Amerika!

I'm not a patriotic person. The closest I get to any species of "patriotism" is my ardent - some might say fanatical - backing of the U.S. Men's Soccer team. When the U.S. is playing I'll drape myself in flags and borrowed glory and rant and weep and curse at the fortunes of my tribal affiliation, but it goes no further in my life. I rise for the Pledge to the Flag daily at my school but I don't recite the thing. What's the point? Ritual is best left to religions - when you mix it with national affiliation you attach a dangerous corona of holiness about the idea of a Nation-State and that's where things get dicey. Rituals belong in church where they go together with the idea of worshiping a deity. I think we get into dangerous waters when we allow our national affiliation to take on these religious over-tones. Overall, I think I agree with Samuel Johnson who said, of patriotism, that it's the "last refuge of a scoundrel." I put "patriotism" in the same dark closet as "racism" and "sexism". As far as I'm concerned the "-ism" is a dangerous suffix. That's a litter of mongrels that's best bagged up in a burlap sack and thrown into  the river.

Right here is where I part ways with the average American, even though I'm at pains to express my entire satisfaction at living here and enjoying what I've got. I see my nation like I see my home: peculiar and comfortable and with a smell that I never notice but which may strike the visitor as disconcerting when they come to the door. My home is my home and I love it but I'd be a fool and somewhat childish if I considered my home to be The Best. It's got a lot to recommend it but there are issues.

It's what I consider a mature attitude.

Some of my favorite Fourth of July celebrations, therefore, have taken place not here in the United States but abroad. Instead of the ritual and pageantry and boosterism and jingoism of the holiday as celebrated across our Land I get a different, more personal look at America. Sometimes you need a little distance from a thing to get a more clear look . . .

The first Fourth of July I spent abroad was twelve years ago. We were in Italy and had just come down out of the lovely warm curves of the Tuscan countryside into the seedy, colorful cliffside city of Sorrento. It was my first encounter with the North/South divide in Italy and it struck me as powerfully as the many field trips I took in elementary school, growing up in Connecticut, where culture was a bus-ride away in NYC. Within a short time the verdant, bucolic and carefully cultivated storybook landscape becomes gritty and shabby and . . . somehow sexy. Exotic and dangerous and other-worldly.

We were staying in a small hotel with a small pool in the small courtyard and we learned first hand the sin, in Italy, of  taking bath towels from your hotel room to serve as pool towels. We also learned first hand that walking through the lobby in barefeet to the pool was a taboo. Each sin committed by our American tour group caused the hotelier to look away as if receiving a blow to the gut. He would grimace with eyes closed, blow out his breath, and then endeavor to explain, patiently but with no little exasperation.

The night of the Fourth a group of us from Winder made our way to the roof of the hotel with a bottle of wine to enjoy an intimate and altogether exotic holiday celebration, one much smaller and more low key but, somehow, more meaningful - in a foreign land where you don't speak the language and the masturbatory celebration of Hurray America! is far away. Sorrento clings to the cliffs and no place is particularly far from falling into the ocean in a swam dive of graceful sordidness. The Tyrrhenian Sea was a pornographic purple and the moon lay upon it, all silvery black; large gangs of young people buzzed up and down the narrow streets in swarms of scooters making the noise of ten thousand leaf blowers, on missions that were entirely carnal. To our left we could see the glass elevator that rode up the outside of the hotel, from the courtyard.

Our Winder group was combined with an unruly pair of student groups from Kentucky and Pennsylvania that we referred to as the Penciltucky People. The students were inevitably drunk every night, in that clumsy asinine way that teenagers have and they were drunk this night too, and therefore they packed too many of their Penciltucky crowd into the glass elevator and we watched from the roof as it made its sluggish, halting way up the side of the hotel, shuddering a bit, until it stopped for good between floors . . .

We watched as the realization that they were stuck dawned on them, slowly. They begin to mill around in agitation and the elevator began to shudder and rock. Perhaps they were pushing buttons or trying to force the doors. One of their crowd noticed us on the roof across the courtyard, no fifty feet away, nearly on the same level and they began gesturing to us in Improvised American Sign Language to "Get Help!" "Go Now!" But we weren't inclined to do so. Inevitably, whatever drunken foolishness the Penciltucky kids perpetrated upon a long-suffering Italy throughout this trip, it was blamed on us: their noise, their trashing the lobbies, the bottles of wine left in the corridors. They hard slyly managed to shunt all the blame our way and now they were trapped and we were comfortable and somewhere, over the Bay of Sorrento, fireworks were going off - for the Fourth of July or some Saint's festa. We had wine and we were comfortable and these kids were shits.

Very quickly the glass sides of the elevator fogged over and then we could only watch the silhouettes of the prisoners flit from side to side, causing the car to sway and bump. One of the Penciltucky kids, knowing we were sitting not far away - and supposing that we were unclear on their predicament - wrote "Get Help!" in the fogged glass, but he wrote it backwards from the perspective of someone outside of the car and so we pretended that we didn't understand. He wiped his forehead and then wiped away his message and then, carefully, wrote it backwards so that we could read it.

Aha! We mimed! Now we get it! And we raised our bottles of wine to him in triumph at our unpuzzling the puzzle. But we didn't get help. Time moves along in the Mediterranean in a way that we Americans can't quite ever truly understand. History is in the air, the rain and the mortar of the stairs that switch back and forth down the cliff-faces to the sea. What is our history when compared to thousands of years of human habitation and drama in this ancient land? We drew a distinction between ourselves and the unruly and brash and callow Penciltucky mob. We had left "hurry" behind us in the States and now we were on Italy time . . . it was the Fourth of July and fireworks fell fizzling into the sea, while the Island of Capri leaned coyly in the distance.