Star And Stripe Quotes

I love you," Ty said out of the blue, his voice almost sing-song. Zane laughed. "You're drunk." "I loved you before I was drunk.

Had a gay bull I had to sell last year. That was a damn nuisance. Gay son? That don't cost me nothing.

I want you to put 'He didn't want to ride the damn horse' on my tombstone.

Don’t matter who you love, son,” he said. “As long as you do it well.

Good kitty" "Why do you encourage them?" "They're good kitties." "They're your minions." "Everyone needs a minion or two" "You won't be so pleased when you find me ground up in their food bowl one day.

Guy with a gun, I’m your man. Big white tiger with teeth, it’s every steak for himself." - Ty Grady

So, Mr. Grady, how did you find yourself in the FBI?” (…) Ty gave her a charming smile. “The Marines didn’t want me, and it’s hard to find a job where you can shoot things without getting arrested.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

All you shitheads need Jesus so far as I'm concerned.

She told me to wait,that I was going to lose a finger." Earl looked toward the kitchen and back at Ty and Duece. He snorted. "I asked her, did she think I was stupid? Then a couple of snips later, whack. Off went the finger. And you know what that woman said to me? I said 'Mara you cut my finger off.' And your mother said to me, 'Well Earl who's stupid now?

You lurve the tiger," Zane croned. "Shut up, Zane".

Ty,” Zane yelled, “don’t shoot the tiger!” “He started it.” Ty continued to stare at the tiger, and the tiger at him.

I refuse to live with any more evil cats. It’s him or me.

„Ty, the horses are not conspiring against you.” Ty crossed his arms and shook his head. „He looks at me. And he talks to me! And he knows I don't know what he's saying!” Zane squinted at him. „Okay. I think you've been out in the sun a little too long.

Ball prints on my hood!

Where do you get bitter cherries?" Deuce asked. "Disgruntled trees.

What are you two up to today?" "Oh, I just figured I'd show Ty some more of Texas. Head down to San Antonio and visit the Bureau office there," Zane said. He shot a sideways look at Ty. "Maybe spend the night in Beaumont." Ty smacked his forehead and turned his head away. "Not much in Beaumont to see," Harrison said with a frown. Zane grinned. "Even so, we're going to try to get it in." Ty had his hand over his mouth, his head down. He was either going to throw up or he was laughing. Harrison felt he'd missed a joke, but he thought maybe he didn't want to know.

Okay there, Ty?" "Yes, sir," Ty answered with a grimace. "Bad leg. Old football injury. Tripped over the water boy. There was Gatorade everywherem it was horrible.

...there are so many paths in life. Some we choose, and some are chosen for us. We walk our paths without looking down and that's the life we lead. The only things you'll get from guessing where another path would have gone are questions you can't answer and heartache you can't ever soothe.

All's I'm saying is love's a blessing, no matter all the same.

You make me ride a horse, you get unbridled puns.” “That’s clever, I approve.” “Thank you.” Ty said

He's scared, Zane." "Well he should join the fucking club." "Come on, Barnum" "Ty, you are not the tiger whisperer," Zane hissed.

Quit your bitching and go buy me a Stetson

Somewhere along the line, he'd come to terms with the fact that the more dangerous Ty seemed, the hotter he was. Zane had no regrets.

You brought my son back and turned him into a beautiful thing. I expect you’ll take the same care with that ol’ Hoss.

How can you approve of them? Does it not bother you that your son, your only son, the very last male to carry the Garrett name, goes home from work every night to another man? That doesn’t offend your sensibilities?” “Not one bit,” Harrison said. He picked up his newspaper again. “At least he looks forward to going home.

The only things you’ll get from guessing where another path would have gone are questions you can’t answer and heartache you can’t ever soothe.

You gonna fight me, faggot?” Ty looked him up and down, then glanced at the men behind him. He shook his head. “Not until you make it a fair fight. Go get more friends. I’ll wait.

Zane rolled his eyes. "Galloping crazies." Ty squeezed his hand. "Well, you said you liked horses.

I'd like to see a flag made not out of stars and stripes, but rather fingers and knuckles, so that it could really wave in the wind. It would be the most welcoming flag in all the world.

Whoa, Lone Star,” he said, laughing as he looked Zane up and down with a critical eye. “You’ll have to buy me dinner before you get that far.” “I already bought you dinner,” Zane pointed out as he righted himself and sat down. “And he’s already gotten that far!” Mark added.

You're driving me fucking crazy!" "There's a short trip!

Once upon a time, [...]. There was a world that was perfectly made and full of birds and striped creatures and lovely things like honey lilies and star tenzing and weasels— [...] And this world already had light and shadow, so it didn't need any rouge stars to come and save it, and it had no use for bleeding suns or weeping moons, either, and most important, it had never known war, which is a terrible and wasteful thing that no world needs. It had earth and water, air and fire, all four elements, but it was missing the last element. Love. [...] And so this paradise was like a jewel box without a jewel. There it lay, day after day of rose-colored dawns and creature sounds and strange perfumes, and waited for lovers to find it and fill it with their happiness. The end. [...] The story is unfinished. The world is still waiting.

He had no doubt that he knew who Ty was now, inside and out. He knew every one of Ty's quirks and weak spots and favorite things. He knew what Ty found funny and what annoyed him. He knew what would break his heart. He knew how to touch him to drive him wild, and when to back off when Ty was having a bad day. He knew that Ty was kind and loyal and funny, that he had a deep sense of honor and righteousness. He knew that Ty would die to save a stranger, and kill to save a friend. That was the type of man he was.

The stars and stripes were fluttering bright against the rain, clear blue overhead, and their minds were saying the words before their ears heard them.

In the valley of the giants where the stars and stripes explode, the peaches they were sweet and the milk and honey flowed.

Ty frowned. “I don’t hate all other animals.” “Horses. Dogs. Chipmunks.” “They’re twitchy, Zane. And chipmunks have shifty eyes.” “Moths?” “They have erratic flight patterns!” Zane doubled over, laughing so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. Ty glared at him. “I’m glad my phobias amuse you.

I've been thinking," Ty said as he pressed his nose to Zane's cheek. "Not your strong suit.

If the thing they were fighting for was important enough to die for then it was also important enough for them to be thinking about it in the last minutes of their lives. That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you've given it away you'd ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You're goddamn right they didn't. They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a father a wife a child They died with their hearts sick for one more look at the place where they were born please god just one more look. They died moaning and sighing for life. They knew what was important They knew that life was everything and they died with screams and sobs. They died with only one thought in their minds and that was I want to live I want to live I want to live. He ought to know. He was the nearest thing to a dead man on earth.

Come on, Elmer,” he said to his horse. “Let’s find a nice prickly cactus you can toss me into.

Good or bad?” Ty asked, rubbing his fingers over Zane’s chest to soothe him. Smith chose that moment to come out of hiding, pouncing on his moving fingers and landing on Zane’s chest. His claws sank in, turning the bed into a frenzy of cat fur, flying linens, and screaming FBI agents.

Mostly I’ve been in the office, trying to inflict a paper cut on myself serious enough to require medical leave.

Ty grunted. “Guy with a gun, I’m your man. Big white tiger with teeth, it’s every steak for himself.

You okay to mount?" he asked Ty. "Next time you ask me that, you better be naked.

There were guns. And tigers. And horses, Ma, the horses were horrible. And basically, people wanted to kill us. Well, not us specifically, but—

The Christian icon is not the Stars and Stripes but a cross-flag, and its emblem is not a donkey, an elephant, or an eagle, but a slaughtered lamb.

I am. You sound hungover.” “It’s Canada Day.” “So?” “So, I’m in Canada.” “Why?” “Because it’s Canada Day! Come on, Garrett!” Zane snorted.

I slipped some... surprises in the tea after y’all left. Ma and Dad should both sleep ’till noon. I might have killed Grandpa, we’ll see in the morning.

He wanted to reach through the phone and hug his partner, who was, for all intents and purposes, a large teddy bear with a gun.

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.

We forget that there is much more patriotism in having the audacity to differ from the majority than in running before the crowd; we forget that in the resistance of the minority some of the biggest things in our own history have been accomplished, and the man who looks on the Stars and Stripes and doesn't hold a right to say nay to his neighbor, even if the neighbor is of the larger party, has forgotten the history of his country.

When the rain had hit the beach and Zane had turned to retreat to their room, Ty grabbed him instead and started a waltz in the downpour. When they finished the dance, people applauded from their balconies. It had been the first taste of what life with Ty might be like when they came out. It had also been one of the most romantic moments of his life.

My ass hurts, Garrett.” “Didn’t we have this conversation when we first met?

Okay, go hang up your kitty pictures and pet your car.

You brought my son back and turned him into a beautiful thing.

You couldn’t have just said you wanted to be dragged back to the house and fucked, huh?” “I didn’t know that was an option!

Are you ready to go home, my love?” Zane bit his lip and nodded. “I’m ready for anything.” Ty’s grin was slow and mischievous. “I certainly hope so.

His lover was a born entertainer who liked to kill things. How he wasn’t in a psychiatric ward or on a Most Wanted list somewhere was anyone’s guess.

Ty, the horses are not conspiring against you.” Ty crossed his arms and shook his head. “He looks at me. And he talks to me! And he knows I don’t know what he’s saying!

What exists beneath the sea? I’d always pictured it in colors of emerald and aquamarine, where black velvet fish with sequined eyes swim among plankton. But, when my eyes adjust, I see gray stones, lost anchors, wet wood, buttons, hooks, and eyes, the salem witches who wouldn’t float, stars and stripes, missing vessels, windup toys, the souls of Romeo and Juliet, peaches, cream, pistons, screams, cages of ribs and birds, tunnels, nutcracker soldiers, satin bows, drugstore signs, Pandora box ripped open at its hinges.

I saw a banner hanging next to city hall in downtown Philadelphia that read, "Kill them all, and let God sort them out." A bumper sticker read, "God will judge evildoers; we just have to get them to him." I saw a T-shirt on a soldier that said, "US Air Force... we don't die; we just go to hell to regroup." Others were less dramatic- red, white, and blue billboards saying, "God bless our troops." "God Bless America" became a marketing strategy. One store hung an ad in their window that said, "God bless America--$1 burgers." Patriotism was everywhere, including in our altars and church buildings. In the aftermath of September 11th, most Christian bookstores had a section with books on the event, calendars, devotionals, buttons, all decorated in the colors of America, draped in stars and stripes, and sprinkled with golden eagles. This burst of nationalism reveals the deep longing we all have for community, a natural thirst for intimacy... September 11th shattered the self-sufficient, autonomous individual, and we saw a country of broken fragile people who longed for community- for people to cry with, be angry with, to suffer with. People did not want to be alone in their sorrow, rage, and fear. But what happened after September 11th broke my heart. Conservative Christians rallies around the drums of war. Liberal Christian took to the streets. The cross was smothered by the flag and trampled under the feet of angry protesters. The church community was lost, so the many hungry seekers found community in the civic religion of American patriotism. People were hurting and crying out for healing, for salvation in the best sense of the word, as in the salve with which you dress a wound. A people longing for a savior placed their faith in the fragile hands of human logic and military strength, which have always let us down. They have always fallen short of the glory of God. ...The tragedy of the church's reaction to September 11th is not that we rallied around the families in New York and D.C. but that our love simply reflected the borders and allegiances of the world. We mourned the deaths of each soldier, as we should, but we did not feel the same anger and pain for each Iraqi death, or for the folks abused in the Abu Ghraib prison incident. We got farther and farther from Jesus' vision, which extends beyond our rational love and the boundaries we have established. There is no doubt that we must mourn those lives on September 11th. We must mourn the lives of the soldiers. But with the same passion and outrage, we must mourn the lives of every Iraqi who is lost. They are just as precious, no more, no less. In our rebirth, every life lost in Iraq is just as tragic as a life lost in New York or D.C. And the lives of the thirty thousand children who die of starvation each day is like six September 11ths every single day, a silent tsunami that happens every week.

Zane,” Annie said with a hand on his shoulder. “Go find a state that allows it, and marry that man.

Want to go to West Virginia and risk life and limb with me?" Zane smirked and gave a single nod. "Sounds like fun.

Ty rested his hand on Zane’s chest again and closed his eyes. Zane turned his head with infinite care and kissed Ty’s forehead. Wesson gave him a warning growl. “Mine,” Zane told the cat.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean it couldn't make it this far. Could be drugs, could be sex trade, could be horses." "If the next option is sex with horses, I need you to stop right there." "We're not in that part of Texas." "I bet you look hot in the hat though." "Stop trying to distract me!

All’s I’m saying is love’s a blessing, no matter all the same.

How wonderful it would be if everything could always be as clear and simple as it used to be when you were twelve years old, or twenty years old. If there really were only two colors in the world: black and white. But even the most honest and ingenuous cop, raised on the resounding ideal of the stars and stripes, has to understand sooner or later that there's more than just Darkness and Light out on the streets. There are understandings, concessions, agreements. Informers, traps, provocations. Sooner or later the time comes when you have to betray your own side, plant bags of heroin in pockets, and beat people on the kidneys—carefully, so there are no marks.

I met this kid from Miles City, Montana, who read the Stars and Stripes every day, checking the casualty lists to see if by some chance anybody form his home town had been killed. He didn’t even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there was someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. “I mean, can you just see *two* guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?

That stood to reason. Life is awfully important so if you’ve given it away you’d ought to think with all your mind in the last moments of your life about the thing you traded it for. So did all those kids die thinking of democracy and freedom and liberty and honor and the safety of the home and the stars and stripes forever? You’re goddam right they didn’t.

For the first time, they were actually discussing their future in concrete terms. They’d both known, on some level, that they intended to spend the rest of their lives together.

It was a large bay gelding, which for Ty translated to "big-ass brown horse.

You’re bullshitting.” “Don’t they call it horseshitting down here?

Hey, Ty?” “Yes, my darling?” Ty responded sarcastically from halfway up the staircase. “I love you.” Ty grinned and started up the steps again. “I like what Texas does to you, Zane.

A breeze stirred Dovewing's pelt, as is someone had walked past. She lifted her head an saw two figures standing just beyond her Clanmates. One was a badger with a narrow, striped face, the other a grotesque, hairless cat who's blind, bulging eyes saw nothing but everything. They met her gaze and nodded, just once. "Thank you." Dovewing heard, quieter then a sigh. "There will be three, kin of your kin, who will hold the power of the stars in their paws. They will find a fourth, and the battle between light and dark will be won. A new leader will rise fro the shadows. This s how it always has been, and always will be." -Rock and Midnight, The Last Hope

When you go for romantic, you go all out, don’t you?” “Only way to go.” Zane knelt and crawled onto the blanket, straightened the edges out where they’d blown over, then turned around, still on one knee, and held his hand out. Ty took it, meeting Zane’s eyes in the flickering light. Zane hesitated, looking up at him with brown eyes that seemed to have gone liquid in the low light. Time seemed to slow. Ty found himself short of breath, and he had no idea why. Zane bent his head to kiss Ty’s fingers, breaking the little spell he’d cast, and then he tugged Ty down to join him on the blanket.

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important.

She came upon a bankside of lavender crocuses. The sun was on them for the moment, and they were opened flat, great five-pointed, seven-pointed lilac stars, with burning centres, burning with a strange lavender flame, as she had seen some metal burn lilac-flamed in the laboratory of the hospital at Islington. All down and oak-dry bankside they burned their great exposed stars. And she felt like going down on her knees and bending her forehead to the earth in an oriental submission, they were so royal, so lovely, so supreme. She came again to them in the morning, when the sky was grey, and they were closed, sharp clubs, wonderfully fragile on their stems of sap, among leaves and old grass and wild periwinkle. They had wonderful dark stripes running up their cheeks, the crocuses, like the clear proud stripes on a badger’s face, or on some proud cat. She took a handful of the sappy, shut, striped flames. In her room they opened into a grand bowl of lilac fire.

It won’t take but a few hours to ride out that way,” Harrison said. “We’ll take it easy.” “I’m sorry.” Ty looked up from what remained of his food. “Did you say ‘ride’?” Harrison nodded. “On a horse?” “What other kinds of things do you ride?” Zane asked.

It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believes that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.

The fusty showman fumbles, must Fit in a particle of dust The universe, for fear it gain Its freedom from my cube of brain. Yet dust bears seeds that grow to grace Behind my crude-striped wooden face As I, a puppet tinsel-pink Leap on my springs, learn how to think— Till like the trembling golden stalk Of some long-petalled star, I walk Through the dark heavens, and the dew Falls on my eyes and sense thrills through.

Mr. Morris, you should be proud of your great state. Its reception into the Union was a precedent which may have far-reaching effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold alliance to the Stars and Stripes. The power of Treaty may yet prove a vast engine of enlargement, when the Monroe doctrine takes its true place as a political fable.

Ralph Hibbs said his heart stopped, for he realized that it was the first Stars and Stripes he'd seen since the surrender. All the men in all the trucks stood at attention and saluted. Then came the tears. "We wept openly," said Abie Abraham, "and we wept without shame.

What he’d said to his family at dinner the other night was true. The thought of asking Ty to marry him was appealing.

This Ty Grady had Zane wrapped around his finger. It was almost sweet.

Goddamn, Zane.” “What?” “How is Texas making you so freaking hot?” Zane

Welcome to the family, Zane,” she said, and the sincerity in her voice made his throat tighten. “I wish I’d known earlier, but if wishes was dollars, I’d be the Queen of Sheba.

The American flag doesn't give her glory on a peaceful, calm day. It's when the winds pick up and become boisterous, do we see her strength. When she unfolds her hand, and shows her frayed fingers, where we see the stretch of red-blood lines of man that fought for this land. The purity of white stripes that strips our sins, and the stars of Abraham's covenant, broad in a midnight blue sky. The rights our forefathers established. As it waves high in the currents of freedom, where the Torch of Liberty shines over the sea, does she give meaning to unity. When we strive as one nation, or when it drops half-mast, to a fallen soldier.

I think the black suits you more than the brown did.” “Oh yeah?” “Brings out your eyes.” “Is that what you look for in cowboy hats?” “Maybe. You know, in high school, if a girl got a guy to give her his Stetson, it was a sure thing they were going steady,” Zane said, his voice heated and smug. Zane’s attempts at flirting were a never-ending source of amusement. And damn him, they were starting to work. “You saying I’d make a great Texan girl?” “I’m saying you look damn good in my hat,” Zane growled. He cupped Ty’s chin with one hand and leaned over in the shadowed truck cab to kiss him.

Drawn crudely in the dust of three window-panes were a swastika, a hammer and sickle, and the Stars and Stripes. I had drawn the three symbols weeks before, at the conclusion of an argument about patriotism with Kraft. I had given a hearty cheer for each symbol, demonstrating to Kraft the meaning of patriotism to, respectively, a Nazi, a Communist, and an American. "Hooray, hooray, hooray," I'd said.

At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America - with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers in his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

Uh . . . I’m thinking . . . I love you. And I’m glad things didn’t go to plan when we were both younger.” Zane slid his fingertips across Ty’s lips. With a blink, his expression changed, and he was gazing at Ty with such longing and love that he might as well have screamed it at the top of his lungs. “I wouldn’t change it,” he rasped. “Any of it.” He

Earlier in the morning Company A, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines had attacked eastward into the ruins of Shuri Castle and had raised the Confederate flag. When we learned that the flag of the Confederacy had been hoisted over the very heart and soul of Japanese resistance, all of us Southerners cheered loudly. The Yankees among us grumbled, and the Westerners didn’t know what to do. Later we learned that the Stars and Stripes that had flown over Guadalcanal were raised over Shuri Castle, a fitting tribute to the men of the 1st Marine Division who had the honor of being first into the Japanese citadel.

the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.

...when we broke the surface again the first thing I saw was the great bold stripe of the Milky Way painted across the heavens, and it occurred to me that together the fish and the stars formed a complete system, coincident parts of some ancient and mysterious whole.

The snowmen stood in bunches, in families, and the breeze generated by the car snatched at their striped scarves. Snowmen fathers and snowgirl mothers with their snowchildren and snowpuppies. Top hats were in abundance, as were corncob pipes and carrot noses. They waved the crooked sticks of their arms, saluting Mr. Manx, Wayne, and NOS4A2 as they went by. The black coals of their eyes gleamed, darker than the night, brighter than the stars.

A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?

Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep, Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes, What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep, As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam, In full glory reflected now shines in the stream: ‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave! And where is that band who so vauntingly swore That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion, A home and a country should leave us no more! Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave: And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave! Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand Between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.” And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

It was a strange sight to see these black men rallying around the Stars and Stripes, when white men were trampling them under foot and riddling them with bullets.

Loneliness from time to time was the price of freedom, and freedom wasn’t a stars and stripes, Boy Scout idea, it was doing what you damn well wanted to do—all the time.

The more he saw of the man who’d caught his son’s heart, the more he liked him.

Stars and stripes, Zane.

Heppenheimer’s Shoppe was now the Stars and Stripes, trying to convince its customers that the owners were patriots, begging them not to turn them in to the local APL. A

Reach beyond the stars; read between the stripes.

On his arm he wore an armband with a star on it.

Shortcake.” I ignore him. “Shortcake.” “I do not know anyone by that name.” “Play with me for a minute,” he says it softly, right in my ear. I turn my face to his and try to regulate my breathing. “HR,” I manage. His face is so close to mine I can taste his breath, hot mint sweetness. I can see the tiny stripes in his irises, tiny unexpected sparks of yellow and green. There are so many blues I think of galaxies. Little stars.

The gnome did indeed have a flag, but not an American one. Not even the Maine flag with the moose on it. The one the gnome was holding had a vertical blue stripe and two fat horizontal stripes, the top one white and the bottom one red. It also had a single star. I gave the gnome a pat on his pointy hat as I went past and mounted the front steps of Al’s little house on Vining Street, thinking about an amusing song by Ray Wylie Hubbard: “Screw You, We’re from Texas.

Jeff Davis’s name they’ll proudly praise, ah ha, ah ha And Lincoln’s tomb will be disgraced, ah ha, ah ha The nation’s flag will lose its stars The stripes they’ll change to rebel bars And we’ll all wear gray if the Johnnies get into power

Happy birthday. Your thirteenth is important. Maybe your first really public day. Your thirteenth is the chance for people to recognize that important things are happening to you. Things have been happening to you for the past half year. You have seven hairs in your left armpit now. Twelve in your right. Hard dangerous spirals of brittle black hair. Crunchy, animal hair. There are now more of the hard curled hairs around your privates than you can count without losing track. Other things. Your voice is rich and scratchy and moves between octaves without any warning. Your face has begun to get shiny when you don’t wash it. And two weeks of a deep and frightening ache this past spring left you with something dropped down from inside: your sack is now full and vulnerable, a commodity to be protected. Hefted and strapped in tight supporters that stripe your buttocks red. You have grown into a new fragility. And dreams. For months there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of unyielding curves, frantic pistons, warmth and a great falling; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights through your window blinds crackling into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.

You rarely saw the celebs protesting anything of substance. The Glades weren't a sexy enough cause, but give the latest blonde-haired twenty-something who'd just hit it big on TV six or seven horn-tailed, red-spotted, sticky-beaked, pigeon-toed, multi-striped tree-owls who might occasionally fly over the two-mile zone pumping millions of barrels of oil out of the ground, and suddenly she began to feel a stronger connection to the land than the Ancient Ones, the Anasazi. Two months later of course, the only red-spotted, sticky-beaked creature in sight would be the little blonde's flush face when she made it on TMZ for failing a breathalyzer test and cursing the cop arresting her, shouting the typical Hollywood star mantra: "Don't you know who I am?

See that guy over there?" I nod toward a man in jean shorts and a Budweiser T-shirt. "Am I that obvious?" St. Clair squints at him. "Obviously what? Balding? Overweight? Tasteless?" "American." He sighs melodramtically. "Honestly, Anna. You must get over this." "I just don't want to offend anyone. I hear they offend easily." "You're not offending anyone except me right now." "What about her?" I point to a middle-aged woman in khaki shorts and a knit top with stars and stripes on it.She has a camera strapped to her belt and is arguing with a man in a bucket hat. Her husband,I suppose. "Completely offensive." "I mean,am I as obvious as her?" "Considering she's wearing the American flag, I'd venture a no on that one." He bites his thumbnail. "Listen.I think I have a solution to your problem, but you'll have to wait for it. Just promise you'll stop asking me to compare you to fifty-year-old women,and I'll take care of everything." "How? With what? A French passport?" He snorts. "I didn't say I'd make you French." I open my mouth to protest, but he cuts me off. "Deal?" "Deal," I say uncomfortably. I don't care for surprises. "But it better be good." "Oh,it's good." And St. Clair looks so smug that I'm about to call him on it, when I realize I can't see our school anymore. I don't believe it.He's completely distracted me.

What are you boys up to?” “Zane was showing off for me,” Ty said with a smile. “I was trying to teach him how to rope.” “I can’t imagine he’ll learn much, way he was staring at you.” Ty looked away, but even the hot summer sun couldn’t mask the blush creeping over the man. Harrison

Far, indeed, in my wishes, very far distant be the day, when our associated and fraternal stripes shall be severed asunder, and when that happy constellation under which we have risen to so much renown, shall be broken up, and be seen sinking, star after star, into obscurity and night!

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of the dots. At length, I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at the very moment with great emotion, in intricate detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which whole worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped, in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water…I saw may apples in forest, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided and apples grew striped and spotted in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves, and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wilds ducks flew, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remembered the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “Yes, that’s how it was then, that part there we called ‘France’”. I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.

But before we cue the brass section to blare "The Stars and Stripes Forever," it might be worth taking another moment of melancholy silence to mourn the thwarted reconciliation with the mother country and what might have been. Anyone who accepts the patriots' premise that all men are created equal must come to terms with the fact that the most obvious threat to equality in eighteenth-century North America was not taxation without representation but slavery. Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1776 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, a generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, "This is your Fourth of July, not mine.

In 1855, at the height of the Crimean War, Roger Fenton’s photograph, ‘The Valley of the Shadow of Death’, published in The Times, poignantly captured the aftermath of British retreat in the face of the Russian army with a single image of an empty battlefield. There was only one problem. Fenton had constructed the entire scene, moving cannon balls artfully until he had the perfect image. In 1945, on the beach of Iwo Jima, legendary war photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the most famous image of battle ever taken: the raising of the Stars and Stripes as American soldiers took the summit from the Japanese. It won him the Pulitzer Prize. Both are a lie.

Deuce groaned. “Ma, what sort of pie was that?” He was rubbing his stomach. “Bitter cherry. Lucy Hopewel had one at the potluck a week back, and I thought I might try it. It wasn’t good?” “It was good, Ma,” Ty said, voice flat. “Where do you get bitter cherries?” Deuce asked. “Disgruntled trees,” Ty said. He looked over his shoulder with a smirk.

You are all more or less wearing the same types of clothes—look around the room and you will see it’s true. Now imagine you’re the only one not wearing a cool symbol. How would that make you feel? The Nike swoop, the three Adidas stripes, the little Polo player on a horse, the Hollister seagull, the symbols of Philadelphia’s professional sports teams, even our high school mascot that you athletes wear to battle other schools—some of you wear our Mustang to class even when there is no sporting event scheduled. These are your symbols, what you wear to prove that your identity matches the identity of others. Much like the Nazis had their swastika. We have a very loose dress code here and yet most of you pretty much dress the same. Why? Perhaps you feel it’s important not to stray too far from the norm. Would you not also wear a government symbol if it became important and normal to do so? If it were marketed the right way? If it was stitched on the most expensive brand at the mall? Worn by movie stars? The president of the United States?

I wish now that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag. We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

Refusing to stand during the national anthem or to salute the Stars and Stripes is not illegal, but it is not sustainable for the nation’s privileged to sit in disgust for a flag that their betters raised under fire on Iwo Jima for others not yet born. Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating custom and tradition as by breaking laws.

Rise and enter the lair, where the darkness gives you your stripes. Tell tyrants, to you, their allegiance they owe," Etta read, running her finger beneath the words within the star. "Seek out the unknown gods whose ears were deaf to lecture. Stand on the shoulders of memory. Bring a coin to the widowed queen. Remember, the truth is in the telling, and an ending must be final.

Just like in the movies I watched on community television, a beautiful collection of elevated houses parades both sides of the street, each with their respective porches and separated by green lawns. Trees and gardens, cut to perfection, adorn the front of each home. Some have a flag of stars and stripes planted in the ground, and the street is empty except for a dog roaming down the block.

Americans live no longer in homes, but in theaters. The members of many families hardly know each other, and the face of some popular TV star is to many wives as familiar as that of their husbands. Let no one smile. Rather should we weep at the portent. It will do no good to wrap ourselves in the Stars and Stripes for protection. No nation can long endure whose people have sold themselves for bread and circuses.

Sappho isn't really meant to be read. It's meant to be sung and there were dances for the songs, also. Sappho was a performance artist, and now she exists as a textual project. She was saved by her critics, and by people who wrote of her in letters to each other. As the morning sun lathers the pool through the long windows and stripes the opposite walls in gold, I look at the fragment translations. She's paper, too. A paper poet for a paper boy. People claim to be translating her but they don't, really, they use her to write poems from as they fill in the gaps in the fragments. A duet. She may have meant for these to be solos but they're duets now, though the second singer blends in with the first. The first singer in this case is offstage, like in the old days of stars who couldn't sing, a real singer hidden behind a curtain, which is the velvet drape of history.

Campbell was an ordinary-looking man, but he was extravagantly costumed in a uniform of his own design. He wore a white ten-gallon hat and black cowboy boots decorated with swastikas and stars. He was sheathed in a blue body stocking which had yellow stripes running from his armpits to his ankles. His shoulder patch was a silhouette of Abraham Lincoln’s profile on a field of pale green. He had a broad armband which was red, with a blue swastika in a circle of white.

Woodard was riding at the back of a Greyhound bus, because that is where Black people traveling through the South sat in 1946, no matter what they had done for their country. He proudly wore his green army uniform. Three stripes on each arm showed his rank. He had four medals pinned on his chest. There was a Good Conduct Medal, an American Campaign Medal, a World War II Victory Medal, and a battle star Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal. He was awarded the last one for bravery.

I never wanted it to end. I wondered if it felt like this the first time. Seeing him. Really seeing him. He wiped his eyes. “You really want to know, don’t you.” “Yeah.” “Why?” I gave in. I couldn’t not. I reached over and put my hand on his knee. He tensed briefly but settled when I curled my fingers over his leg, just letting my hand rest there. I couldn’t look at him. I thought my face was on fire. He said, “That’s….” His voice broke. He cleared his throat. “After the hunters came, something shifted. Between us. I don’t know how or why exactly. You stopped being weird around me.” “Seems like I’ve picked that right up again.” He chuckled. “A little. It’s okay, though. It’s like… a beginning. You came to me one day. You were sweating. I remember thinking something bad had happened because you kept wringing your hands until I thought you were going to break your bones. I asked you what was wrong. And you know what you said? “Probably something stupid.” “You said that you didn’t think you could ever give up on me. That no matter how long it took, you would be there until I told you otherwise. That you weren’t going to push me for anything but you thought I should know that you had… intentions.” “Oh dear god,” I said in horror. “And that worked?” Kelly snorted, and I felt his hand on the back of mine. “Not quite. But what you said next did.” I looked over at him. “What did I say?” He was watching me with human eyes, and I thought I could love him. I saw how easy it could be. I didn’t, not yet, but oh, I wanted to. “You said you thought the world of me. That we’d been through so much and you couldn’t stand another day if I didn’t know that. You told me that you were a good wolf, a strong wolf, and if I’d only give you a chance, you’d make sure I’d never regret it.” I had to know. “Have you?” “No,” he whispered. “Not once. Not ever.” He looked away. “It was good between us. We took it slow. You smiled all the time. You brought me flowers once. Mom was pissed because you ripped them up from her flower bed and there were still roots and dirt hanging from the bottom, but you were so damn proud of yourself. You said it was romantic. And I believed you.” He plucked a blade of grass and held it in the palm of his hand. “There was something… I don’t know. Endless. About you and me.” He took my hand off his knee and turned it over. He set the blade of grass in my palm and closed his hand over mine. He looked toward the sky and the stars through the canopy of leaves. “We came here sometimes. Just the two of us. And you would pretend to know all the stars. You would make up stories that absolutely weren’t true, and I remember looking at you, thinking how wonderful it was to be by your side. And if we were lucky, there’d be—ah. Look. Again.” His voice was wet and soft, and it cracked me right down the middle. Fireflies rose around us, pulsing slowly. At first there were only two or three, but then more began to hang heavy in the air. They were yellow-green, and I wondered how this could be real. Here. Now. This moment. How I ever could have forgotten this. Forgotten him. It had to have been the strongest magic the world had ever known. That was the only way I’d have ever left his side. He reached out with his other hand, quick and light, and snatched a firefly out of the air. He was careful not to crush it. He leaned his head toward mine like he was about to tell me a great secret. Instead he opened his hand between us. The firefly lay near the bottom of his ring finger. Its shell was black with a stripe down the middle. It barely moved. “Just wait,” Kelly whispered. I did. It only took a moment. The firefly pulsed in his hand. “There it is,” he said. He pulled away and lifted his hand. The firefly took to its wings, lifting off and flying away. He stared after it. I only had eyes for him.

We were scorning the symbol of hypocrisy and hope. Many of us had only begun to realize in Africa that the Stars and Stripes was our flag and our only flag, and that knowledge was almost too painful to bear. We could physically return to Africa, find jobs, learn languages, even marry and remain on African soil all our lives, but we were born in the United States and it was the United States which had rejected, enslaved, exploited, then denied us. It was the United States which held the graves of our grandmothers and grandfathers. It was in the United States, under conditions too bizarre to detail, that those same ancestors had worked and dreams of “a better day, by and by.” . . . I shuddered to think that while we wanted that flag dragged into the mud and sullied beyond repair, we also wanted it pristine, its white stripes, summer cloud white. Watching it wave in the breeze of a distance made us nearly choke with emotion. It lifted us up with its promise and broke our hearts with its denial.

Hearing her favorite story had calmed her. It had made her braver. Familiar stories do that. They're as much a part of our identity as the backs of our hands. If we were zebras, our stories would be our stripes. If we were pilots, they would be our compass. If we were adventurers, they'd be our North Star. Our stories are what makes us unique. The combination of stories in our lives—the unique mix of the stories we choose to read, choose to live—makes each of us just a tiny bit different from everyone else on the planet.

I remembered another life… Once, my skin wasn’t covered in smooth snake scales like the naga women or striped in hide like the shape-shifting maidens. Once, my skin bled from one hue to the next, shifting to reflect the transition from evening to night. Before, I never left the riverbanks unless my skin was the cream and pink of a newborn sunset. But something had changed…I had met someone. Someone who had seen me the way I was and had not sneered. He had seen me, reached for me when my skin was velvet black and start-speckled. I could still feel his stare--lush as obsidian, star-bright and pouring into the crevices of my dreams.

My youthful dreams of the future were born from the gentle sadness of those evenings, far removed from the rest of life, when you lie in the grass beside the remains of someone else’s campfire, with your bicycle beside you, watching the purple stripes left in the western sky by the sun that has just set, and you can see the first stars in the east. I hadn’t seen or experienced very much, but I liked lots of things, and I thought that a flight to the moon would take in and make up for all the things I had passed by, in hopes of catching up with them later; how could I know that you only ever see the best things in life out of the corner of your eye?

Woodard was riding at the back of a Greyhound bus, because that is where Black people traveling through the South sat in 1946, no matter what they had done for their country. He proudly wore his green army uniform. Three stripes on each arm showed his rank. He had four medals pinned on his chest. There was a Good Conduct Medal, an American Campaign Medal, a World War II Victory Medal, and a battle star Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal. He was awarded the last one for bravery. When the bus arrived at a rest stop in a South Carolina town now known as Batesburg-Leesville, Police Chief Lynwood Shull and his officers dragged Woodard off the bus. The bus driver hadn’t liked the way Woodard asked to use the restroom fifty-four miles back, outside of Augusta. So, when the bus got to the town, the driver called the police, even though he and Woodard hadn’t shared two words since that stop. The police demanded to see Woodard’s discharge papers. Then the cops forced him into an alley, where they beat him savagely. For good measure, the police chief used his baton to gouge Woodard’s eye sockets until both eyeballs ruptured beyond repair. Woodard was blind from that day forward. He was twenty-seven. And remember, all this happened while he was wearing the very uniform that identified his service to his country

Always remember... We are engaged in a battle for the continuation of our capitalist, free-market economic model; our way of life; and our liberty. The enemy is anticapitalist, believes in big government, embraces collectivist ideologies, and has, over the past century, infiltrated every level of our government and most of the banking industry. They don’t care about patriotism, although they may sport the red, white, and blue and the stars and stripes on their bumper stickers. They don’t care about personal responsibility or civic duty. They don’t share your sense of honor. All they care about is power and control over your money and every aspect of your life.

Alwasy remember.... We are engaged in a battle for the continuation of our capitalist, free-market economic model; our way of life; and our liberty. The enemy is anticapitalist, believes in big government, embraces collectivist ideologies, and has, over the past century, infiltrated every level of our government and most of the banking industry. They don’t care about patriotism, although they may sport the red, white, and blue and the stars and stripes on their bumper stickers. They don’t care about personal responsibility or civic duty. They don’t share your sense of honor. All they care about is power and control over your money and every aspect of your life.

MARKET GARDEN had won a sixty-five-mile salient that crossed five major water barriers but led nowhere. Without turning the German flank or gaining a bridgehead over the Neder Rijn, 21st Army Group had nearly doubled the perimeter to be outposted, from 150 to 280 miles. That task would entangle most of Second Army, as well as the two committed U.S. airborne divisions, which, with Eisenhower’s tacit approval, would be stuck helping the British hold this soggy landscape until mid-November, eating British oxtail soup and heavy puddings, drinking British rum, and smoking British cigarettes considered so foul that some GIs preferred to inhale torn strips of Stars and Stripes.

The great American dream that reached out to the stars has been lost to the stripes. We have forgotten where we came from, we don’t know where we are, and we fear where we may be going. Afraid, we turn from the glorious adventure of the pursuit of happiness to a pursuit of an illusionary security in an ordered, stratified, striped society. Our way of life is symbolized to the world by the stripes of military force. At home we have made a mockery of being our brother’s keeper by being his jail keeper. When Americans can no longer see the stars, the times are tragic. We must believe that it is the darkness before the dawn of a beautiful new world; we will see it when we believe it.

Students at the University of Chicago were warned that the adult world was “rough and bloody … but if you have enough of the lust of battle in you, you will have a pretty good time after all.” Elsewhere in the Windy City, in a major address to mark Washington’s birthday, he thundered his gospel, “Life is strife,” against a backdrop of Stars and Stripes. “There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people,” Roosevelt went on, “to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer.” He urged his audience, in the name of Washington, to be ready for the day when America had to uphold its honor “by an appeal to the supreme arbitrament of the sword.

he found a palpitating snake, Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.  She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue, Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard, Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d; 50 And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed, Dissolv’d, or brighter shone, or interwreathed Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries — So rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries, She seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf, Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self. Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar: Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet! She had a woman’s mouth with all its pearls complete: 60

When I got to the gig I was told I would be singing for a male vocalist. In walked this sexy, serene, toasted-almond-colored artsy young man—he just looked like the definition of an artist. His thick, dark hair was just in the beginning phases of dreadlocks. He had a perfect five o’clock shadow, with a thick stripe of goatee down the center of his chin. He was dressed rock star casual: heavy black leather vintage motorcycle jacket, black jeans, black T-shirt. He had a thin ring in his nose and smelled how I imagined ancient Egyptian oils would smell. His face was kind and fine, with a boyish smile. He went by the name of Romeo Blue. His friends called him Lenny. And about a year later, the world would know him as Lenny Kravitz.

The flag story is important, Berntson thought. Before the assault was over, Christmas had sent Frank Thomas, his gunnery sergeant, to find an American flag. He knew it was against the rules. This was a war on behalf of the Republic of Vietnam, and the correct flag to run up the pole at its province headquarters would have been Saigon’s yellow and red ensign. But Christmas’s men had bled and died all the way across southern Hue, not ARVN troops. They had looked up at that enemy flag the whole way. They had taken it down, and they wanted to show who had done it. The Stars and Stripes had earned its place. Berntson continued jotting down Christmas’s words: “‘Proudest moment of my life—to be given opp to do it’ . . . ‘main thought was getting the flag up—so it would fly and everyone could see that flag flying’ . . . Capt. Ron Christmas, 27, 2001 S.W. 36th Ave, Fort Lauderdale, FLA CO for 2/5 Hotel . . . ‘street fighting is dirtiest close in. Biggest problem is control—keeping all platoons in line—communication also problem . . . platoons have done extremely well . . . flag. ‘inspiration thing I have ever seen in my lifetime—because it was a hard thing. That feeling of patriotism . . . all you could hear are cheers . . . really brings out America Spirit.’” Hours later, Christmas was paid a visit by two officers, both majors, one army and the other marine. They had been sent by Colonel Hughes from the compound. They said the American flag would have to come down. The South Vietnamese flag was the appropriate one. The men around Christmas were still loading up the wounded and dead. “I don’t think my men are going to like that,” he said. “That doesn’t make any difference,” said one. “You are violating protocol.” “Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Christmas. “If you want to take the flag down, you guys go take it down. But I cannot be responsible for all of my men.” Kaczmarek, who was sitting close enough to overhear the exchange, chose that moment to reposition his rifle. The majors left. The flag remained. Christmas had a gunny sergeant haul it down at sunset, and the next morning a bright yellow South Vietnamese flag flew in its place. But watching Old Glory run up that afternoon was a sight none of the marines who witnessed it would ever regret, or forget.

The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.

When people wrap their point of view in the flag, notice the number of stars in which they have clothed themselves. There are fifty. There are no versions of the Stars and Stripes that eliminate conservative states or liberal ones. There are fifty stars. The blue field on which those stars shine isn’t called “the Union” for nothing. If you honor the flag, if you like to stand during the national anthem, you are adopting all the stars. Our flag is the very image of compromise. If you chose America, you chose all of America, “Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all.” No democracy has survived any other way. It is easier to listen to the drone of confirming information, to reject, out of hand, ideas that question what we believe. But democracy is not for the lazy.

When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the glorious ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in the original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterward,'; but everywhere, spread over all the characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart, -- Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

The traumatic aspect of drinking ayahuasca is that in order to heal yourself, you must first confront the wound; by forcing you to deal with your own inner garbage, ayahuasca shows you things about yourself that you might not want to see. I wish that a whole country could drink ayahuasca—not merely every individual citizen of a country, but the country itself, the spirit of the country. I wish that a flag could drink ayahuasca, that we could just fold the Stars and Stripes into the shape of a cup, pour in the tea, and transport Uncle Sam into another dimension. He’d have to fight his way out of some nightmares, but he’d be cleansed. What would he find? William S. Burroughs wrote that when you drink ayahuasca, “The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized—pass through your body.” When Burroughs drank, he actually saw himself transformed into both a black man and a black woman. What if some freedom-hating narcoterrorists snuck into the Fox News studios and put ayahuasca in Sean Hannity’s coffee, just before he went live? What would be the day’s fair and balanced news for America? If America drank ayahuasca and then withdrew into the filthy pit of its own heart, confronting all its fears and hate and finally purging itself of that negative energy, maybe America would come out Muslim: sucked through a black hole by the Black Mind, young Latter-Day Saint crackers with smooth cheeks, short-sleeved white shirts, and name tags confront nightmarish visions of getting swallowed whole by giant grotesque “Jolly Nigger” coin banks and then find themselves vomited back up as Nubian Islamic Hebrews in turbans and robes selling incense on the subways. The “God Hates Fags” pastor, eyes wild with a new passion for Allah, boards a helicopter to drop thousands of Qur’ans upon the small towns below. I want to see ayahuasca’s vine goddess clean out America’s poison. But what would happen if a religion could drink the vine? What if I poured ayahuasca into my Qur’an?

On April 30, 1921, President Warren G. Harding appointed Reily, a former assistant postmaster in Kansas City, governor of Puerto Rico as a political payoff. Reily took his oath of office in Kansas City, then attended to “personal business” for another two and a half months before finally showing up for work on July 30.24 By that time, he had already announced to the island press that (1) he was “the boss now,” (2) the island must become a US state, (3) any Puerto Rican who opposed statehood was a professional agitator, (4) there were thousands of abandoned children in Puerto Rico, and (5) the governorship of Puerto Rico was “the best appointment that President Harding could award” because its salary and “perquisites” would total $54,000 a year.25 Just a few hours after disembarking, the assistant postmaster marched into San Juan’s Municipal Theater and uncorked one of the most reviled inaugural speeches in Puerto Rican history. He announced that there was “no room on this island for any flag other than the Stars and Stripes. So long as Old Glory waves over the United States, it will continue to wave over Puerto Rico.” He then pledged to fire anyone who lacked “Americanism.” He promised to make “English, the language of Washington, Lincoln and Harding, the primary one in Puerto Rican schools

Right when Marston and Peter must have been meeting with Gaines and Mayer to talk about what Wonder Woman ought to look like, a new superhero made his debut. Captain America.19 He quickly became Timely Comics’ most popular character. Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941) (illustration credit 23.7) Marston wanted his comic book’s “under-meaning,” about “a great movement now under way—the growth in the power of women,” to be embodied in the way Wonder Woman carried herself, how she dressed, and what powers she wielded. She had to be strong, and she had to be independent. Everyone agreed about the bracelets (inspired by Olive Byrne’s): it helped Gaines with his public relations problem that she could stop bullets with them; that was good for the gun problem. Also, this new superhero had to be uncommonly beautiful; she’d wear a tiara, like the crown awarded at the Miss America pageant. Marston wanted her to be opposed to war, but she had to be willing to fight for democracy. In fact, she had to be superpatriotic. Captain America wore an American flag: blue tights, red gloves, red boots, and, on his torso, red and white stripes and a white star. Like Captain America—because of Captain America—Wonder Woman would have to wear red, white, and blue, too. But, ideally, she’d also wear very little. To sell magazines, Gaines wanted his superwoman to be as naked as he could get away with.

On the night of September 13, Bill O’Reilly had an exchange with Sam Husseini, a former spokesperson for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, that characterized Fox’s position as it was developing. “Here’s what we’re going to do, and I’ll let you react to it,” O’Reilly said. “We’re going to take out this Osama bin Laden. Now, whether we go in with air power or whether we go in with a Delta force, he’s a dead man walking. He’s through. He should have been through long before this. He’s been wanted for eight years. Now, they’re going to go in and they’re going to get him. If the Taliban government of Afghanistan does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power, probably. All right? We will blast them, because …” Husseini told O’Reilly that innocent Afghans would be killed by a protracted air strike. “Doesn’t make any difference,” O’Reilly huffed. “Bill—” “They—it was an act of war.” “No, no. It does make a difference,” Husseini said. “I don’t want more civilians dead. We’ve had civilians dead in New York and now you’re saying maybe it’s okay to have civilians dead in Afghanistan.” “Mr. Husseini, this is war.” “Yeah, exactly. And in war you don’t kill civilians. You don’t kill women and children. Those are your words, Bill.” “Oh, stop it,” O’Reilly said. “You just made the most absurd statement in the world. That means we wouldn’t have bombed the Nazis or the Japanese. We wouldn’t have done any of that, because you don’t want somebody who has declared war on us to be punished. Come on.” “Who declared war on us?” “The terrorist states have declared war, Mr. Husseini!” “Get them. Get the terrorists,” Husseini said. “Cut his mic,” O’Reilly responded, waving his finger across the screen, the lower third of which was covered with Stars and Stripes graphics and a caption that read: “AMERICA UNITES.

The question revives Kropp, more particularly as he hears there’s no more beer in the canteen. “It’s not only Himmelstoss, there are lots of them. As sure as they get a stripe or a star they become different men, just as though they’d swallowed concrete.” “That’s the uniform,” I suggest. “Roughly speaking it is,” says Kat, and prepares for a long speech; “but the root of the matter lies somewhere. For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he’ll snap at it, it’s his nature. And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too. The things are precisely the same. In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum. The army is based on that; one man must always have power over the other. The mischief is merely that each one has much too much power. A non-com. can torment a private, a lieutenant a non-com., a captain a lieutenant, until he goes mad. And because they know they can, they all soon acquire the habit more or less. Take a simple case: we are marching back from the parade-ground dog-tired. Then comes the order to sing. We sing spiritlessly, for it is all we can do to trudge along with our rifles. At once the company is turned about and has to do another hour’s drill as punishment. On the march back the order to sing is given again, and once more we start. Now what’s the use of all that? It’s simply that the company commander’s head has been turned by having so much power. And nobody blames him. On the contrary, he is praised for being strict. That, of course, is only a trifling instance, but it holds also in very different affairs. Now I ask you: Let a man be whatever you like in peacetime, what occupation is there in which he can behave like that without getting a crack on the nose? He can only do that in the army. It goes to the heads of them all, you see. And the more insignificant a man has been in civil life the worse it takes him.

Outside the snapdragons, cords of light. Today is easy as weeds & winds & early. Green hills shift green. Cardinals peck at feeders—an air seed salted. A power line across the road blows blue bolts. Crickets make crickets in the grass. We are made & remade together. An ant circles the sugar cube. Our shadow’s a blown sail running blue over cracked tiles. Cool glistening pours from the tap, even on the edges. A red wire, a live red wire, a temperature. Time, in balanced soil, grows inside the snapdragons. In the sizzling cast iron, a cut skin, a sunny side runs yellow across the pan. Silver pots throw a blue shadow across the range. We must carry this the length of our lives. Tall stones lining the garden flower at once. Tin stars burst bold & celestial from the fridge; blue applause. Morning winds crash the columbines; the turf nods. Two reeling petal-whorls gleam & break. Cartoon sheep are wool & want. Happy birthday oak; perfect in another ring. Branch shadows fall across the window in perfect accident without weight. Orange sponge a thousand suds to a squeeze, know your water. School bus, may you never rust, always catching scraps of children’s laughter. Add a few phrases to the sunrise, and the pinks pop. Garlic, ginger, and mangoes hang in tiers in a cradle of red wire. That paw at the door is a soft complaint. Corolla of petals, lean a little toward the light. Everything the worms do for the hills is a secret & enough. Floating sheep turn to wonder. Cracking typewriter, send forth your fire. Watched too long, tin stars throw a tantrum. In the closet in the dust the untouched accordion grows unclean along the white bone of keys. Wrapped in a branch, a canvas balloon, a piece of punctuation signaling the end. Holy honeysuckle, stand in your favorite position, beside the sandbox. The stripes on the couch are running out of color. Perfect in their polished silver, knives in the drawer are still asleep. A May of buzz, a stinger of hot honey, a drip of candy building inside a hive & picking up the pace. Sweetness completes each cell. In the fridge, the juice of a plucked pear. In another month, another set of moths. A mosquito is a moment. Sketched sheep are rather invincible, a destiny trimmed with flouncy ribbon. A basset hound, a paw flick bitching at black fleas. Tonight, maybe we could circle the floodwaters, find some perfect stones to skip across the light or we can float in the swimming pool on our backs—the stars shooting cells of light at each other (cosmic tag)—and watch this little opera, faults & all.

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “yes, that’s how it was then, that part there was called France.” I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes. We all ought to be able to conjure up sights like these at will, so that we can keep in mind the scope of texture’s motion in time.

The history of the land is a history of blood. In this history, someone wins and someone loses. There are patriots and enemies. Folk heroes who save the day. Vanquished foes who had it coming. It’s all in the telling. The conquered have no voice. Ask the thirty-eight Santee Sioux singing the death song with the nooses around their necks, the treaty signed fair and square, then nullified with a snap of the rope. Ask the slave women forced to bear their masters’ children, to raise and love them and see them sold. Ask the miners slaughtered by the militia in Ludlow. Names are erased. The conqueror tells the story. The colonizer writes the history, winning twice: A theft of land. A theft of witness. Oh, but let’s not speak of such things! Look: Here is an eagle whipping above the vast grasslands where the buffalo once thundered bold as gods. (The buffalo are here among the dead. So many buffalo.) There is the Declaration in sepia. (Signed by slave owners. Shhh, hush up about that, now!) See how the sun shines down upon the homesteaders’ wagons racing toward a precious claim in the nation’s future, the pursuit of happiness pursued without rest, destiny made manifest? (Never mind about those same homesteaders eating the flesh of neighbors. Winters are harsh in this country. Pack a snack.) The history is a hungry history. Its mouth opens wide to consume. It must be fed. Bring me what you would forget, it cries, and I will swallow it whole and pull out the bones bleached of truth upon which you will hang the myths of yourselves. Feed me your pain and I will give you dreams and denial, a balm in Gilead. The land remembers everything, though. It knows the steps of this nation’s ballet of violence and forgetting. The land receives our dead, and the dead sing softly the song of us: blood. Blood on the plains. In the rivers. On the trees where the ropes swing. Blood on the leaves. Blood under the flowers of Gettysburg, of Antioch. Blood on the auction blocks. Blood of the Lenape, the Cherokee, the Cheyenne. Blood of the Alamo. Blood of the Chinese railroad workers. Blood of the midwives hung for witchcraft, for the crime of being women who bleed. Blood of the immigrants fleeing the hopeless, running toward the open arms of the nation’s seductive hope, its greatest export. Blood of the first removed to make way for the cities, the factories, the people and their unbridled dreams: The chugging of the railways. The tapping of the telegram. The humming of industry. Sound burbling along telephone wires. Printing presses whirring with the day’s news. And the next day’s. And the day after that’s. Endless cycles of information. Cities brimming with ambitions used and discarded. The dead hold what the people throw away. The stories sink the tendrils of their hope and sorrow down into the graves and coil around the dead buried there, deep in its womb. All passes away, the dead whisper. Except for us. We, the eternal. Always here. Always listening. Always seeing. One nation, under the earth. E Pluribus unum mortuis. Oh, how we wish we could reach you! You dreamers and schemers! Oh, you children of optimism! You pioneers! You stars and stripes, forever! Sometimes, the dreamers wake as if they have heard. They take to the streets. They pick up the plow, the pen, the banner, the promise. They reach out to neighbors. They reach out to strangers. Backs stooped from a hard day’s labor, two men, one black, one white, share water from a well. They are thirsty and, in this one moment, thirst and work make them brothers. They drink of shared trust, that all men are created equal. They wipe their brows and smile up at a faithful sun.

Our stars and stripes have a lot of stains on it, and it'll take centuries of determined accountability to clean them off.

The New American Sonnet America doesn't mean the best, America means accountability. America doesn't mean supremacy, America means responsible liberty. America doesn't mean flawless, America means growing against oddity. America doesn't mean condescension, America means caring for all humanity. America doesn't mean white or color, America means celebration of diversity. America doesn't mean red or blue, America means together crossing rigidity. Stars and stripes have no place for hate. Our heart is human, it's humanity we celebrate.

This editorial appeared in The New York Times on June 14, 1940, to mark Flag Day, a holiday that seems to have fallen into neglect in more recent years. Flag Day commemorates the day in 1777 when the Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the official flag of the United States.

America, burning. Cornfields on fire. Sickness in the streets. The people poisoned by their own food and by each other. Red parachutes in the sky: invasion. Dead people in the streets: plague. The stars-and-stripes cut to ribbons and burned for warmth as a long winter sinks its teeth in and never lets go.

Wearing jeans, striped sweaters, and impractical Keds, they kicked their way through the fallen leaves that coated the forest floor. More leaves continued to fall, the late-afternoon sunlight shining through their brittle thinness as they spun, tumbled, and whirled. Falling stars speckled red and orange and yellow.

Never forget how much I love you.” Then he touched the heads of his kits one by one. “Silver Stripe, be brave and take care of your mother. White Tail, learn all that you can so that one day you will make your Clan proud. Black Ear, forgive any harm you’ve been done and show kindness to your Clanmates. For we are all fighting a hard battle, and sometimes kindness is all we need.

Life comes first, then the stars and stripes, if needed, hundred union jacks be sacrificed.

World is My Brotherhood (Sonnet 1616) No neighborhood without brotherhood, No sainthood without martyrdom. Martyrdom doesn't mean dying in body, but to be lost in others' ascension. You're born with a human backbone, Don't let it be vilified by cowardice. Backbone responsible is backbone honored, Backbone responsible is antidote to malice. World is in your care, carry it with grace. No bigger disgrace than backbone bending! Find a cause that honors your human backbone, Humans can break, while animals bend for nothing. Stars-n-stripes, union jack, all trivial, for the world is my neighborhood. I got no brotherhood of cult or creed, for the world is my brotherhood.

Stars-n-stripes, union jack, all trivial, for the world is my neighborhood. I got no brotherhood of cult or creed, for the world is my brotherhood.

You keep writing about war protests and flag burnings. None of that is in the Stars and Stripes. And Barb’s mom said Martin Luther King says this war is unjust. I’m starting to wonder about it myself. But can’t they support the warriors and hate the war? Our men are dying every day in service of their country. Doesn’t that matter anymore?

I looked up just as the clouds parted, creating a window to the stars. I watched the lights glistening brightly and hoped that there would be many more nights like this where I was outside, by a fire, enjoying the biggest wild we have, the space above our heads.

There’s not an inch of bare skin anywhere between his wrists and his shirtsleeves—it’s all Stars and Stripes, Bald Eagles, and passages from the Constitution.

American Rocker” I was born in the land of the brave, where the eagles soar and roam, With the roar of the rivers and the whisper of the wind, in the place I call my home. My heart beats to the rhythm of the drums, and the guitars strumming wild, In the land of the free, I stand with pride, an everlasting American child. 'Cause I'm American, through and through, My soul's painted in red, white, and blue. I rock to the core, with freedom's sound, In the USA, where my roots are found. From the neon lights of the bustling cities to the quiet country roads, I've seen the beauty of the starlit skies and where the mighty Mississippi flows. I've danced in the rain and I've faced the sun, with a spirit that won't be tamed, In every note I play, in every word I say, I'm American, unashamed. We're the land of the dreamers, the home of the brave, Our anthem rings true, for the free and the saved. We'll rock this country, from dusk till dawn, With the power of the word, and the strength to carry on. 'Cause I'm American, through and through, My soul's painted in red, white, and blue. I rock to the core, with freedom's sound, In the USA, where my roots are found. So let the guitars wail, let the drums beat hard, As we sing our song, under the stripes and stars. We're American rockers, with a story to tell, In the land we love, where our hearts dwell.

America, I’ve Given You All and Now I Have Nothing”: September 13, 2024, at 9:32 AM Verse 1: America, I’ve given you all and now I have nothing, Watched the stars and stripes fade, it’s a bitter sting. Once a land of dreams, now shadows in the night, Where did we lose our way, where’s the guiding light? Chorus: America, I’ve given you all and now I have nothing, You’ve lost your soul, but I’ll keep on fighting. I will do my best, to do my duty, To God and my country, for love and for beauty. Verse 2: From the amber waves of grain to the city streets, Echoes of the past, where freedom used to meet. Voices of the fallen, whisper in the wind, Remind us of the promise, where do we begin? Chorus: America, I’ve given you all and now I have nothing, You’ve lost your soul, but I’ll keep on fighting. I will do my best, to do my duty, To God and my country, for love and for beauty. Bridge: In the heartland, where the rivers flow, In the mountains high, where the eagles go. We’ll find our way back, to the land we knew, With faith and hope, we’ll see it through. Chorus: America, I’ve given you all and now I have nothing, You’ve lost your soul, but I’ll keep on fighting. I will do my best, to do my duty, To God and my country, for love and for beauty. Outro: America, I’ve given you all and now I have nothing, But in my heart, I’ll keep on loving. I will do my best, to do my duty, To God and my country, for love and for beauty.

Rise and Stand” Verse 1: We stand and fight for God’s country, Where the fields are wide and free, In the heart of this great nation, We find our destiny. Chorus: Where what we stand for speaks volumes, More than our silences ever could, Together we rise, hand in hand, In this land where we’ve always stood. Verse 2: Stand up for who you are, Proud American through and through, With the stars and stripes above us, We’ll see our dreams come true. Chorus: Where what we stand for speaks volumes, More than our silences ever could, Together we rise, hand in hand, In this land where we’ve always stood. Bridge: From the mountains to the prairies, To the oceans, far and wide, This is God’s country, And it’s the place we call home. Chorus: Where what we stand for speaks volumes, More than our silences ever could, Together we rise, hand in hand, In this land where we’ve always stood. Outro: We stand and fight for God’s country, With pride in every stride, In this land of hope and glory, We’ll forever abide.

I am an American" Verse 1: I am an American, free born and free bred, With the stars and stripes flying high above my head. My old man said, “Son, when it’s time to be counted, Be man enough to stand up, don’t you ever doubt it.” Chorus: This country ain’t built by those who hate it, It’s built on the shoulders of those who love it. From the fields of the heartland to the city lights, We stand together, ready to fight. Verse 2: In the land of the brave, where the eagles soar, We work hard every day, always wanting more. With grit and grace, we face the storm, In the land of the free, where dreams are born. Chorus: This country ain’t built by those who hate it, It’s built on the shoulders of those who love it. From the fields of the heartland to the city lights, We stand together, ready to fight. Bridge: When the night is dark and the road is long, We find our strength in a country song. With tears in our eyes and hope in our hearts, We hold on tight, never falling apart. Through the trials and the pain, we rise above, In this land we cherish, this land we love. Chorus: This country ain’t built by those who hate it, It’s built on the shoulders of those who love it. From the fields of the heartland to the city lights, We stand together, ready to fight. Outro: I am an American, free born and free bred, With the stars and stripes flying high above my head. My old man said, “Son, when it’s time to be counted, Be man enough to stand up, don’t you ever doubt it.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dew drop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. —John Muir, Travels in Alaska

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dew drop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

Proud Americans outlaw country gritty defiant [Verse] Stompin' boots on dusty trails, where the thunder rolls, Stars and stripes hang high, in the heartland of our souls, Old-time whiskey in our veins, and the spirit of the free, Riding through the winds of change, it's where we wanna be. [Chorus] We're proud Americans, our hearts beat as one, The time has come, to heal and embrace, So let's stand united, let our voices be heard, Proud Americans, leading the way. [Verse 2] Front porches and pickup trucks, where stories still unfold, From sea to shining sea, we've got so much untold, Mending fences, crossing lines, together we are strong, In the land of milk and honey, where we all belong. [Chorus] We're proud Americans, our hearts beat as one, The time has come, to heal and embrace, So let's stand united, let our voices be heard, Proud Americans, leading the way. [Bridge] Through the trials and pain, we’ve always pulled through, In every small town and city, under skies of blue, With grit and love, in each verse we say, We're fighting for a brighter day. [Verse 3] Guitars strum like battle cries, in the twilight’s golden hue, From the shadows to the spotlight, we sing a country tune, Bonfires light the night, with hope and memories, Echoes of freedom, carried by the breeze.

Have you converted to Protestantism? Given up gluten? Sworn allegiance to the Stars and Stripes?” “Whatever. Poison the preschoolers.

At the sight of the flag he tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America—with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of the summers of his childhood, the many Kansas summers, running the bases, falling harmlessly onto the grass, his head beating with heat, the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons, the thick, palpable shade of colossal elms, the muttering of radios beyond the windowsills, the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits, the voices carrying over the yards in the dusks that fell later and later, the trains moving through town into the sky. His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.

The Boss is the perfect blend of Elvis and Dylan, come from New Jersey (America’s armpit) to save the seventies from further Mellotron arabesques and Minimoog, with a stars-and-stripes ass to die for snugly fitted jeans on the cover of Born in the U.S.A., the minstrel descending the Lincoln Memorial staircase to crown Obama, the knight in shining armor for the Super Bowl halftime show, the musical equivalent to fried chicken wings and the E pluribus unum motto engraved on the national crest.

The ‘performers’ do their act with all the grace of ballet dancers, seemingly oblivious to the danger around them.” Brad Durfee, referring to flight deck workers in Stars and Stripes, August 16, 1975.

The current Cuban flag was created by Narciso López in June 25, 1848, and first sewn by Emilia Teurbe Tolón. It consists of five blue and white alternating stripes, with a streaming, equilateral, red triangle having a 5-pointed white star at its center. This flag replaced the American flag on May 20, 1902, as a symbol of Cuba’s independence and sovereignty.

There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean’s horizon.

He paused, stone faced and sincere. “I like to think of the American flag, ma’am. It’s not one solid color—it’s sliced up by stripes and dotted with stars—all those different pieces crammed together onto one flag. But it is one flag, all of it bound together. And it’s our flag—yours, mine, all those who voted for you, and all those who voted against you. Those who have died before us, and those who will live on after us. You need to try to be like that flag, ma’am. Your presidency needs to be like that flag.” “Holding all those parts together,” she said. “Yes ma’am. We need you to hold us all together.” Behind

Let us who hail from Ireland stand to the last by the stars and stripes!

What’s California like?” Jared asked after another minute’s silence. “Warm, very sunny,” Catherine replied. “They’ve got almost everything they need there. They can grow their own food, harvest their own lumber, and mine their own gold—that they sell to the Mexicans and Confederates. Plus the British in Victoria. Probably others.” “Do they even know they’re technically still part of this country?” “You won’t see any stars and stripes there, that’s certain. Each city is practically its own state.

Unlike the American Stars and Stripes or the British Union Jack, it has no particularly exciting or symbolic history.

Everyone knows that there are thirteen stripes to represent the original thirteen colonies and fifty stars, each representing one of the fifty states. But what you may not know is that red represents hardness and valor. White represents purity and innocence. And blue represents perseverance, vigilance, and justice.

At some point in time before the battle, Key and Skinner were transferred back to the Minden, “and they thought themselves fortunate in being anchored in a position which enabled them to see distinctly the flag of Fort McHenry from the deck of the vessel.” Key recalled, “They paced the deck for the residue of the night in painful suspense, watching with intense anxiety for the return of day, and looking every few minutes at their watches, to see how long they must wait for it; and as soon as it dawned, and before it was light enough to see objects at a distance.  Their glasses were turned to the fort, uncertain whether they should see there the stars and stripes, or the flag of the enemy. At length the light came, and they saw that ‘our flag was still there.

It reminded him of history lessons back in the world beyond the manor, whenever World War II came up in the curriculum. Students had stared wide-eyed, shifting in their seats with discomfort as the teacher showed grainy pictures of yellow stars, striped clothing, and concentration camps, horrified that the scenes had once been reality.

Like every boy, I really wanted a pet. But I was allergic to animal hair. I realize having “allergies” doesn’t help my street cred, either. But this might: I ended up living amongst reptiles. That’s cool, right? I first got the idea while lizard hunting with Uncle Frankie when I was 10. We caught a black and yellow-striped garter snake and I kept that for a while. Later, I acquired a six-foot Burmese python and named him Dudley, after Dudley Moore, my co-star in the film Like Father, Like Son. The cast of Growing Pains gave me a red-tailed boa constrictor for my birthday one year and I named that one Glenn, after my cool set teacher. I had another red-tailed boa that I named Springsteen, named for—well, you can probably guess.

The promotional material for Fourth Island is far more lavish and not at all defensive. From the Permanent Living Reenactment of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima to the Rockets’ Red Glare Four-Hour Fireworks Display every night, from the United We Stand Steak House by way of the statue-lined Avenue of the Presidents to the Under God Indivisible Prayer Chapel, it is all on a grand scale, and every last piece of it is red, white, blue, striped, and starred. The Great Joy Corporation is evidently expecting or receiving patriotic visitors in great numbers. Interactive displays of the Museum of Our Heroes, the Gun Show, and the All-American Victory Gardens (salvia, lobelia, candytuft) feature large on the Web site, where one can also at all times recite the Pledge of Allegiance interactively with a chorus

Ma patched you up the best she could and got you dressed and in bed. I told her not to bother curling your hair, but she did it anyway. Made it easier for her to look at that knot at the back of your head.” He reached up and flipped one of my striped cotton curlers with his fingers. “Looks cute, though. Very John Philip Sousa.” At first I thought he meant I looked like the heavily bearded composer on the cover of one of Pops’ old records, the guy who wrote all those patriotic marches the marching bands play during parades, but I shot him a playful glare when I got the reference. The red, white, and blue rag curlers. “Oh yes, I know, very Stars and Stripes Forever.

He says Canadians are scary.

I’m saying you look damn good in my hat,” Zane growled.

Every little dirty thing you’re thinking and more.

You hold still,” he instructed, and in one smooth motion, he went down on his knees and sucked Ty’s cock between his lips. He

Tonight he sucked hard and fast and messy, taking Ty in over and over. “Fuck, Zane!” Ty gritted out. He tugged at Zane’s hair, and his hips pushed away from the door, thrusting into Zane’s mouth without the care he usually took. Zane

all just heightened the sensations of fucking the hottest man in the bar in a messy back-room encounter. Ty

Come on,” Zane taunted with a sharp thrust. He dug his fingers into Ty’s hips, trying for any small bit of control he could get. “Paint the door for me, and you’ll be feeling my cum drip out of you the rest of the night.” Ty

Zane hunched over, grabbing Ty’s ass and spreading him apart as he fucked him brutally for five or six thrusts, nailing him to the door. He let out a long moan, and his hips stuttered as he began to come. For

He could feel the cum slipping out of Ty, dripping down his cock, and yet it continued. Ty

Love you,” he whispered against Ty’s ear. Ty

Is this what they mean when they talk about coming out of the closet?” Zane

They were good for each other in so many ways, even if foreplay did sometimes include a Strider and a sucker punch to the midsection.

Ty rolled his hips, and Zane followed the sensual movement with his fingertips. His cock slid deeper into Ty with every roll, and he hastily reached to spread Ty apart so he could watch his thick cock plunging into his lover. Ty

The head of his cock pushed at the stubborn muscles of Ty’s entrance, spreading him apart, forcing those muscles back with its girth. Ty threw his head back and moaned again. He rolled his hips around, forcing Zane’s cockhead to massage him. Zane

then grabbed Ty’s hair, yanking his head back so he could whisper in his ear. “I’m going to come in you so hard you’ll be tasting it.” Ty