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Need a good pair of red, white, and blue earmuffs? I recently happened on a web- site offering everything from starred-and-striped dildos to Uncle Sam worthy DVD players and toilet seats. Why, E-Bay’s even got a set of red white and blue designer luggage, in case you’re abroad and no one can tell you’re American. But it isn’t the utter oddity or variety of the items available, or the exuberance shown in the shameless sale of this tripe that struck me as bit off-center. Strangeness, zeal, and salesmanship are central to American culture and always have been. So what hit me so wrongly about this new wave of patriotic panhandling? It felt like the first time I heard of Nazis ripping the gold teeth out of holocaust victims before they were killed to strengthen the wealth of the nation. Kind of like Native Americans using all of the buffalo, but a bit on the rotten side, cannibalistic. A lot of people died that morning in September. Was this our way of grieving? Personally, I do not subscribe to the notion that putting a bumper sticker of Old Glory on an SUV makes a person an honorable citizen. To me, a patriot is one who nobly embodies the American idea. What citizenship means in a Babylon of race, religion, and language is a tough question. Hundreds of brilliant thinkers have hundreds of different thoughts on the topic, but there must be central truths. It seems to me that the purest form of any idea can be found at its origin. The best way to be a good American is to be like the first Americans: to embody the transcendental self, to uphold truth and fight against tyranny, to exude loyalty to those who share the nearest soil to you, the nearest sweat.
Approximate Word count = 1057
Approximate Pages = 4.2
(250 words per page double spaced)
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