American Reset

 The other day someone I'm close to called the American flag a "MAGA flag."

Pretty much sums up where we are as a nation on our 250th birthday, doesn't it?

We are America the fissured, America the appropriated, America the For Me But Not For Thee. Patriotism is defined by the harshest and most clueless voices. And, yes, some people look at the American flag and think of it as a MAGA flag, because that species of American has wrapped itself in it and covered their front lawns with it and turned it into hideous sports jackets and sparkly Spandex and who knows what all.

America the appropriated, indeed.

The great irony, of course, is that those who most loudly (and garishly) proclaim their love for 'Merica are frequently those who understand it the least. They have claimed it for their own, yet are vandals of its history. What they know of it is only what our current Vandal-In-Chief tells them, and never mind his own famously tenuous grasp of the American story.

Enough. On this Independence Day, I'm declaring my independence from all of that. I'm going to take my small American flag and put it on the lamppost, and I don't give a tinker's damn what anyone thinks that says about me. 

Because it's not about their smug assumptions. Nor is it about the arrogance of the vandal/patriots and their haughty claims that only they know who is a Real American and who is not.

To hell with all of them, and to hell with their ignorance. It's not for them I'm putting out that humble little American flag today.

I'm doing it for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and James Madison, with whom I share a birthday.

I'm doing it for the men who launched this great experiment, which has somehow survived 250 years despite its contradictions and moral conundrums and its occasionally cotton-headed leaders.

I'm doing it for Harlon Block and Ira Hayes and Michael Strank; for Franklin Sousley and Harold Schultz and Harold Keller. They're the six men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima. Three of them never made it off the island.

I'm doing it for all of those who never made it off their own islands in defense of America, and for those who did but who remain there in heart and mind. I'm doing it for the 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg, for the 101st Airborne at Bastogne, for the Marines who took Belleau Wood. For Bloody Nose Ridge on Peleliu ... and Bloody Lane at Antietam ... and LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang valley.

Who else am I doing it for?

I'm doing it for John Glenn and Gus Grissom and Gordo Cooper. For Alan Shepard and Wally Schirra and Malcolm Scott Carpenter. For Borman, Lovell and Anders ... and Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins ... for all the star voyagers, past and present, who've gone into space wearing an American flag patch, and who sometimes died wearing it.

I'm doing it for the strivers, the entrepreneurs and the smartest people in the room, all of whom came from somewhere else. For Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and Tecumseh and Little Turtle, who did not. For the Irish and Italians and Germans and Eastern Europeans -- and, yes, for the Somalis, the Haitians, the Hondurans, the Venezuelans, on and on. 

To say one group or other doesn't belong here misses the entire point of that flag and the  country it represents -- even if at one time or another some of the most ardent flag-wavers have said it about all of them.

Today I put out that flag not for them, and not for the distortion of America they represent. I'm putting it out there to honor the America that has survived them and untold other idiots for two-and-a-half centuries. I'm putting it out there not only for the Great Experiment, but for the Great American Reset it has always made possible.

Happy Fourth, everyone. Enjoy the beer, the hotdogs and the potato salad, and try not to blow off any appendages.