On the road in a land apart
DD Guttenplan
July 6, 2006 12:55 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dd_guttenplan/2006/07/wish_you_were_here.html
I spent July 4 on a Greyhound bus. Normally I celebrate US Independence
Day by having an argument with my wife, who being both Greek and a
radical is pretty much a walking definition of "un-American", about my
irrepressible urge to hang the stars and stripes from our window in
Hampstead. Thanks to Todd Gitlin's book The Intellectuals and the Flag
this is an argument with which you can all join in.
But this year I took the day off, riding through the sclerotic heart of
industrial New England, from Boston to Brattleboro, counting the flags
along the way - I stopped at 130 - and musing on whether my country had
always been so strange or whether it just seemed that way to me now, an
expat spending my first July 4 on this side of the ocean in a dozen
years.
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