The Wall Street/Main Street Fantasy

NEW YORK -- Tuesday morning in downtown Manhattan was overcast and dark. By 8:30 a.m., Wall Street was busy as thousands of men and women filed out of the subway station for another day at work. Old men with crooked ties and tassles on their loafers carried newspapers under their arms with the headline: "Nightmare."

Desperate New Yorkers looked each other in the eye, searching for reassurance or doom. Tired faces marched to work: pregnant, bald, suited, goateed, all of them carrying some secret panic. Young, beautiful women perched atop the highest shoes filed into fortified buildings with soft, nervous smiles. All of them crept past like teenagers sneaking home after a long night out after curfew.

In front of the New York Stock Exchange, a man stood in the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets handing out flyers and wearing a sandwich board that read "We Buy Gold."

The old black man giving out free newspapers at the top of the subway stairs had to fold each paper over to hide the headline: "Massacre." It was silent up and down Wall Street, except for one man's voice, as he called out to people, "New York’s strong! New York’s strong, baby! That's right! We're strong!"

In the lobby of the Equinox gym, dozens of giant plasma televisions flashed different versions of the news. Most of the screens were a jumble of tickers and graphs and numbers and grim newsmen. One of them ran footage of the two presidential candidates – suddenly irrelevant –
and the television's closed captions flashed the phrase "Main Street and Wall Street" over and over during the two men's sound bytes.

It was all these men could do: make an imaginary connection between the two mythological American avenues, neither of which exist in the way they mean them to.

Before this day, I had never been to Wall Street. And having seen it, in most ways, it is an unremarkable place. It is a narrow, crooked alleyway that runs only a few blocks. On one end, Wall Street is trapped under the FDR freeway structure, growing out of the gray and dead East river. It runs a few jagged blocks, past some unassuming facades and dead ends at Broadway, at the foot of the Trinity Wall Street Church. Right in the middle, almost tucked away on a side street, is the columnar cathedral of wealth: the New York Stock Exchange.

I don't know where Main Street is, but this is Wall Street. A lot of people smoking cigarettes and typing furiously on Blackberries: the heart of the American economy.

In 1920, Sinclair Lewis wrote a book called Main Street that became an instant bestseller. It was a criticism of small town America, chronicling the life of an educated, independent spirited woman from "the city" who is forced to compromise her life and ideals in the fictional Midwestern town of Gopher Prairie.

Gopher Prairie was based on Lewis' hometown of Sauk Centre, Minn., about an hour northwest of the Twin Cities. Earlier this month, I spent several days with a friend of mine in the north side neighborhood of St Paul. Now, St. Paul is a much larger city than Sauk Centre, but the north side has the feel of a small town, isolated from downtown and populated by working families.

My first day there, my friend gave me a driving tour of the neighborhood. He lives off of Rice Street (the north side's main street) and as we drove, he pointed out the homes on his block that have been recently foreclosed. It was more than half of his block and even worse on some other streets.

Rice Street looks like many of the business districts I've seen this year in towns like Newburg, N.Y. and Racine, Wis.: empty storefronts, a strip mall with a Subway sandwich shop and a liquor store with bars on all the windows. There are few lonely taverns, of course, and an old tire shop that's rarely open. I visited one of the taverns and spent a couple of hours in silence, watching Dirty Harry on TV with a few old men who stared into their glasses and fumbled with napkins.

My friend moved to the neighborhood a few years ago because he wanted to own a home and that's where he could afford to buy one. Now he lives on a nearly empty street across from a cemetery. It is hard to imagine the residents of the north side climbing out of this sad slump for years.

Wall Street, on the other hand, had changed rather dramatically by Wednesday evening, when I went back to have a meal in a pub called the Killarney Rose. On my way there, I passed the AIG building, where the street was completely blocked by deliverymen on bicycles, dozens of them waiting for assistants to come down and sign for dinner. It was already 7:00 p.m. and nobody was going to be home for supper. One young man in a suit walked up the street, heading home. His tie was cut off, jaggedly, as if someone had taken scissors to it. I asked him what happened and he laughed. "Aw, it was that kind of day and I'm the new guy. I'll be back!"

Tellingly, the Killarney Rose was nearly empty. I took a seat at the bar. On one side of me sat two middle-aged guys in rolled-up sleeves and ties, drinking beers in relative silence and watching the Yankees on TV. After a few minutes, a song came on the jukebox and one of them started to tell a story. "Good song. Alice in Chains." A few seconds passed. "I remember I used to have an old Buick Regal, only had AM radio. I heard this song every day."

His friend laughed. "Well, now you've got a driver and satellite radio."

On the other side of me sat two young men in the same Wall Street after-work uniform, well into a night of drinking and Yankees baseball. They took turns joking about A-Rod's performance at the end of a dismal season. One of them, it turned out, was recently engaged and that gave them plenty to joke about. "The market'll be fine, man. I've got bigger problems: I'm getting married! That's for life!"

By Thursday morning, it was obvious that during the long night, optimism had been beaten into all the poor souls on Wall Street. Heads were high, jackets pressed and every conversation on the street ended with hand slaps.

New York has recently become like Las Vegas in the 1990s: a city obsessed less with its history than the act of destroying and rebuilding. The holy shrine of Yankee Stadium will host its last game on Sunday. Shea Stadium is in its last year. And just north of Wall Street, a gaping hole in the ground is set to become a new World Trade Center. Several of the people I talked to on Thursday were confident that the market would rebound and were excited about being a part of it.

Around lunchtime, I called my mom in California to say hi. I told her about the eerie optimism on Wall Street and she said, "Well, that's not the case out here. We're scared and we have no idea what we're going to do."

The New Right: A Movement is Born Outside the RNC

ST. PAUL -- Nearly a decade ago, as a wealthy and peaceful but somehow angst-ridden America teetered on the edge of a new century, two shocking and violent events took place. In April of 1999, two young white men (boys, really) killed a dozen of their classmates, a teacher and themselves at their suburban high school in Colorado. In November of that same year, small groups of young, (mostly) white male anarchists made shattered and burning chaos out of a larger protest of the World Trade Organization in Seattle.

At the time, I was the same age as the Columbine shooters and, I imagine, many of the rioting anarchists. I remember seeing an emptiness in myself reflected in these acts and even a sick kind of heroism.

1999 was the year of Fight Club and the Matrix: now legendary calls to arms for young white men feeling trapped and marginalized in an increasingly bland and corporatized world. Columbine and the Seattle WTO protests, linked with events like the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, formed a chain of events that reflected a spiritual crisis among the young white men of America.

After spending a week in the Twin Cities during the Republican Convention, I see the manifestation of these events in the faces of the young white men of two movements well outside the walls of the convention: the ultra-conservative Ron Paul Revolution and the anarchist protesters, who combine to form a New Right.

These are groups of men without a political home.

The Excel Center this week was packed with white faces, overwhelmingly old. The new, young shining star of the Republican Party is a woman. The Target center, however, where Ron Paul held his “Rally for the Republic”, was packed with young white men in awe of their principled, underdog leader from Texas.

The anarchists, though they share many causes and concerns with the aged hippies and college students of the “traditional left” who have gathered here to protest, are not of that movement and scoff openly at their non-violent tactics. The traditional protesters distance themselves from the anarchists, blaming them and not the police when a peaceful march goes awry.

Additionally, the candidacy of Barack Obama has swept most of my generation up in a frenzy of optimism, turning the counter-culture (college liberals, young people, the hip hop generation, anti-war people) into the mainstream. That shift makes this splinter of young white men on the right -- shunned, frustrated and cast aside -- the new counter culture.

On Tuesday evening in Saint Paul, you could almost hear the Republican Party taking its last breaths. Hurricane Gustav reminded America of the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, prompting John McCain to shut down most of the festivities. In downtown Minneapolis, though, a livelier and more holistic gathering was taking place: Ron Paul’s Rally for the Republic drew thousands of GOP defectors to the Target Center.

Early in the day’s events, Jesse Ventura, the former wrestler, actor and governor of Minnesota who is often considered the most prominent voice of politcal independents in America, gave his address. He got cheers and chants from the crowd when he talked about the horrors of the national debt and the Patriot Act. He also talked at length about gun control, saying he was tired of politicians framing the debate in terms of hunting and sportsmen’s rights. He clarified his view, saying “The second amendment, the right to bear arms is there so that we the public, if our government gets out of control, we can overthrow it.”

Wild cheers.

Hours later, Ron Paul took the stage and delivered a clean and classic address, attacking the federal government and reminding his followers of how far off we are from what the founding fathers intended.

After the event let out, I watched the RNC on television at a bar with several Ron Paul supporters. The three young guys made cracks about the various speeches, at one point calling Joe Lieberman a douche bag. They told me they drove eight hours from Chicago just to be there for the rally. One of them put down his beer and said something I’ve been hearing all year, in reference to another, quite different charismatic leader. He said, “I was never really involved in politics until I heard Ron Paul speak.”

There is a tension at every protest gathering here that I did not feel at the DNC in Denver and have not felt in a long time. The police are angrier and more disorganized and the same could be said for the protesters.

At the close of a week of arrests and violent clashes, protesters gathered at the state building in St Paul Thursday night to march to the Excel Center during John McCain’s address and denounce what they call the “Republican Agenda”. As they started to walk, however, they were met with a massive line of police officers in riot gear and gas masks. Stranded on a bridge for nearly an hour, the protesters were forced back to an intersection and surrounded.

Right away, most of the protesters recognized what was happening and organized a quick departure. They shouted into their megaphones, telling everyone to return to the state building, where they had a permit to assemble, though they were still more than a mile away from the Excel Center.

Within minutes, nearly every one of the hundreds of protesters had left the intersection. The rest, the ones that stayed behind, were dressed in black, with bandanas over their faces, clowning and taunting the police. One held up a sign, fashioned out of a pizza box, mocking the other protesters as they left that read, “liberals, can we riot now?”

The moment passed. The police, satisfied with dispersing the majority of the crowd, took off their gas masks and a number of them marched off.

I sat on top of a concrete median with a group of young self-described anarchists who were disappointed with the outcome. “It’s ‘cause there’s nothing up here to smash,” said one. He was right. We were in a park at the base of a bridge with no structures or buildings around.

I should mention that any member of either of these groups--the Ron Paul supporters or the anarchists--would probably be horrified to be linked to the other. Though in a very strict sense they are both of the extreme right, their movements have evolved to a point where they are on opposite sides of most issues except, notably, gun control.

On Thursday night in the Excel Center, after John McCain finished his address and the balloons were dropping, I ran into a young man in a cowboy hat named Vincent. He had Ron Paul stickers all over his hat and pants and a t-shirt with Ron Paul written on it in black marker. He explained to me that he was an alternate delegate from Texas and he was kicked off the floor of the convention because of his attire. He was disappointed, but not surprised.

As Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” played in the hall for the party faithful, Vincent told me he had been at the Ron Paul event on Tuesday night, too. I asked him how that compared with his time at the RNC and he said, “This felt fake.”

The Road From Denver to St Paul

ST. PAUL -- There is a lot to be learned by staying behind after a political convention has left town. On Friday night, after the Democrats, protesters and police disappeared in a cloud of pyrotechnic smoke, I watched Denver become Denver again.

16th St. downtown was reclaimed by its regular inhabitants: packs of young men on corners and benches, selling and smoking weed, a skinny, wrinkled old woman wheeling an oxygen tank and lighting a cigarette, teenage girls in miniskirts showing off bruised legs, pushing strollers, a man with a kitten on his shoulder playing the recorder for spare change, round faced men from the suburbs -- stuffed into polo shirts, trying to appease their streaky-haired wives with dinner downtown and a carriage ride.

The nice restaurants with wine lists and Italian names that were packed all week long sat nearly empty on a Friday night, the bored waitresses sharing cigarettes and light gossip. Chili’s still had a reasonable crowd, most of them inside at the bar, where the televisions had changed back to ESPN after days of CNN.

The Jamaican vendors with the folding tables had scrapped their Obama souvenirs for marijuana pipes, cell phone cases and incense. A sad and slow energy settled back over Denver.

The night before, I sat in Mile High Stadium, one of 84,000, and watched as Barack Obama brought entire families to tears of joy. Most of the people in the crowd were from the area, but there are no hints of that exuberant optimism left in Denver.

A few blocks north of the downtown strip, a place called the Melbourne Hotel sits in the shadow of the Greyhound station. It costs $16 dollars a night to get a bed in a dormitory there and inside it looks like I imagine it did 80 years ago: low ceiling fans swirl cigarette smoke around in a long hallway with brown walls and dim light.

I share a bunk bed with a man named Rob who has been living in the Melbourne for over a year and gets a discount by helping out. He says he likes it there because it’s close to downtown, close to jobs. I ask him what kind of jobs there are, he takes a sip of lemonade from a mason jar and says, “in this economy, it’s not great, but it’s better than being in the middle of nowhere.”

Rob’s friend is an ex-military man, shining his boots at the edge of his bed. He doesn’t talk much, but Rob says he’s back from Iraq and floating around, looking for work. The Melbourne is full of men like this. Old, bearded, young, gap toothed, sad, tired men, wandering around the west, looking for work. Meeting Rob and his military friend, I feel like I’ve wandered into a Steinbeck novel, swapping stories with depression-era characters.

A crowd of people boarding a bus for Mexico blocks the sidewalk in front of the Melbourne. Men in white cowboy hats and short women with braided hair line the wall, waiting to go home. I make my way to the Greyhound station and purchase a ticket for St Paul, Minnesota. It’s a 21-hour ride and if I want to be there in time to see the Republicans, I have to get going.

The first leg of the trip is unremarkable. Nothing much happens when you cross from Colorado into Kansas: you’re clearly not in the mountains any more, just streaking trough miles of desolate, rolling green. Every few miles, a rusted windmill pokes the horizon, but there is nothing else out there.

The sun goes down and we make a stop in Fort Riley, Kansas. I meet a man named Daryl with no teeth who tells me he is on his way to Toledo or Detroit; he’s not sure which yet. It depends where he can find some work, hopefully as a hotel clerk or maybe doing security. “Whatever I can find to pay the rent,” he tells me. “And get me cigarettes and coffee.” He quit driving a truck last year and registered with the IRS as a professional gambler. When I meet him, he’s coming back from Las Vegas, where he lost everything he had on slots and video poker.

I change buses in Kansas City, Missouri at 1 in the morning and manage to sleep for the next 10 hours or so, waking up as we pull into St Paul. I get to a television to hear how the Republicans are settling into town and instead, I see footage of poor black people in New Orleans being loaded onto buses. I hadn’t seen a newspaper in days or heard anything about Hurricane Gustav, so it’s a surprise to me.

John McCain comes on to announce that this is no time for a party. And yet, the downtown St Paul restaurants with wine lists and Italian names are full. The president won’t be here Monday, as scheduled, because his priority, suddenly, is the people of the gulf coast. McCain himself skipped town to help out in Mississippi.

I’m reminded that if you don’t ride Greyhound or stay in a cheap hotel, if you don’t loiter downtown somewhere for a few hours or talk to people at truck stops, poverty is invisible in America until an act of God blows it across the television screen. That is, unless you live in one of these communities in Denver, Toledo or New Orleans.

It’s uncertain right now how this week will unfold. By Friday night, though, every one will be gone and St. Paul will become St. Paul again.

RUN DNC

DENVER -- I can remember very clearly where I was four years ago when I realized that John Kerry and the Democrats were going to lose the presidential election. It was the third night of the Democratic Convention in Boston, and John Edwards had just left the stage after his big address. Moments later, members of the Black Eyes Peas came on stage and started singing, Let's Get It Started (a more p.c. version of their hit Let's Get Retarded). It was such an absurd and contrived moment, partly because The Black Eyed Peas are The Monkees of Hip Hop, and partly because nobody on the convention floor was dancing. I knew Kerry had no chance.

The other night in Denver, however, I was at a rooftop DNC after-party watching Hip Hop veterans Slick Rick and Biz Markie perform onstage. The crowd was a young and colorful mix of delegates and supporters, sweating and cheering and dancing. At one point, Biz started to perform his hit, "Just a Friend," altering the lyrics to deliver a political message:

Obama, you got what I need!

You gonna be the President!

You gonna be the President!

Wild cheers went up in the audience, and I couldn't come up with anything cynical to say. In a perfect twist of fate, members of The Black Eyed Peas were there that night, too -- in the audience.

The sudden, shocking relevance of Hip Hop in presidential politics can be attributed to a number of things. Most obviously, the Democrats have nominated a black man as their candidate. But I don't think that's it. The party looks a lot different than it did four years ago. The faces in the convention hall and the streets of downtown Denver are noticeably younger and more diverse than they were even four years ago.

On the second day of the convention, I found myself in an event hosted by the College Democrats of America called The Hip Hop Caucus. If you're like me, you are surprised to find out that the Democratic Party even has a Hip Hop caucus. The event was, kind of predictably, boring, over-intellectualized and self-important: kind of what you would imagine a Hip Hop class at UC Berkeley to be. The event attracted a number of curious attendees, though.

A group of black teenagers sat in front of me. They had come all the way from New Orleans to the DNC to share their experiences in the wake of Katrina. They came to the Hip Hop caucus expecting something different and I watched them as they melted in their chairs, rolled their eyes and sucked their teeth through hours of oppressive academic analysis from podium-banging blowhards.

One speaker made a point worth mentioning, however. He said that Barack Obama would be not just the first black President, but the first President of the Hip Hop generation. I thought about the significance of that for a while: this is not a tired, old black politician who grew out of the civil rights movement; this is a multicultural man who was barely out of his teens when Grandmaster Flash dropped The Message.

In the past year, several artists have come out with songs in support of Obama's candidacy. Nas built a hit on his new album around a sample of Tupac Shakur's famous line: "And though it seems heaven sent, we ain't ready to see a Black President."

In an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Obama said he listens to Ludacris on his ipod. Encouraged by that revelation, Luda wrote and performed a song called "Politics", endorsing Obama, while calling Hillary an irrelevant "bitch" and saying John McCain belongs in a wheelchair and not The White House. As funny as it was, Obama learned that having the support of the Hip Hop community can be a mixed blessing.

A notable exception, of course, is mogul Russell Simmons, who early on endorsed Dennis Kucinich. He has also been critical of Obama for his condemnation of derogatory rap lyrics, saying the candidate should "reform the conditions of poverty," not the lyrics of rappers.

More recently, Simmons finally gave his endorsement of Obama late in the primary season, calling him a "spiritual inspiration".

The important point here is that Hip Hop's involvement in this campaign is not forced. It's not a Sprite commercial or a Scion concert. It is the result of the awakening of a political generation that had nobody legit to rally around until now.

The streets of Denver are lined with vendors selling Obama t-shirts. It's similar to what I've seen this year in cities across America: Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco. It used to be the only portraits you saw on the chests of young people were Scarface and Tupac. Now the image on the glittery, XXXL t-shirts you see on the smiling and optimistic faces of the Hip Hop generation is a presidential candidate.

Things to do in Denver When Your Cause is Dead

DENVER, Co. -- Half way through On the Road, Jack Kerouac finds himself alone and depressed in Denver. He works in a fruit market, lugging watermelon crates and goes to softball games, alone, at night. It's a dark time for him and in the middle of his narrative, before he describes leaving for San Francisco in a car with two pimps, he stops to craft two lines of verse:

Down in Denver, down in Denver

All I did was die

Fifty years later, in the dry and sagging days of August, something else is dying in Denver. A disappointing turnout of aging protesters make their way through downtown's streets, weaving past the common landmarks of modern America's downtowns: Barnes and Noble's, Virgin Megastore, Niketown, Chilli's. They beat a drum or start a chant, but those are clearly limp acts of desperation.

They're here to send a many-tiered message to the thousands of Democrats gathered for their 200 million dollar high school pep rally: end the war, stop torture, upset the setup, demolish corporate greed. As political conventions have evolved, though, no delegate will ever see a protester. No protester will get within a mile of the arena where the delegates are gathered. And the act of protesting itself seems to be an embarrassing relic from a different time, the protesters putting on some kind of re-enactment, playing dress up, about as relevant as civil war buffs or trekkies.

The major organizing body for protesters in Denver is calling itself Recreate68. I have a hard time getting my head around this name. I can't imagine why anyone would want to recreate such a traumatic, violent, devastating and ultimately fruitless year in American history. Dr King killed, Bobby Kennedy killed, the Democratic party implodes and their convention is marked by chaos and violence. The next time America looked up, Richard Nixon was president of the United States and it would be a long time before anybody came home from Vietnam.

Members of the group that I've spoken with (both young and old) are careful to distance themselves from what most of us know of 1968, citing instead the "front line battle for social change." That's what they mean by recreate68. This is an admirable goal, except that there is such a pitifully low turnout of protesters that they would have a hard enough time just to recreate an episode of Ricki Lake from 1998.

In fact, the only ones who look prepared and excited to recreate the mayhem and violence of 1968 here in Denver are the police. Every street is lined with officers on bikes, hanging off of SUVs, clad in riot helmets and padded gear head to toe. They are an army (no exaggeration) with helicopters, guns, batons, jeeps, tear gas and horses keeping Niketown and the Sheraton and the Pepsi Arena safe from a handful of malnourished and dreadlocked sign toters. The police seem like they, too, are playing a bit of dress up -- but there is an excitement and intensity in their eyes that reads, "please give me a reason." It is more than a little bit unnerving to be a pedestrian in Denver this week.

Many of the protesters are young, just as many are not. The leaders and most prominent voices are well past their idealistic prime. At the front of the march on Sunday for instance, was Ron Kovic, the 62-year-old paralyzed Vietnam veteran whose memoirs were the basis for the Oliver Stone film Born on The Fourth of July. The protests keynote speaker Monday night was Cindy Sheehan, the 51-year-old mother of a soldier who died fighting in Iraq.

This is not a march of the young and idealistic, flying in the face of authority. This is an exercise in confused and jaded futility.

No, the young people gathered in Denver right now are very much in line with the Democratic Party. They are clad in Obama t-shirts, driving Volvo's covered in Obama bumper stickers and waving signs in the convention hall.

A young man named Biko Baker, the director of the League of Young Voters, made a point of saying that the young people he works with are excited about the election "...not because of the candidate, but because we want real change in our communities." This may be his experience, but the scene in the Pepsi center suggests otherwise. The Democratic Party is overflowing with youth and, save for the occasional blond teen-aged girl with a Hillary button, they are all unapologetically in love with the idea of Barack Obama for president. This is a reflection of partisan loyalty and a continuation of young people's enthusiasm for "the new hope".

A few months back, working on a story about the sate of the anti-war movement, I spoke with a number of organizers who expressed frustration at dwindling numbers in their ranks. They told me they were losing people to the Obama campaign. The young and politically minded jumped ship for Obama's movement, which felt like it was going somewhere.

And now I can see it. Cindy Sheehan is far outside the convention center and the kids have credentials.

Only In America: The Making of a Young Patriot

In the late summer of 2001, I traveled with my mother to Mexico City so that she could attend her high school reunion. I was there for her peace of mind (my aunt told her ‘it’s not safe there now, not like when we were kids’) and, I suppose, as something to show off.

Years before, we teased my uncle for renting a Cadillac to go to his Air Force Academy reunion, but you could say I was her Cadillac: a well-dressed, reasonably charming American boy.

It was my first time outside of the United States and I was immediately in love with the filth and the madness of that city. I absorbed all of the mythology of the place: the Virgin, the pyramids, the cafes where my teenaged mother sat with her girlfriends. On one of the final days of our trip, we visited the Zocalo, which my mother described to me as “Times Square and Vatican City and Washington DC all squeezed into one block.”

There was a protest there that day, farmers who marched hundreds of miles to hold banners and wave flags. At the center of the square was a flagpole with an absurdly large Mexican flag.

From every window of every building on the square hung a Mexican flag.

I had never seen anything like it and my mother, sensing my bewilderment leaned over to me and whispered, “They’re really crazy with their nationalism down here. I mean, when do you ever see anything like this at home? Some sporting events, maybe.” I nodded.

At 20 years old, I had never thought about it. The American flag at that time in my life was old and archaic, a little bit scary, safe only as ironic pop art or draped across an Olympian’s shoulders.

Two weeks after I got back from Mexico, my girlfriend’s sister came running into our bedroom at some ungodly hour in her pajamas, curly red hair all over the place, screaming, “We’re under attack!” I turned on the TV and saw people being swallowed by clouds of smoke.

I spent the next several mornings at my kitchen table with a bowl of cereal reading the paper, listening to Sade’s new album and crying. One morning I read a story about the shortage of American flags. Stores were sold out. A woman in the story said, “I don’t know what it means, but when I see someone flying the flag, I know that they’re feeling the same thing that I am.”

One night, a group of us gathered at my girlfriend’s house in San Francisco’s Sunset District to paint American flags. You honestly could not buy one in a store, so we decided to make our own with construction paper and watercolors.

It was a nice night: lots of Coors Light and Camel cigarettes, family and friends. We needed things like that then.

At one point my girlfriend’s very Irish cousin, visiting from Chicago, expressed some frustration with the “Chinamen” in the neighborhood who weren’t flying any flags. I gently tried to explain why recent Chinese immigrants might be a little reluctant to embrace ferocious nationalism.

I hung my handmade flag in the window of my apartment the next morning, after the paint dried.

By January, things felt better. I sat in a Boston bar in Santa Monica watching the playoffs with legions of New England Patriot fans, secretly rooting for the Raiders.

As the final seconds ticked past and the Boston boys erupted in cheers, I realized that the Patriots had stolen their Super Bowl appearance from the Raiders. My brother, also a secret Raider fan, floated the theory that it was fixed so that the “Patriots” could win in the year of our great national tragedy. I became suspect of anything with the word “Patriot” attached to it.

A little more than a year later, I emerged from a train station in Barcelona to see thousands of people in the streets, stopping traffic, chanting “Guerra No” and burning American flags.

I didn’t know the bombs were already dropping in Iraq, so I was shocked. It became clear that my travel partner and I would have to hide the fact that we were American. I mocked him at the airport before we left because he cut the American flag label off of his Ralph Lauren jean jacket, somehow anticipating this mayhem.

People were spray-painting the parliament building with anti-war slogans, which inspired my partner, an artist, to contribute. He crafted a large butterfly figure and next to it, wrote the slogan “Ni Los Propios Americanos Estan Por La Guerra”, or, “Not Even Americans Are Pro War”.

We spent the next few days in bars and cafes, debating with Spaniards, defending our confused patriotism. Over the next couple years, I nervously watched a war unravel and an election blow past and then early in 2006, I found myself in an SUV speeding through the desert of southern California. I was on the phone with a man named Bandit, the field organizer for a group of Minutemen stationed at the border fence in Campo.

He was asking me questions, trying to determine whether he would allow me, a journalist from San Francisco, to hang out with him and his comrades as they patrolled the border.

In a gruff voice and with simple words, he asked me things like “Do you believe in the constitution of the United States?” I phrased my answers honestly but carefully, so as not to alienate him. Finally, he asked me, “How do you feel about this country?” I stuttered a little bit.

“Well, I d-don’t always agree with what our leaders may do, but I love my country and am proud to be an American.” He said “mm-hm” and gave me the directions to their operation.

I was afraid that I had fudged my answer, that I wasn’t honest with him because it was more important to me to get access than to maintain some integrity. But I thought about it and surprised myself, realizing that I meant it when I said I loved America.

That spring, a million people -- sons and daughters of the people Bandit patrolled the desert looking for -- marched in the streets of downtown Los Angeles, waving American flags and announcing their presence.

I was there, watching and smiling, at times emotional.

And just last month, I sat in my aunt and uncle’s apartment in Manhattan as we watched NBC report that Barack Obama had secured the Democratic Nomination for President. The confetti was still falling as my uncle, a black man who grew up in Harlem, picked up the phone to call his son. He laughed as he yelled into the phone, “Make sure you tell your kids! It’s like a man walking on the moon!”

Tom Brokaw looked into the camera and said, “Only in America. Only in America.”

The Pro-War Youth Candidate

Week three of this droning, already dwindling general election season is tempting me to hit the snooze button until the fall.

Hillary Clinton’s departure seems to have sucked all of the life out of this thing, leaving Barack Obama alone to contend with the fumbling, bumbling Bob Dole-Ozzy Osbourne hybrid Manchurian candidacy of John McCain. And, sadly, it’s not nearly as entertaining as it sounds.

If you pan away from the geriatric town hall meetings for a moment, though, and over to the ever-amusing antics of our president, you might find a curious surprise or two. Consider, for example, this week’s announcement from President Bush that he has removed North Korea from the ranks of the “axis of evil.”

This leaves only Iran and Iraq: the duet of evil. Keeping in mind that the next few months are the political equivalent of the last day of school for Mr. Bush, I have to consider that this is some kind of senior prank.

But that’s not the case. The president has, in fact, adopted a softer stance toward the aggressive and nuclear-ready regime of Kim Jong Il.

I have to consider that this comes just weeks after Obama addressed the Israel lobby in Washington, D.C., at the close of the Democratic primary season. He used strong language to assure the audience of his commitment to Israel’s safety, saying that he would do everything in his power to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

He repeated himself, placing even more emphasis on the word “everything.” Then he said “everything” yet again, for those of us who did not already know that “everything” means -- and I’m paraphrasing the Gap Band here -- he’ll drop the bomb on them.

At the time, it was kind of jarring to hear the “anti- war candidate” use such hawkish language, as if his legions of supporters had been duped. Flashing back to the primary, though, I realized that he was never really an anti-war candidate. He was merely an anti-Iraq War candidate.

The proudest badge on Obama’s girl scout sash throughout the primaries was the fact that he was the only serious candidate to have voted against the Iraq war. He touted this fact even as he received criticism for saying things like he would bomb Pakistan if he knew Bin Laden was there. Obama’s Iran tough talk is not mere lip service for the benefit of the friends of Israel; he will take action.

In weighing this information, though, I am reminded that mine is not an anti-war generation. Obama did not break any promises or betray the peaceful trust of his young followers because young people in America are more realistic than pacifistic. Ours is a political generation that grew out of the violent spectacle of Sept. 11, 2001. And until we realized that our government had swindled and betrayed us, many of us were in favor of military retaliation.

Many of the young men and women I’ve spoken to who are serving in Iraq enlisted shortly after Sept. 11 for precisely that reason. Most of them now don’t understand what we’re doing in Iraq, though.

The anti-war movement is a tired, old animal. Consider that the most visible personality in the anti-Iraq War movement has been Cindy Sheehan: the mother of a young man who chose to serve in the military and died in Iraq. This is the image of the anti-war movement in America: a grieving mother, a middle-aged woman avenging the death of her son.

A few months ago, on the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War and soon after the milestone of 4000 American soldiers dead in Iraq, I was on the phone with a 16-year-old as he passed by the protests in San Francisco. He is a progressive-minded young man and no fan of the war, but he limited his description of the protest to “all dreadlocks and drum circles.” (Let me remind you that, at 16 years old, he was eight on Sept. 11 and just a couple of years older when the war in Iraq started. For most of his young life, he has lived with the rumbling of distant wars.) He said there were also a bunch of “old people” and went on to say that he doesn’t understand why they keep coming out because marching never does anything.

We tend to identify an anti-war movement as a relic of another era, something our parents or grandparents did. It’s a dinosaur parade, a romantic exercise in futility. For a long time, this indifference to an anti-war movement caused older generations to paint us as apathetic. But last January, when Iowa chose Barack Obama in their Democratic caucus and a wave of youthful optimism crested over the country, that proved not to be the case. We weren’t strictly apathetic; it’s just that until then, no one was talking to us.