As I drove in to work this morning through suburban Maryland, I noticed — or failed to notice — the American flags which instantaneously materialized everywhere last September 11. The red white and blue sprouted from car windows, clothing, flagpoles, televisions, even radios. “God Bless America.” “United We Stand.” “Remember the Heroes.” It even made its appearance in the form of a tiny little flag on our lawn, placed there by my wife, and now standing tattered and faded among the un-mown grass and the drought-stricken day lilies.

A confirmed cynic, I reveled in the campiness and hokiness of the jingoism of last autumn. I loved the look of confusion which George W. couldn’t wipe from his vapid face. I listened to the forced solemnity with which my friends and relatives told me, “This changes everything.” I stifled laughter as I observed our leaders attempts to rediscover the innocence and unity which permeated the country in the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor, knowing that this post-modern society is incapable of suppressing the self-awareness which such innocence requires.

The images that haunted me in those days immediately following the attacks were three. I still see the desperate men and women — more of them than we will ever have a full accounting of — who, faced with the impossible choice of death by fire or death by suffocation, and knowing that rescue was not in the cards, gambled on a third option and leapt to their deaths from the triple-digit floors. Cameras turned away, tapes were edited, and people only whispered about the leaps. We never heard about what happened when they hit the ground, so, in my mind, those people remain forever suspended in mid-air, hanging in the sky with the ghost-limbs of the Towers themselves.

And that is the second image which stays with me. I drove by and stepped inside the World Trade Center hundreds of times in my forty-one years. I have a very early memory (perhaps faulty) of visiting the excavations, where my father pointed out to me the massive shapes of the Holland Tunnel tubes laid bare amidst the rock and dirt which were being removed to make way for the deep roots of the towers. The Twin Towers were a yardstick for me: four towers laid end-to-end equalled the distance from my apartment to my school; one-quarter mile high meant that the Apollo astronauts travelled a distance equal to about one-million of the towers. I couldn’t picture a million, but I could certainly picture a stack of towers disappearing into the blue sky. Disappearing into the blue sky…

Now I’m older and living in Maryland, and I make the trip to New York once a month, on average, to see my parents and friends. Sometimes, it might mean extra traffic, but even now, we always make a point of driving up the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway because, for a short distance, as we pass under the neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights, we are driving along the East River where we are afforded a magnificent view of the southern tip of Manhattan. I am always amazed by the scale of the skyline, the way it seems as impressive and eternal as the mountainscapes near my brother-in-law’s house in suburban Seattle. Watching the towers come down that day was akin to watching Mt. Rainier suddenly vanish from the Seattle landscape. The towers were a so-solid presence in my life, a symbol of a decade of progress and of the era when our country had big dreams — of building buildings to the sky, of putting men on the moon, of exploring the ocean floors. Now what small dreams does this country dream of? And first and foremost: how much will those dreams cost?

The third picture which stays with me is of the firefighters — or ironworkers or policemen or whomever — raising the flag over ground zero. All I could think of when I first saw the picture was the self-consciousness of that act. How could they create that tableau without realizing or planning their mimickry of the Marines at Iwo Jima? How could photographers not instinctively point their cameras at the sight, just like tourists coming upon a “Kodak Picture Spot” at Disney World? How could newspapers, swept along in a tide of stars-and-stripes fervor refuse to splash that picture on their front page? And how could so many fail to see that appropriating an image of do-or-die heroism does not make one heroic?

Were the people who set out to reclaim the Trade Center site heroes? Does anyone with a risky job qualify as a hero? The cops and firefighters and EMTs who went rushing into the building with no thought of personal safety, with no idea of the nature of the situation –was it over? was it just starting? — to help rescue the victims and survivors of the attacks — those were heroes without a doubt. The men and women who spent the next six months cleaning and disassembling the ruined structures, amidst a field of smoking iron, body parts and the mundane wreckage of office life — they are most of them virtuous and reverent and dedicated and worthy of respect for taking on and completing such a horrific job — but “heroes”? Use a term too lightly and it loses all its meaning.

On Iwo Jima, there were bombs falling, Japanese soldiers who had already vowed to die on the island firing at the Marines from bunkers beneath the ground. The men of Easy Company slogged up a mountain of bloodied volcanic ash to raise the flag on the highest point of the island so that every Marine would see that victory was near and continue their seemingly-hopeless fight. Three of the six flag-raisers were killed by the enemy within a week. The other three maintained for the rest of their lives that they were not heroes — that the only heroes were the dead friends they’d left behind.

The photo of the WTC moment is as false as the multi-culti recasting of the same image in bronze, where the some of the white men raising the flag were replaced by Latinos and African- and Asian-Americans — real men replaced by a metaphor, just as our retribution was aimed at a metaphor. The photo of that moment is as false as our leaders’ deciding to wage war on Iraq, then scrambling for reasons to justify the inevitable carnage. It is as false as our projecting expectations of greatness on the mediocrity who inhabits the White House, merely because he happens to inhabit the White House during a time of national crisis — and doesn’t stick his foot in his mouth, doesn’t cry for his Mommy, doesn’t do anything criminal, and doesn’t immediately launch our entire newkyoolar arsenal at whoever is “evil” or an “enemy combatant” today.

Although my company suggested I do, I’m not wearing red, white and blue today — not because of any disrespect to the thousands who died so senselessly, but because I want to show my friends, neighbors, relatives, co-workers that this country does not speak with one monolithic voice. I love my country, but I hate what the opportunist hypocrites who control it have done in my name over the past year. I would gladly die defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but those who would ask me to defend it are even now dismantling it, removing its protections one by one, until the only right that will remain is the right to carry a gun.

This screed could go on forever. I could talk about my disappointment in the Democrats who have remembered the first part of the term “loyal opposition” while completely forgetting the latter half. I could rant about the likelihood that Nike, Coke and General Electric are sponsoring some of today’s memorial services, with one eye on the flag and one eye on the up-and-coming Afghani market. I could talk about the rotten-to-the-core corporate culture whose putrescent slime-trail leads to the White House and to whatever subpoena-free hole in which our Iraqi-oil-tainted Vice President is cowering.

Instead, I’ll go home and sit with my wife on our driveway and look at our little flag and think about the thousands of New York dead and the hundreds of Pentagon dead and the dozens of Pennsylvania dead and the American servicemen and reporters dead in Afghanistan and the Oklahoma dead and the Afghani dead and the Palestinians and the Israelis and the hundreds of thousands in the original “ground zero” and the millions dying of starvation and of AIDS and of the effects of global warming… I’ll think of my nieces and nephews and how, I have suddenly realized, I don’t envy them the world they are inheriting.