Oh, Say, Can You See?

by Christopher Cooper

On this Fourth of July I did not barbecue a beast. Not a cow, not a pig. No, nor even a chicken or chickens or parts thereof, a scant six weeks from egg to grill, to serve and be served. I did not attend a parade. I find them boring. If I want to see a fire truck, I'll visit my friend the Chief. I confess I did not think about the beach all day. I did pull some weeds and pile some mulch and grind through a small fraction of my acreage gone to hay from rain and neglect, hoping to reclaim enough lawn near the road to appear at least marginally worthy of my corner of the American Dream to passing tourists.

I heard "The Stars And Stripes Forever" on the radio, but, inescapably rooted in the culture of my low-class youth, as surely as "The William Tell Overture" draws from my throat a hearty "Hi-Ho Silver!", so did I use the occasion of this stirring patriotic march to remind my loyal doggies that we must always be kind to our web-footed friends on the very sensible and humane ground that "a duck may be somebody's mother."

Nowhere on the property, my motor vehicle or my person did I display those stars and stripes. Congress is working toward its latest iteration of an anti-flag-desecration Constitutional amendment, and with the Republicans running the show and most Democrats playing parlor poodle there's an excellent chance we'll get it this time. Then those few of us who think we might better employ our time wondering and worrying about the desecration of the Constitution than any banner or symbol will find abundant diversion in bringing suit against redneck teenage girls in red white and blue halter tops and preschoolers who drop their cheesy Chinese-made flags-on-a-stick in the gutter when the chamber of commerce candy-flinging float motors by.

So at least I mowed. That, surely is a good, God-fearing suburban American pastime for any man on a summer afternoon. And in Maine in July mowing means battling deer flies. They are my favorite biting insect. I appreciate their large size, slow speed and direct engagement. They do not steal up to stab the backs of my arms and legs as mosquitoes do, nor do they crawl on my face in great numbers, the tactic of the blackfly. Deer flies wobble close, land on my arm or head, and about half the time find themselves there squashed flat. By me. Even as I mow. Even as I dream up these essays. I have never killed the legendary Seven With One Blow, but I am satisfied with my record.

Over the years, of course, deer flies have continued to prosper and to attack in apparently undiminished number and with equal vigor, despite the considerable toll I have taken. I hate them; I throw all my resources into assaulting those I can smite; they attack as ever. And, despite my fifty per cent kill ratio, enough get through my crude country Star Wars shield to cause me pain, to make me bleed, to itch, to scratch. This campaign is never ending.

But it's worth it.

President George W. Bush asked us to consider whether the deaths of over seventeen hundred American men and women in Iraq (so far) has been "worth it." He then spent the balance of his speech assuring his captive audience at Fort Bragg and those few citizens able to endure his third-grade-reading-lesson cadence that it is not only worth the death and dismemberment and anguish, but that "we will stay in the fight until the fight is won." Now, I have a good ear and a reasonably facile mind, and some part of every day I engage the English language for good purpose, but by the end of that speech I will admit I could not well sort out which references were specifically to the war in Iraq and which to the concurrent if more amorphous "War on Terror." This was probably deliberate on the part of White House speech writers.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ruminated that he expected the Iraq war might require another ten or twelve years to conclude. To "win." Vice President Cheney assured us recently that the Iraq insurgency is "in its last throes."

That's good news, to be sure, and Mr. Cheney, although venal to a fault, is not stupid. (Mr. Rumsfeld seems only predictably stupid, in an Al Haig kind of way. Mr. Bush's intelligence speaks for itself.) So, a decade or so of last throes should net us several thousand more dead soldiers (and tens of thousands of maimed and brain-addled, one of several as-yet untold tales of this popular little war).

Popular? Very, until recently. You remember. By last week, though, over half the persons polled thought it had been "a mistake." Still, an almost equal per centage thought we should stay there and keep doing some version of what it is we've been doing that got seventeen hundred and fifty boys and girls blown up. This will change. Eventually polls will show a majority willing to leave before "the job is done", before "the rise of democracy" is com