It was sunny and hot today, and I wore a red summer dress. I was trotting down the street when I noticed with alarm that the flowers on the dress were not, as I'd thought when I bought it, white and black. They were white and BLUE.
I was wearing red, white, and blue.
Oh, lordy.
New Yorkers in general are supposed to be above such hokey gestures, ones like wearing Santa hats in December or green on St. Patrick's Day.
So, naturally, I wasn't pleased to be wearing a floral version of the American flag around Greenwich Village, perhaps the most cynical neighborhood in the most cynical city in the whole damn country.
Especially because I am not feeling particularly patriotic this July. Not by a long shot.
There are ideologue dunces out there who would have us believe that love of country is the same thing as love of policy. Love America, they say, love its wars. Hate its wars, hate America.
I think that we can all agree that this is a stupid, reckless simplification. I have plenty of love of country. I recognize that I am a thoroughly American product, and I'm obsessed with the old-fashioned American themes of self-creation and pursuit of happiness.
But I have never felt less giddy about waving an American flag.
It would be easy to blame everything on the current administration. I'll leave that to Maureen Dowd. We all know that Darth Vader and a monkey puppet occupy the executive offices of the White House. Yes, it's widely known that we're in a disastrous war in Iraq and no one knows why or how we're going to get out of it. And, oh yes, we all know that these days an entire American city can get practically wiped off the map, and then not even be mentioned in the subsequent presidential State of the Union address because poor blacks don't usually vote for Republicans anyway.
We know all of that already.
But laying blame entirely at the feet of the administration is too easy.
Every generation has had its dark, destructive politics and policies. Don't forget that before we had Bush, we had Nixon. And then there was that lovely Iran-Contra incident, and Kennedy's secret assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. Oh, and all of those CIA-sponsored coups of democratically-elected governments. And so on.
But at least in ye olde days, when Americans hated their government's policies, they did something about it.
During the Vietnam War, our parents formed an incredible tide of counter-culture. War gave them an active, effective community, even if it wasn't the "we're all in this together" culture of the second world war. And that counter-culture was patriotic as hell, because it was democracy flexing its muscles.
What I want to know is this: where is my generation's collective counter-culture?
Hmmm, let's see.
Is it in our iPods?...Nope, no counter-culture there.
Let's turn on MTV. I don't see a lot of counter-culture there, either - but ooo, goody! Justin Timberlake is bringing sexy back!!
If we turn the channel, surely the evening news will show us some student demonstrations, lobbying for the end of the war or protesting the Supreme Court's recent ruling on racial standards for school admissions.
Well, ... maybe not, after all. But I'm certainly very relieved to learn that Paris Hilton survived her harrowing experience in the pokey.
Isn't it a little bit disturbing that the only pop-cult figure who feigns concern with the state of America's affairs is A.J. Soprano?
Sixty-million people voted for Bush, but nearly as many people voted against him. But what happened to those opponents when Bush won? They seemed to melt away like snow, and let him spend his "political capital" in sullen silence.
Yes, Americans voted in a slim Democratic majority in the midterms elections, but that hardly amounts to rage.
Just where the hell is that rage?
A while back, Vanity Fair sponsored an essay contest about why we have no youthful counter-culture these days. I can't remember who won that contest or what he or she said, but my friends and I discussed the question for hours.
"The stakes are too high to be fringe these days," said one.
"There's no sense of real community anymore, with the internet and all," said another.
"We're too fat and happy," said a third.
"Well, as usual, the rich kids don't care," said a final commentator. "The middle-class ones are working too hard on their extra-curriculars. And the poor ones are so disenfranchised and alienated that they don't know where to begin."
I personally am 31, a mite too old to be called disaffected youth. But it bothers me, really bothers me that men and women 10 years my junior from mostly from tiny towns in places like Texas and West Virginia are getting their faces shot off in Iraq, and we're too lazy to even talk about it at home.
Maybe Congressman Rangel was right, when he said that we need to reinstate the draft. And maybe the draft notices could get text-messaged or IM-ed, so they'd be sure to get noticed by their highly-wired recipients.
Because if more of us were called upon to make that high level of sacrifice, it would jolt us out of being fat and happy just long enough to kick up a fuss.
Just maybe.
Oh, and for the record: I went home and changed my dress.