Joe Rosenthal's iconic photograph from World War ll, of battle weary soldiers on Iwo Jima struggling to raise the American flag amidst the debris of war, symbolized the spirit of our military, the spirit of our country. 

More than 55 years later, amidst the horrifying debris of the destroyed World Trade Center, weary firemen, consciously imitating their valiant older brethren, raised the American flag, once again symbolizing the strength of our country. 

Update -- Russ Vaughn adds:

TIME Magazine, that bastion of objective news reporting, where journalistic ethics are disappearing even faster than their readers (circulation rates down 17.5% in 2007 from the previous year according to Wikipedia) has trashed an American patriotic icon with its latest cover:

 

The cover is insulting to all American warriors but constitutes absolute sacrilege to one particular branch of American fighting men. TIME’s clueless, liberal editors may have endeared themselves to Al Gore and his Green Lemmings but they have surely incurred the wrath of a far more formidable green organization, the entire present and past United States Marine Corps, the lean, mean Green Machine.

 

In this confrontation between boneheads and Jarheads, all I can say is Semper Fi!

For only the second time in 85 years, Time magazine abandoned the traditional red border it uses on its cover. The occasion – to push more global warming alarmism.

 The cover of the April 21 issue of Time took the famous Iwo Jima photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the Marines raising the American flag and replaced the flag with a tree. The cover story by Bryan Walsh calls green “the new red, white and blue.”

Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute on April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.”

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” Mates said. “Whoever did it is going to hell. That’s a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor.”

 Mates also said making the comparison of World War II to global warming was erroneous and disrespectful.

 “The second world war we knew was there,” Mates said. “There’s a big discussion. Some say there is global warming, some say there isn’t. And to stick a tree in place of a flag on the Iwo Jima picture is just sacrilegious.”