
>You can take pictures of a few people waving flags and make that look like
>the whole population to people in places like Australia, where all they can
>see are the pictures, but the reality on the ground is a bit different.
>There was a fair amount of flag waving right after 9/11, which is quite
>understandable, given the tremendous emotional shock. There was also a rise
>in flag waving (but not so great) at the onset of the Iraq war. But at this
>point, the only people waving flags are the rabid Bush supporters.
I think you're focusing too much on the word "waving." Those little flags flapping on car-mounted flagstaffs that were so popular after 9/11 have gone away, but I still see plenty of non-waving flag decals on vehicles, and they are at least double the size of any flag decals in previous common use. In addition, there is a new explosion of patriotic ribbon display -- with car decals showing yellow support-the-troops ribbons, red-white-and-blue ribbons, or combinations of the two.
All in all, this remains a land congenial to the most florid excess of patriotic sentiment.
Carl