111 countries, and a record July

Panama became the 111th country to have had a reader click on this blog, and total number of hits for the month of July is reaching a record, well over 4,300. Earlier in the month two other new country-clickers were Uruguay and Togo.

Panama has a long history intertwined with the U.S. It was originally colonized by Spain, after Balboa crossed the isthmus to be the first European to see, and  name the Pacific Ocean, in 1513. It gained independence in 1821 and was part of Colombia until 1903.
That's when the U.S., wanting to build the Panama Canal, managed to get it to secede from Colombia. The 48-mile canal was completed in 1914 by the US Army Corps of Engineers, and remained under American control until 1999. That happened because of a 1977 agreement, and there's an Oklahoma connection. Senator Henry Bellmon was one of those backers and he was criticized heavily in his home state and  on the editorial pages of The Oklahoman. I remember seeing a billboard saying "Benedict Bellmon."
But American intervention has also been tawdry. The country was largely democratic until the military took over in 1968, and the US and CIA supported it, including a military strongman, Manuel Noriega, tho took over in 1983, even though he was involved in drug deals and assassinations. 
President Reagan  supported him, using secret funds to back Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Congress learned of it, and blocked the funds, but Reagan and his CIA subordinate Marine Oliver North used secret money from arms sales to Iran to work with Noriega and illegally keep the funds going. It's called the Iran-Contra affair. Eventually though Reagan invoked sanctions on Noriega, and President Bush(the first), invaded in late 1989 to capture him, based on threats to Americans, drug charges, and protecting the canal. Noriega was captured in five days, and was in prison until 2007. He was extradited to France on murder charges and sentenced to seven years in 2010. But the French released him to Panama, to serve 30 years in prison.  Oliver North now works for Fox news.

Since then, the country has had four successful democratic exchanges of power. The country is economically strong. A 2012 poll found that its capital Panama City has the happiest people in the world. Revenue from the canal is a huge portion of the country's income.
Its flag, dating from independence, has two stars and four squares, representing the different political parties. The blue is traditional for the conservative views, and the red for the liberal. America has it backwards, referring to blue and red states. Until that division in very recent years, calling someone in America a "Red," amounted to calling them a Communist. 

Sacred and secular...flags of readers

You can get in a fight in America, and sometimes arrested, for dishonoring the country's flag. Misuse or disrespect of the flag is a political issue. A sure way to anger Americans, protesters in other countries know, is to burn it. To those who have served in the military, it is almost sacred.

But there is at least one flag of regular readers of this blog that is religiously sacred--that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Adopted in 1973 with white inscription and sword on the background of green for Islam, the flag carries the Islamic creed, the "shahada." In Arabic, it's pronounced "lā ʾilāha ʾillā l-Lāh, Muḥammadun rasūlu l-Lāh."
"There is no god but God and Muhammad is the messenger of God."

The sword stands for the house of Saud, the founding dynasty of the country. The kingdom was founded by Abdul-Aziz bin Saud in 1932, though conquests began in 1902.
Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam and is sometimes know as the "land of the Two Holy Mosques," in reference to Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in Islam.
Saudis take their flag religiously. It is never lowered to half staff as a sign of mourning, or hung vertically, because that would be blasphemous. In another instance, in the Olympics, an attempt to put the flag on soccer balls was reversed after protests, for the same reasons.
Another flag of frequent readers of this blog has a longer, but more secular,  history, that of the Republic of Colombia, Adopted in 1861 after winning independence from Spain in 1823, the flag is unique in that its stripes are not of equal width, and German philosopher Johann Goethe inspired it, telling the designer:

"Your destiny is to create in your land a place where the primary colors are not distorted,"
The colors represent the gold of the country, the seas on its shores and the the blood of heroes who gained the country's freedom.
Colombia has been a land of turmoil and long rebellions, and most recently drug cartel violence, but violence and danger are decreasing and tourism and the economy  increasing. After Mexico, it has the largest population of any Spanish-speaking country. It is one of few countries  to have shores on two oceans, the Pacific and Atlantic.

Important to me and this blog, in addition to its readers, is its huge coffee crop, which was once second largest in the world. Now, thanks to climate change which has decreased production, it ranks third behind Vietnam and Brazil.
Oh, and by the way, as Saudi Arabia gets its name from a person and family, Colombia does too, in a way, named for Christopher Columbus.