Taps At Reveille
Richmond, Peter
TAPS AT REVEILLE Waking Up After All These Years BY PETER RICHMOND It was a teenager with a couple of earrings and badly dyed spiky blond hair, standing next to the barrel of dried pigs' ears in...
...I know this for so many reasons, but none as telling as what happened on my local alt-radio station today...
...Anchored to sarcasm and irony was like being anchored to the wind...
...We knew how to sneer...
...We had a take on everything, without adding anything to the mix, because we had nothing to add of our own, except a wave of cinematic retro-patriotism that veered from the sincere hero worship of Saving Private Ryan to the hokey, sterilized pablum of Pearl Harbor...
...I didn't know him, or why he was there, or what he had done for our country...
...I just wish that I had more/any faith that the fate of humanity is in able hands," says the e-mail I received a few minutes ago from a friend...
...Then I stood back to admire my work...
...And now that every generation has experienced the trauma, we have common ground, we have a common stamp, and it is permanent...
...The pride I felt at seeing it—the first on the block!—ended all thoughts of how sorry a statement it was that I hadn't owned a flag and didn't even know how to hang one...
...It was REM, singing "It's The End of the World As We Know It...
...he asked...
...Plays the local club ° scene when he isn't doing his daily show...
...run, who reacted as if we were a separate species made up of rich, spoiled, greedy little kids, now know how foolish their generalizations were...
...But it looked wrong...
...the guy who keeps hours very different from those who march on Main Street America...
...And those who thought they knew what made the U.S.A...
...For now, in America, something new has been forged, just at the time when we needed some forging...
...Patriotism has an entirely new meaning, now: to have witnessed and experienced the attacks and come out on the other side with a clearer sense of purpose...
...TAPS AT REVEILLE Waking Up After All These Years BY PETER RICHMOND It was a teenager with a couple of earrings and badly dyed spiky blond hair, standing next to the barrel of dried pigs' ears in the Agway on Route 22, who told me that the logical place to look for a flag was the American Legion post in town...
...Ryan's answer has stayed with me ever since: "Oh," he said, with stunning nonchalance, as if he weren't telling me anything I didn't already know...
...I didn't know what to answer...
...For when it came to being American, my generation, Eisenhower babies born in the mid-fifties, didn't have a clue...
...Don't kid yourself: Abbie Hoffman loved that flag...
...The company's motives may have been purely paternalistic, but its request rang far more of Big Brother-dom, as an absurd act of self-censorship and completely misconceived, for we must live with what happened on that day daily, from here on in, must be reminded of it always...
...I hung it upright, the stripes horizontal, as if it were on a flagpole...
...I learned that early on, three years out of Yale, when, as a sportswriter in New Haven, I was asked to interview Yale's new athletic director, Frank Ryan...
...But that time is over...
...Took me five and a half years...
...But all cliches are based on truth, aren't they...
...But I'd never been inside it...
...After all, there was no surprise that I was unfamiliar with the flag...
...The selfish years...
...We have now arrived in a place where the word "patriotism" will never again carry the taint of rah-rah jingoism, or a cynical subtext...
...Hell, I didn't even know what went on inside it...
...neither fit.Then we were too old for the "Me Generation," which, in a perverse way, was as American as it gets: they had an industry of their own...
...Mine was already up, Peter...
...Then again, I'd felt pretty foolish going around town all morning, two days after the attack, asking where to buy a flag in the first place, thereby admitting that I didn't have one in my attic or my basement or in a drawer somewhere...
...Seventy-five originally, I said...
...What class...
...We contributed nothing...
...And that from here on in, we belong to the land as strongly as the generations that came before us...
...Because for all of their cunning, the hijackers and their bosses somehow didn't anticipate the most basic law of American physics: that the good to come out of an act of terrorism will always be exponentially greater, correlatively, than the evil that contributed to the original tragedy...
...On September 11, 2001, we were attacked on our own soil for the first time, not only in my lifetime, but in all of our lifetimes...
...What we were willed was cynicism, and how detached it made us...
...We weren' t the lost generation, those of us who came to adulthood in the mid-Seventies, a decade that has been relegated in history to the status of a bad television show...
...If I were a different sort of man myself, this would have seemed like the best kind of time and place to be having a morning drink...
...But he's a guy in his early thirties, and I think his youth blinds him from seeing how we have never been in better hands: our own...
...Hal is my age...
...The front doors of American Legion Post 178 were locked, but in the parking lot out back I saw three cars, and when I pressed my face to the glass of the back door, I saw a long bar inside, men hunched on stools and a TV tuned to CNN...
...We were of no particular use to anyone other than ourselves and those right around us...
...We had no name, no pride, no identity...
...This was patently obvious to the kid, even a kid who seemed emblematic of slackerdom incarnate: that if you needed to buy an American flag, you'd go to the American Legion...
...It is always thus, in the development of the individual or of a nation: the organism matures, outside events trigger innate propensities, push it to the next level of awareness...
...The old Cleveland Brown quarterback had left his position on the faculty at Rice to reinvigorate Yale's fumbling sports program...
...Hell of an acoustic guitar player, has a CD of his own...
...the guy who never owned a suit...
...Then the next song—the next on his list of defiant songs—came on...
...For once, I—and, I hope, my generation—had been ahead of the American curve...
...They've told me about your classes .You guys were the classes known for contributing nothing...
...They didn't make rails or cars, but they made money...
...All we ended up contributing were a legion of post-modern, 84 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 post-ironic commentators...
...Somehow, our attackers hadn't anticipated that in attacking the fat and happy land, they would, in fact, change it...
...Thanks for showing the flag," said the man who'd opened the door, with no irony, nor judgment...
...They're nearly all from friends reaching out, to not only affirm that we're still here, but also that something is changing, something that even the most detached generation in American history can feel...
...we were the loser generation...
...This hadn't occurred to me, even though I'd driven past the Legion post next to the dry cleaners every day for the last four years, ever since we moved to town...
...Back home, I tacked the flag to the roof of our front porch, with red and white tacks, next to an empty wasp nest...
...It was a spotlessly clean place, lit by the sun outside and the neon beer signs in the room itself...
...It was in one of those old-fashioned beer glasses that men used to drink Schlitz out of in their basement rec rooms...
...Leaving no legacy...
...one left, a 3-foot-by-5-foot flag, for $28...
...Anyway...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 85...
...So I bought the last flag in Millerton, New York, my small blue-collar town two hours north of Ground Zero, and turned to leave...
...The accumulating stories of heroism and hope and selflessness here at home outweigh the tragedy a hundredfold, on so many levels—this is obvious to all now...
...On "Hal's Show," Hal decided to play all the songs that "Clear Channel," the nationwide radio conglomerate, asked its thousand-plus stations not to play, lest they put us in mind of the horror of Black Tuesday...
...When I tried the door and found it locked, one of them swung off his stool, walked over, opened the door without a word and returned to his glass of beer...
...A very friendly guy...
...I can feel this...
...The guy who, over a couple of beers, you share your cynicism with about big money, about country club politicians, about the morass of materialistic mainstream America...
...And we have our enemies to thank for it...
...The flurry of contacts from people with whom I thought I'd lost touch, as well as from regular friends, has been remarkable...
...Sure, I marched, but I was just trying on the attitude, like my older brother's borrowed "Strike...
...For wasn't it just a few hours after I put my own flag up that Peter Jennings told me Congress had passed a resolution to fly flags for 30 days...
...And then, through my car-radio speakers, he started to sob...
...Then I heard myself say, "Thanks for believing in the things we all believe in right now," and I walked out...
...The world has seen that New York is not a city of arrogant, violent, materialistic boors, but an amalgam of all of us, a global gumbo, one of those cliched melting-pot World War II movie platoons that, when put to the test, answers with its best...
...It was his last one...
...Because of a handful of unthinkable acts of terrorism, our nation was forced to grow up a great deal in a very short time...
...For the first time, we are part of the continuum that spans from my dad to my son—the 16-year-old slacker who told me the other day that he wanted to enlist, if only they'd let him...
...We were much too young to feel the pride of the last good war, of course, but we were also too young to even feel the pride of the anti-war movement thirty years ago, which at bottom was tremendously patriotic—as patriotic in its own way as my neighbors hunched over their morning beers at Legion Post 178...
...Instead, I asked the man behind the bar if he had any flags to sell, and he said he had Peter Richmond writes about sports for GQ...
...Three men sat at the bar, drinking beers and some kind of whiskey, even though it was just after 11 on a brilliantly sunny cloudless morning...
...76 by the time I got the diploma...
...And if I can feel it, from the depths of my cynicism, we all can...
...To know Hal, the alt-folkie, is to know a very familiar face of my generation: the guy who moves to a different kind of music...
...He was right...
...Its meaning is now clear and clean, and as long as all of us share its understanding, this is all we will need to win this war...
...And our uselessness was obvious to everyone else...
...Just thanks...
...No one could be so outraged with a nation's policies unless they cared about their country...
...That's not much...
...But it was what we knew how to do...
...I told Ryan I'd been a Yalie myself...
...I felt sort of foolish, that a kid in a feed store had to tell me where to buy a flag...
...They seem to share not only my age, but also my conviction that we have not just united as a nation, but that, finally, we have united as generations and—for the first time—that mine has a place...
...And I feel fine...
...Well, today, Hal—the happy hippie— broke down on the air, as he said these words, as he pleaded with all of us, listening to his show: "We have to leave something better than this for our children," came the cracking voice...
...t-shirt...
...So I climbed back up the ladder, and hung it again, downward this time, with the blue field of stars on the top, and the stripes vertical...
...Today, as I write, with my flag luffing in an autumn wind, visible out the living room window, my phone rings, and the e-mails arrive in clusters...
Vol. 34 • November 2001 • No. 8
