Flag waving

I'm sure that the last World Cup that England participated in didn't precipitate this amount of flag waving. Everywhere you look there are English (St George's cross) flags - cars, houses, my canteen at work, schools. Is it that the English are now more nationalistic, more concerned and insecure about their national identity? Perhaps it is a reaction to England's lack of international success; as if the owning of, and waving of, a flag will have some kind of collective effect on the team's performance? My, perhaps overly cynical, impression is that this is a phenomenon emerging from an availability of cheaply produced flags and an increased number of competing media outlets vying for the attention of an audience that is of a fixed size. Making one's media product more 'patriotic' might make it more popular and increase its circulation.
At a certain point, and probably quite soon, I'll run out of Lichtenberg aphorisms to include in this blog, but not yet. G C has something useful to say about patriotic publications:
"From the love of fatherland they write stuff that gets our dear fatherland laughed at." (Notebook E: 1775 - 1776)
Although perhaps it isn't quite so funny these days.