Let’s all go to the football and yell and roar, and cheer and cry, and feel alive — invigorated by our sense of belonging: our club, our district, our nation. Let’s all wave our flags and wear coloured beanies and feel superior and swagger.

Or if we lose, let’s weep into our beer. At least we weep together. If you’re going to feel such sorrow, it’s great to be part of a community, a club, a district, a nation. So let’s all go out and wave our flags and belt the shit out of anyone who disagrees.

We can even go to war to do it. Well, war isn’t what it used to be. These days the flag is on the wall in front of computers where soldiers get fat while remotely dropping bombs on real people in real time. ‘Swatting flies’, they call it. Oh, there’s another village gone. Ho-hum. Another day at the office.

But what does anyone on the ground, who escapes this slaughter, see? A flag, a flag to hate, a flag to stomp on, a flag to burn, a flag to send bodies home in.

Meanwhile the local rowdies reel home from the pub, singing their drunken hearts out.

remote hilltop
just wind and the fluttering
of prayer flags