Between you and me and Grant Green

2012 rolled by with one lousy blog post. Well, it wasn't lousy. It was kind of funny. But it makes me think--whatever happened to my desire to write.
I have this novel (which is still available through createspace.com, thank you) and I think I did a pretty good job on it. Sometimes I think I said all I really wanted to say in that book. It's a good story, if I do say so myself, but I don't feel like it should be the last word on my life.
A lot has happened since my last blog entry. In July I lost my job. Nine years with the company and they decided my job performance just wasn't good enough. Still trying to figure out why that happened. I felt like I was going nowhere there anyhow--hadn't had a raise in four years.
In August, my dad passed away. He was 88 and died of liver cancer. He ran a barber shop in Columbus for 56 years. It's closed now and has been cleaned out down to the tonic case. My mom has been left with a lot of work to do and a lot of old racetrack tickets. The racetrack was where Dad was happiest, if you could have called him happy. And it was where I was happiest for quite a few years. Money is too precious to me now. I can't believe now how much I used to bet on horses back when I was working for the Racing Form. And dogs, and blackjack, and...
Then, in September, I was hired as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service. It's much better paying than my previous job, and also a lot more work. It's not your father's Postal Service. The clock is everything there. Get the mail out and be back by five. The carriers are very supportive and I've learned a lot from them, though. I was supposed to have a 90-day evaluation, but the manager said the other day that I'm "past that now," whatever that means, so I'm assuming that I'm good. Having a job situation so up in the air has really made me live life one day at a time. Each day that I still have a job seems like a bonus to me now. It does make me wonder what might have happened had I worked half this hard on any of the other jobs I've had in my life.
So, here I am. Jamie isn't feeling well and went to bed early and I'm listening to Grant Green playing "A Day in the Life" on YouTube. Not a bad way to spend a Wednesday evening, I guess.
So why do we blog? I look through other people's blogs and there seems to be so much repetition. Someone's photographs here, some teenager who can't stand life anymore there. How much is really worth wading through? I remember when blogs were new and seemed more interesting. When I first got a computer, it was so neat to go anywhere in this thing we call cyberspace and discover new people. Of course, there are some people you wish you'd never discovered.
Perhaps Facebook is the reason why I haven't blogged. Whenever I have an opinion that I want to share, I can just do it more directly over there. But there are times when it's just me and Grant Green and my dog scratching in the background when I just want to let loose and solo. I was always fascinated by the way Jack Kerouac wrote--first thought, best thought. Then again, it resulted in some inconsistent writing.
Maybe I should try blogging more. If nothing else, it's fun to look at your thoughts in print and try to figure them out. So you may hear more from me, maybe not.
All I know is that I've got a lot of mail to carry in the morning with my seven years of college. You can see me walking through Homewood or Point Breeze or Shadyside in all kinds of weather. And maybe I'll see you. It might help to live in Pittsburgh, though.

A Night(mare) At The Opera

Hard to believe this is my first Fritzburgh An’at entry of 2012.

I’ve been pretty busy doing important things like working two jobs, catching stinkbugs, mowing grass and devoting several weeks to a two-minute horse race and having no profit to show for it. Still, I have not abandoned this blog. I do have the hope that people will read it for more things than finding out who Polly Archer is.

I haven’t written a song parody in a while, and I was inspired to do so last night by a post I made to Facebook. I was going down an early ‘80s punk/new wave rabbit hole on YouTube and played “My Sharona.” I thought that it must be the most parodied song in history—just off the top of my head I can recall “My Bologna,” “My Menorah,” and “Ayatollah,” and that doesn’t count all the unofficial ones that kids made up back when the original was a hit (the summer before I started high school). Just about any phrase that came close to scanning with the title became a parody of the song. If coronas were mentioned in science class, it was “Dah dah dah dah dah dah, my corona…” And even in the locker room, it was “Dah dah dah dah dah dah, my sca-rotum…” I guess you could say we all got The Knack that year.

So I asked if “My Sharona” was the most-parodied song of all time and was answered with a page that says it isn’t even close. I question the accuracy of the page, mainly because I doubt that “Sk8er Boi”—a song I’ve heard exactly once—is the second most-parodied song of all time, and because I haven’t heard that many parodies of the alleged champion, “Bohemian Rhapsody.”  It didn’t seem like the easiest song to write new words to—or so I thought.

That night, as I was doing dishes, inspiration struck me like a family of drunks caught smoking in PNC Park. So I submit to you:

FRITZBURGHIAN RHAPSODY

Is this the real song?

Is this just parody?

Is AmIRight’s list

Even based in reality?

What is this site?

Is it made for kids only?

I’m 46, now

Pop’s passed me by, you see

Because I don’t know Avril Lavigne

Beatles, yes, maybe Queen

Anything the kids like

Doesn’t really matter to me,

To me.

Facebook,

It sucks my time—

Frat bros recall getting high

High school classmates proselytize

Though the night has just begun

Before too long, I’ve thrown it all away

Facebook, ooh ooh ooh

Didn’t mean to stay so long

I just sat down to play some Words With Friends

Share some old videos

And click to say I like gay marriage

It’s too late,

The night is gone

Now it’s time to go to bed

Benadryl turns off my head

Good night, everybody

I’ve got to sleep

Got to get up in the morn and go to work

Facebook, ooh ooh ooh

(Where did all the time go?)

Where’d the hours go?

I sometimes wish I’d never signed up at all

I see a little silhouette-o in my sleep

It’s a dream, it’s a dream, is it people in Mensa?

Or is it a horse race

That takes all my snore space?

Go! (Number seven!)

Number seven! (Number seven!)

Number seven, give me fifty bucks to show

And there they go, oh, oh, oh

Now it’s the Mensans, I’m at an RG

Yes, it’s the Mensans, we’re playing Jeopardy

Barry, shut up—who is Dostoyevsky?

Now it’s 5:44

Can I sleep some more?

(Miss Lily!) No, you cannot sleep some more! (Sleep some more!)

(Miss Lily!) You cannot sleep some more! (Sleep some more!)

(Miss Lily!) You cannot sleep some more!

Cannot sleep some more!

Cannot sleep some more!

No, no, no, no, no, no, no!

But I’m still sleepy, I’m still sleepy

Please, I need to sleep some more

But can’t you tell that the dog has really got to pee?

To pee-e-ee,

To peeeeeeeeee?

So we walk through the front yard at break of the day

Then I watch Dennis Bowman on KDKA

Oh, Jamie,

Give a kiss to me, baby,

You’ve got to get out,

You’ve got to get right out of here.

Doesn’t really matter,

Frankstown Road or Penn,

Off to work each morning,

Then at five I come home again.

Pittsburgh traffic really blows….

Lyrics copyright 2012 Robert A. Fritz

It's alive!

That's right--my novel, A Witch to Live, is now available at www.createspace.com



******

[The following is a transcript of a presentation I made about A Witch to Live earlier this year at the Columbus (Ohio) Mensa Regional Gathering. It was not given as it is presented here, but contained quite a bit of last-minute editing, ad-libbing and stage fright.]

At this RG, you are going to hear presentations from best-selling authors who have honed their craft into the basis for a career that has blessed them with the opportunity to make a living doing what they love, as well as the respect of their friends, readers and fellow writers.

This is not one of those presentations.

Instead, this presentation is about struggle—the struggle with putting the right words on the page, the struggle with rejection by agents and publishers—but most of all, the struggle with my own self-doubt.

It might help to provide you with some background. Some people were born to be writers. I’m still not sure if I was or not. My favorite books as a child weren’t even fiction—they were the World Almanac and the Guinness Book of World Records. I would have rather read the Racing Form than anything by Shakespeare. Still would. As a teenager, I did develop some favorites: Animal Farm, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, To Kill a Mockingbird. I enjoyed mysteries, especially those by Dick Francis. Big shock there, huh?

But the idea of writing for a living was far from my mind. If you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I probably would have said a high school band director.

All that changed in my junior year of high school thanks to an English teacher named Bonnie Auletta. There was a class assignment about the end of the world and I wrote a story for it called “Crimson Haze.” Miss Auletta liked it so much that she had it published in the school newspaper. And so, to steal a line from William Butler Yeats, a terrible beauty was born.

The thought occurred to me—how cool would it be to make a living by coming up with ideas? No heavy lifting, no nine to five, and I could get out of taking most of those math and science classes that I didn’t like. And lots of people would know my name!

OK, so my motives weren’t the most noble in literary history. The important thing was that I wanted to be a writer.

So I went off to college thinking I was going to take the local literary community by storm. There was a literary magazine at the college, and it seemed like destiny that I would submit “Crimson Haze” to the magazine and the staff would fall over in awe. Turns out that the only things that fell were my literary aspirations. I received the story back with a note reading, “Please do not submit this again unless you like rejection.”

OK, so I wasn’t going to be John Updike. My true calling seemed to be journalism, anyhow. I was Sports Editor of the college paper and wrote for the college sports information department. And I did eventually get published in that literary magazine, for what it’s worth. I found it helped to join the magazine staff.

I made my living, meager as it was, as a writer for several years. I was a news reporter and sports editor for ThisWeek Newspapers, which many of you who live in Columbus know quite well. After that, I wrote for the Daily Racing Form, the national horse racing publication. You might remember it as that paper Yemana was always reading on Barney Miller. To answer the first question that non-racing fans always ask me when they find out I worked for the Form—no, I was not able to make a living betting on horses. I would not be standing here talking to you (at least not about writing) if I could.

All along, I wanted more. I always had some sort of side writing project going, usually something that I considered Literature. With a capital L. There were poems—mostly whining about how tough life is when you travel the country hanging around race tracks. There were songs that sounded like a cross between George Gershwin and Charles Manson. There was also an extremely transgressive novella that I wrote after reading Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and getting the idea that True Art is supposed to drown the reader in a sea of vulgarity. I think I might have missed Burroughs’ point a wee bit.

For all my literary efforts, all I have gotten so far is a lousy T-shirt. OK, that’s an exaggeration. It was actually a polo shirt bearing the logo of a bar in Shakopee, Minnesota. I won it by finishing second in a poetry slam there. I think I gave it to St. Vincent DePaul while cleaning out my closet a few years back. I imagine some hipster in Pittsburgh is wearing it now, wondering where in the hell Turtle’s Bar and Grill is over his Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Well, actually there was one other thing I got out of my attempt to be the next Jack Kerouac. When I was between jobs (or about to be) in 1993, I read an article in the Columbus Dispatch on the MFA program in creative writing at Ohio State. I thought I had found my big break, which only goes to show that I was unfamiliar with both the competitive nature of MFA programs and their correlation with success as a writer. I applied to the program and didn’t make it. But I took the GRE and got pretty good scores, so I decided to send them to the national office of a certain social organization—and guess what happened! This is my favorite of my life’s many ironies—my GRE scores were high enough to get me into Mensa but not into grad school.

While my journalism career is now dormant, I’ve never given up the glimmer of hope that I could make my living as a novelist or a creator of some other form of fiction. I’ve even tried to actively kill that idea sometimes, but it doesn’t work. As they said in the movie Halloween, you can’t kill the boogey man.


So how did A Witch to Live come to be?

First of all, it wasn’t originally called A Witch to Live. The original title was The Lord and The Lady, but I changed it because I thought A Witch to Live sounded more provocative.

I’m reminded of the story Joseph Heller once told about Catch-22. He said that the first scene he wrote was actually the book’s final scene. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, I won’t ruin it for you—it’s too good.

So it was with A Witch to Live. The year was 2005. George W. Bush was President, a young Jimmy Fallon taught us how to laugh, and I had developed an interest in paganism. One morning before I left for work, I was reading an invocation of the Horned God online when a vision came to me in a flash. That vision turned out to be the final scene of A Witch to Live. Again, no spoilers here.

So I had a final scene involving the novel’s three major characters. I spent the next 15 months finding a way to get them to that final scene. I worked on the novel bit by bit until it was completed on January 14, 2007. Sounds easy, huh?

Then came the hard part—shopping the novel around to agents and publishers. The miracles of Microsoft Word and the Internet made my job a bit easier than it was back in the ancient days of the word processor and the U.S. Mail—but the results were still next to nonexistent.

It was hard to get a response. A couple of agents turned it down in a friendly manner—one just said she wasn’t in love with the idea—while one publisher did offer a bit of constructive criticism. That publisher had a problem with the book’s omniscient viewpoint. Which led me to a host of writing websites to find out what omniscient viewpoint was.

For those of you who have never driven yourselves crazy trying to write a novel, omniscient viewpoint means that the point of view shifts from one character to another regularly during the novel. I’m not sure why publishers consider this a problem. I asked a novelist at the Pittsburgh AG about omniscient viewpoint once, and she said that it’s considered old-fashioned, but that many writers have used it. She gave Dorothy Sayers as an example. I think that’s pretty good company, so I’m not changing it.

At the same time, I was starting to lose enthusiasm for the project, mainly because all the rejections were starting to get to me, and I was starting to think I was wasting my time. I know that getting published is not easy—there are people in this room who will tell you that. At the same time, the cumulative effect of those rejections gave me the same message I got from that college literary magazine—“Please do not submit this again unless you like rejection.”

How strange that one of those rejections pushed A Witch to Live back to the front of my mind. It was pretty standard—an agent said that it wasn’t quite the thing they were looking for, yada yada yada. What made this e-mail different was that I received it three years after I sent the query! Nice to know that someone is a bigger pack rat than I am. Amused by this e-mail, I mentioned it in my Facebook status message and people started asking about the novel again. I sent it to a few friends and never heard back, so, again, I figured that the tribe had spoken.

So here was a novel that I couldn’t get anybody to read—so what could I do with it? I have a blog and I decided that I could use it for something other than posting misheard song lyrics and making fun of politicians. So, between January and April of this year, I posted the novel on my blog.

Then a funny thing happened—I found out that people actually liked it.

Not only did I receive positive comments from some of my fellow Mensans, but my blog received hits from the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, France, Lithuania and Malaysia, just to name a few countries.

One suggestion I received was to publish the novel myself on CreateSpace, a self-publishing arm of Amazon.com. The procedure seems simple—just set up an account, copy and paste the novel using CreateSpace’s own template and sell it on the website. It was such a thrill when it dawned on me that A Witch to Live had its own International Standard Book Number.

There are currently some technical glitches. Several chapters of the manuscript have lines running through it in strange places and I haven’t been able to remove them. There have been some personal financial setbacks this season and I’m working two jobs to make ends meet (and, yes, that’s one of the main reasons why I’m publishing the novel), so I’m working on getting the kinks out in between obligations. In the meantime, please feel free to give me your name and e-mail address, and I’ll keep you posted on its publishing status.


So what is A Witch to Live about?

The easy answer is that it’s about a 17-year-old girl named Alaina Cole. Alaina lives in a small town in southern Ohio called Shady Glen. She’s been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, and, while she is quite intelligent—I’m sure she would qualify for Mensa—and has always hoped for a life outside Shady Glen, she has never seriously questioned her family’s worldview—until now.

Several factors are contributing to her crisis of faith. She meets a boy named Will Clayson, whose mother, Mary Jane, has recently opened a pagan shop in Shady Glen. Encouraged by her church, she starts talking to him about Jesus, with predictable results. At the same time, she feels drawn to him for a reason she can’t quite define. Then she visits the pagan shop, meets Mary Jane and is surprised by how non-threatening the experience is. Meanwhile, she finds out that one of her best friends, Justin Fitzgerald, is gay, which conflicts with her church’s teachings. When she sees the way Justin is treated by members of her church, she starts to question those teachings. How does she resolve the conflicts in her life?

Some people may read A Witch to Live and get the idea that I don’t like Christianity, which is far from the truth. I was baptized as a Methodist and went to a Methodist college. I have had issues with organized religion of many stripes and have never felt welcome in any church. While I’ve explored many spiritual paths, Mensa is the closest thing to a religion I’ve ever had.

I suppose I was inspired by a teenage girl I knew when I was writing for ThisWeek. At one point, she joined one of the largest evangelical mega-churches in her area (and one of several that inspired “The First,” the church in A Witch to Live) and was very enthusiastic about it. I asked myself—did she really know what she was getting into? (I know the answer to that question now: Of course not! She was a teenager!)

But A Witch to Live is not an endorsement or criticism of any one religion so much as a story of one person’s struggle to go against the majority in order to do what’s right. As Mensans, we all know what it’s like to be in the minority, right?


What will happen from here? Who knows? My literary odyssey is certainly not complete. It is a journey without a map—only fragments and rumors of maps that have been used by others—so I have no idea how long it will be or even where it will go. But to steal a line from Jim Croce, if it gets me nowhere, I’ll go there proud.

Will it become a best seller, or even help me buy groceries? It’s hard to say. If nothing else, I hope that my six-year journey will inspire other writers out there.

I keep coming back to that note I received in college—“Please do not submit this again unless you like rejection.”

I’d like to leave you with some comments publishers have made about a few novels:

“I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level.”

That was said about Catch-22, which also became an excellent movie and added a new phrase to the English language.

“Overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.”

That was said about Lolita, which sold 50 million copies and inspired a really cool song by The Police.

"We are very impressed with the depth and scope of your research and the quality of your prose. Nevertheless ... we don't think we could distribute enough copies to satisfy you or ourselves."

That was said about The Clan of the Cave Bear by Mensan Jean Auel.

"The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the 'curiosity' level."

That girl’s name? Anne Frank, whose diary has sold 30 million copies.

"...she is a painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer whose every sentence, paragraph and scene cries for the hand of a pro. She wastes endless pages on utter trivia, writes wide-eyed romantic scenes ...hauls out every terrible show biz cliché in all the books, lets every good scene fall apart in endless talk and allows her book to ramble aimlessly ..."

That was said about Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. OK, even if those words are true, it still sold 30 million copies.

Like rejection? Maybe the secret is to learn to love it!

Blog under construction

Fritzburgh An'at is currently being reworked and will reappear soon in a form to be determined by its creator. The problem is not in your net.

Everyday I Don't Write The Book

A random blog topic I stumbled across tonight is "Books I Want To Write."

So what books do I want to write? I could have answered this question more easily when I was a senior in high school. I had a whole page full of ideas, most of which I don't remember, and most of which are not worth remembering.

Elvis Costello once said that his prime motivators for making music were "revenge and guilt." So it was with me back when I first had the crazy idea of becoming a writer. Write about all the horrible crap that's happened to you and you'll become famous. It doesn't work that way. Nobody cares that I wasn't popular in high school (which I now consider a blessing) or that I spent seven years in college to become an office drone or that...well...I can't get published.

I have written a young-adult novel with a pagan theme, but I can't seem to blackmail anybody into reading it. It probably won't get published, but I'm still proud of it because it showed that I have the patience to take an idea and follow through on it.

An idea that keeps coming back to me is a memoir of sorts about the years I spent writing for Daily Racing Form--sort of a stream-of-consciousness, On The Road type of novel about traveling to and from the various tracks. Think of it as "Racetrack Kerouac."

It has been suggested to me that I could use my racing background and write Dick Francis-type mysteries. The Brie-eating artiste in me protests that this is not hip and that it's been done to death, but hip won't fix the holes in the bathroom wall. My mind doesn't seem linear enough to write a good mystery, though. There would probably be gaping holes in it and it would go off in different directions, like my wife's phone just rang and it plays Herbie Hancock's "Headhunters" and there are two miniature Buddha statues on my desk sitting on a postcard from someone who wants me to refi my mortgage and my dog's legs drag the ground but he still gets around OK in his wheelchair and the Steelers kicked Oakland's ass today and the refs called all sorts of bullshit penalties although it's great that they kicked Richard Seymour out of the game for pushing Ben...see what I mean?

I have thought of writing non-fiction, maybe children's biographies about sports heroes or entertainers. It would be easy research--just find a bunch of news articles on the web, bring it down to a fourth-grade level, fill in with pictures, and presto! Might have to be a little creative with some people. ("OK...and Roethlisberger didn't play at the start of this season because...?")

I also thought it would be really cool to write a new kind of religious text. Put a bunch of proverbs in archaic-sounding language, claim I found the text in a cave somewhere, and see if people follow the teachings. Who knows? I might actually convince people to be nice to each other. What a concept!

Rude Awakenings

Much has been said about Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers student who committed suicide after two classmates webcast him having sex with another male student.

I’m surprised that the outrage has been nearly universal, judging from online comments to news stories about the tragedy. Unmoderated comments to news stories don’t usually bring out the best in humanity (last week some humanoids on CNN seriously suggested hanging an 11-year-old babysitter who accidentally killed a toddler), but this has been different. No quotes from Leviticus, no Fred Phelpsian blather about Clementi being in hell. Even Bible-thumpers (with the possible exception of one Mormon bigwig) joined the overwhelming chorus of “Dude, not funny!”

The tragedy has reminded many people, as it should, that the fight for equality still has a long way to go, but I say that the mere fact that there is such indignation shows that we’ve come a long way in a relatively short time.

The first time I ever saw the word “homosexual” was in Mad Magazine, which is appropriate. When I was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, homosexuality was, at best, a subject for ridicule. Teenage boys used the word “fag” like it was going out of style (which, I guess, it did), and they weren’t talking about cigarettes. I remember one boy in my high school who was strongly rumored to be gay, and some of the things they did to him were, looking back, pretty cruel. One year, he was my class’s highest vote getter for homecoming attendant. Real funny, huh? (A faculty adviser with some decency threw out every ballot with his name on it.)

I didn’t grow up with any “out” gay people. For all I knew, gay men were these weird people who lived in San Francisco and listened to disco and would try to recruit me into their lifestyle if given half a chance. Then came college. Quite a few college classmates, including some of my fraternity brothers, were gay, although I didn’t know it at the time.

The incident at Rutgers reminds me of an event from my college days that has gone down in history—or at least the history inside my head—as “The Rude Awakening.”

I went to college long before webcams, so when we wanted humor at someone else’s expense, we had to use more low-tech means, like the good old rumor mill. One night I heard from one of my fraternity brothers that another brother had told him that two male classmates woke him up one night by having sex.

For some reason, I thought this was hilarious. There is genuine humor in the situation, albeit of the crass variety that is so popular in dude-bro movies nowadays. If you were the person who had been, well, awakened, what would you say? (“Uh…hey, guys, let’s go get some White Castles!”) And, let’s face it—as open-minded as I like to think I am, two men having sex is not on the short list of the things I’d most like to see when I wake up in the morning.

Of course, I was assuming not only that the…uh…captive audience actually was in the same room (he could have just heard them from another room—and why would they go at it with someone else in the room, unless they were really kinky?), but that the incident actually happened. Hey, it was funny! Who cared if it was true?

The incident was good for nothing more than some stifled giggles whenever I heard one of the parties’ names mentioned for a year or so. Then came my fraternity’s Hell Night.

One of the rituals involved each of the pledges being seated in a chair and asked questions with a third-degree light being shined in his face so he can’t see the questioners. The questions were fairly innocent, along the lines of “What does this fraternity mean to you?”

Two or three pledges into the ritual, who should have his turn but one of the alleged participants in the “Rude Awakening”?

I was in my cups—and bowls—(I had not yet learned that, even if I sing like him at karaoke, Jim Morrison was not a role model) and I’m sure you can guess where my mind was going. The problem was that I was laughing too hard to ask the questions, so I tried to get other people to do the dirty work.

“Know what you oughta do?” I whispered to the guy next to me. “Ask him if he’s ever been a fag……better yet, ask him if he’s ever had a homosexual affair with ******! ‘Cause he did, ya know? ****** said they woke him up one night when they was fuuuuckin’!”

Luckily for all concerned, nobody took the bait. Nothing came out of the incident except me making a fool out of myself. It wasn’t the first time and it certainly wasn’t the last.

I would like to think that, given the more tolerant atmosphere now, that if I were in college today, the thought of outing somebody in such a humiliating way would not have crossed my mind.

But the tragedy at Rutgers had me thinking—what if things had gone differently that night? What if I had been able to get those words out of my mouth? How many lives could I have damaged over a puerile, and somewhat mean-spirited, joke?

Could “The Rude Awakening” have become far ruder than I imagined?

[Note: I realize that quite a few people from college could be reading this. I’m not naming names, since “The Rude Awakening” may have never happened (and what if it did?), but if you recognize yourself in any of the above mess, I apologize. Your behavior is not the point, but rather mine and that of far too many others.]

I blame the Bicentennial

Independence Day creates a dilemma for liberals.

How do you express your pride in your country without being mistaken for some paranoid loon with an arsenal in his basement?

Of all the crimes committed by the right wing in recent times, one of the worst is the hijacking of America’s symbols.

Look at any conservative website (or at least its home page—go further at your own risk). You’re likely to see any combination of the following:

*The American flag, or some other combination of red, white, and blue
*The bald eagle
*Words like “liberty” and “freedom” (never clearly defined, of course)
*Anything connected with the American Revolution

The Colbert Report is especially good at parodying the right-wing look—and outlook. At least I think it’s a parody.

Compare these sites to the liberal website Daily Kos. Kos’ most prominent color is burnt orange, and its main visual image is a man waving a flag that may or may not be the U.S. flag (several other countries have flags with similar horizontal stripes). A person unfamiliar with American politics would have to do a little reading to determine the site’s country of origin.

The worst part of this phenomenon is the portrayal of the American Revolution as an exclusively conservative movement. Right-wingers constantly support their views by invoking the Founding Fathers, as if they somehow know that people who have been dead for 200 years would support their ideas. “Why, of course, George Washington would have wanted every paranoid schizophrenic to have access to an AK-47…”

While liberals have just as much of a right to don three-cornered hats, brandish muskets and quote Patrick Henry, you never see them doing that. Why?

I blame the Bicentennial.

For those who may have forgotten, may have tried to forget, or weren’t born yet, 1976 was a strange year in America. Maybe it was part of the recovery process from Watergate, but the whole nation devoted an entire year to patting itself on the back.

Everywhere you went, the country was bathed in red, white and blue. The media were loaded with programming about American history, particularly the Revolution. CBS ran its “Bicentennial Minute” every night, which told what happened 200 years ago that day—the problem being that most of the events were pretty mundane. “200 years ago today, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his cousin, and every “s” in it looked like an “f,” zzzzzzz………..” The Bicentennial logo was everywhere from government buildings to sports jerseys. Fire hydrants were even painted to look like Revolutionary War soldiers!

I was 10 at the time—and don’t get me started on the school curriculum. Every school subject, with the possible exception of math, centered on the American Revolution. Which is something kids should learn about, but it seemed as if it were the only event in our nation’s history. There was a traveling exhibit called the Freedom Train, which I visited twice, but I’ll be damned if I could remember any artifact that was on the train. (Shame, really--some of them sound pretty impressive.) There was a school program where each of us dressed up as a figure from the Revolution and read some dry facts about that person off index cards. I remember wearing a puffy shirt and knickers and telling a roomful of parents about George Washington. And the local middle school presented a musical called “Let George Do It,” which I haven’t seen staged anywhere since. One of the few songs from it I recall was called “Cooperation”:

Things will operate (clap!) more straight
Things will operate (clap!) more straight
Things will operate (clap!) more straight
If we all cooperate, cooperate
Cooperate, cooperate
Cooperate!

Come to think of it, those lyrics don’t exactly sound like they’re about the beginnings of a democracy…

So what does the Bicentennial have to do with patriotism being such a one-sided affair nowadays? I contend that it overloaded the country with red, white and blue to the point where any thinking person had enough of it to last a lifetime. For many people, patriotism died of overexposure.

Maybe it wasn’t necessarily the Bicentennial, but something happened since then that has driven patriotism squarely into the hands of the reactionary and the jingoist. As hokey and excessive as the Bicentennial was, I don’t recall it being limited to people of a certain political viewpoint. Everybody was invited to the party.

When people speculate on the intents of the Founding Fathers, they might do well to ask themselves if they intended to limit the benefits of the new nation to those who agreed with them.