Some part of me cries out to see this photo. It could have been me. It should still be me.
In 1976, when the United States celebrated her two-hundredth birthday, I was two years old. Even so, I remember the Bicentennial: it was an idea I worked to grasp; it was flags and stickers, and the dim memory of my parents dancing. The souvenir flags stayed around for years, fuelling recollection. They were child-sized, made of silk, made in America.
My two-year-old self barely knew what America was. My parents had left most of it behind and moved back to the land, to an old farm that sat where the foothills of Oregon’s coastal mountains began to slide into the Willamette Valley. They kept sheep and chickens, planted fruit trees and worked two big gardens. They pulled the ancient mower and hay rake behind the lumbering Massey-Harris tractor. Every year, just before winter became spring, our barn filled with ewes and lambs, and the smells of mucus, milk and—occasionally—death.
My parents had been intellectuals, before. My father had a huge library. He read Castaneda, Jung, and St Augustine, and played classical music on the hi-fi. He was always talking about things I didn’t understand: computers; interest rates; politics. The radio talked about these things too, and worse. Mostly I couldn’t understand, but sometimes my parents switched it off anyway.
Until the Bicentennial came along, nothing newsworthy had touched my memory. I was too small to remember waiting in gas lines during the Arab Oil Embargo. The Carter years, the Tehran hostage crisis, and the Falklands war were all yet to come. My greatest concerns in those days were catching earthworms and snakes, and looking for agates in the gravel of our driveway.
My parents had come to the countryside from huge antiwar protests brutally broken up, with no mention in the newspapers. Their hippie friends tended toward flakiness and excess. But although they escaped to a land of woodstoves and beekeeping, their regard for “America” was unquestioned. What we were doing, after all, was typically American, in the best sense: making a living off the land. I felt a contagious certainty, then and later, that America was a good place, that it stood for something noble, even if it currently appeared to be going down the tubes. Which is why that picture embodies something of the child-me.
It’s funny to think about: the 1970s were a pretty grim time. It was an age of unparalleled disillusionment, but it was new disillusionment. Then, if you loved your country you were infuriated by injustice. People actually made a fuss when something punctured their idealism.
Today, there is so little fury. And to unreservedly love this country—to really believe that America is pure and good—requires isolation from reality, or from sanity. You must rely on some hope that the vice-president knows what he’s doing; that the media are out to fooll us. Or, worse, you accept that the End is at hand, and you turn to welcome the catharsis and cleansing of an accelerating Apocalypse—Christian, New Age, Eco-Terrorist or otherwise—that will deliver us from devastation into purity. It takes effort, delusion and superstition to believe in a bright, smiling future.
I am old enough now to feel nostalgia, to miss that long-ago ideal of America, false as it must have been. Really, very little has changed since 1976. We may have quickened our pace, but the world is headed right where it was headed thirty years ago. What shocked then is commonplace now. And a carefree child with a flag seems a lifetime away.
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