RED, WHITE AND CAN-DO : Now That We’ve Won the War, We Can Rally ‘Round the T-Shirt

I’m feeling so good right about now. You, too? I don’t know, maybe it’s the spring weather. Or maybe it’s that indefinable sense that, after so long, I’m once again a citizen of a Can-Do Country.

Of course, we couldn’t build a television set if our lives depended on it, but regular TV is crap, cable costs too much, and the news is censored anyway. And maybe we are mired in debt more deeply than Bangladesh and Brazil combined. But I’ll tell you this: If and when that debt gets paid off, it’s going to be in dollars. And unless I’m seriously mistaken, they won’t be Australian dollars.

Yeah, things feel pretty good around here. For those of you too young to remember the Bicentennial, things feel the way they did back then. That’s the last time, unless you count the little rush following the L.A. Olympics, that patriotism was really hot. I don’t mean the obligatory round of applause for the ritual bout of nationalistic chest-thumping at a Republican fund-raiser. I mean that T-shirt manufacturers are telling fashion correspondents for this paper that the Simpsons and the Ninja Turtles are out and flags and Operation Desert Storm are in.

You can actually call up a home-shopping channel and have a pin that commemorates Desert Storm delivered right to your mailbox. Is there another country in the world, except maybe Canada, where that could happen? Hey, we can turn around commemorative pins, from design to toll-free number, before most countries even wake up in the morning.

Sure, it’s barely possible to notice that all this euphoria--and I hate that word, it sounds so druggy, but it just means “feeling good” in Greek, and the Greeks weren’t into drugs--is based on, among other things, bombing the hell out of troops in full and frantic retreat. But if an infinite number of monkeys break some eggs, sooner or later you’re gonna end up with an omelet.

We don’t actually have to do anything to justify this good feeling either, like work harder or save more money or help people in need. Somebody else has done the work--people who thought they were getting skills that would serve them well in civilian life. And somebody else is probably going to end up paying for it--maybe the Japanese, who are so busy with their little supercomputers that they can’t figure out how to build a Patriot missile. So all we normal people have to do is feel good.

Patriotism, especially “Hey, we kicked their butts” celebration of country, has always puzzled the so-called smarties. I guess it’s hard for them to understand that this is a country of 250 million people, many of whom are within a generation or two of another homeland, and mindless jingoism is about the only force, aside from love of Oprah Winfrey, that binds us together. They observe that this obsessive need to luxuriate in a bath of nationalistic fervor every 20 years or so is not shared by the citizens of Britain or Sweden or Italy. No one has ever heard a European Lee Greenwood croon that he’s proud to be a Belgian.

But you know what the Belgians, and the Canadians, obsess about when they think we’re not listening? The crisis of national identity. The Canadians fret about whether they’re too much like the Americans or too much like the French to be really, truly, you know, Canadian. Is buying a bottle of Desert Storm beer any less classy than parading around with a placard that says “Curling, yes! Baseball, no!”?

So we have our little binges. The hangover isn’t as bad as that from an alcoholic bender--just a few years of morose national depression and a sullen search for scapegoats--and nobody really gets hurt. So a pacifist Seton Hall basketball player from Italy refused to let an American flag be sewn on his uniform and he got hounded out of the country. Did we really need a pacifist power forward when we were on the Road to the Final Four?

And those little flags won’t be coming off those uniforms anytime soon. We didn’t start singing the national anthem at ballgames until World War II brought us to our senses. This is how traditions get born around here. And, let’s face it, it is a grand old flag and an art director’s dream. Simple, geometric, vivid colors. Born to be on a pair of shorts.

Yeah, I feel good. The Mexicans and the Japanese better not get in our way because once we successfully kick some butt, it can become kind of habit-forming. I have only one concern about our little national party. Aren’t we going to need a constitutional amendment to ban the burning of flag T-shirts? Just in case?