Last week I was passing through security at LaGuardia Airport when, as I laced up my shoes, I noticed this flag hanging on the wall:

flag

I dislike forced and bogus displays of patriotism—I can not stand, for example, how the Yankees now insist on playing “God Bless America” at every home game—and something about this flag caught my eye.

Maybe it was the copyright logo after “Flag of Honor.”

Maybe it was the line “Now and forever [this flag] represents their immortality.” Because, of course, if the people who died on 9/11 were immortal, there’d be no need for that flag. Memorializing with overblown rhetoric invariably suggests insincerity and hidden agendas.

Or maybe it was the lack of periods at the end of the final two sentences; sloppy grammar so often gives away the con. Think of all those spam emails from Nigeria—if only they could find a thief who could spell!

So I took a picture of the flag and, when I returned home from my trip, did a little digging.

Naturally, “Flag of Honor” is a scam. If you go to its homepage, you’ll see a lot of stuff about honoring the victims of 9/11. But the most prominent wording on the site takes you to an online store, where you can buy these flags of honor for anywhere from $20 to $1778. (That number is a bit like those missing periods; I suspect the perpetrator of this scam meant $1776.)

Proceeds from the flag sales, according to the site, go to several charities. But it doesn’t say how much of the proceeds, and there’s no name associated with this mysterious Flag of Honor group.

But last year the Associated Press did some digging of its own, and it turns out that the man behind the scam is a guy named John Michelotti, who lives in Greenwich, CT. (Lots of scammers in Greenwich, though most of them wear suits and take the train to Grand Central.) AP reported that Flag of Honor is actually a for-profit company, and though he said that he planned to donate 70 cents from the sale of each flag to charity, at the time of AP’s reporting Michelotti hadn’t given any of the proceeds away—ten years after 9/11.

Maybe that’s changed, but another page at Flag of Honor—not easy to find—announces that the “Flag of Honor Fund” has been closed “because of ongoing financial considerations.”

The flags, however, are still for sale; there are 10th anniversary editions, firefighter editions, and so on.

None of this surprised me much—the patriotism I trust isn’t copyrighted—it’s just particularly offensive given the horribly painful nature of the event involved.

In a way, this offense has some things in common with the brouhahas involving Niall Ferguson and Fareed Zakharia. All three men involved became less interested in substance and distracted by money or fame. But their shortcuts of language and thought revealed their compromises, and some people in the culture still care enough about standards to take those things seriously.

In this Internet age, where substance is to many not an end in itself but merely the means to wealth, and the appearance of substance is often an effective stand-in, we pay less and less attention to language because language is less and less lucrative. Language, for so many, is merely “content,” and content is just stuff you can sell. But words retain their power and, in a sense, their autonomy. They are hard to fake.