It's the Fourth of July on a sunny Sunday afternoon in a small town on Florida's Gulf Coast and it's the late 1950s and there's a pool hall and a guy just out of the Navy as a radio man on a destroyer escort who's playing eight-ball for the phone number of an 18-year-old cheerleader who lives in Clearwater and has air conditioning and situational ethics and a thirst for gin.

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The former radio man is being beaten at pool by a guy his age but two-thirds his size named Hiro who is the son of the Japanese pilot who bombed his father at Pearl Harbor although he doesn't know this but knows it's possible and he's a little bleary-eyed from the beer and he's been known to have a temper but it's the Fourth of July so even the bartender's getting drunk so he just says Arigato, Sayonara, etc., and the Japanese guy gets the phone number of the girl and the former Navy radio man from the destroyer escort walks up the street to his hotel and goes up the stairs and unlocks the door to his room and sits down at the window with a bottle of Schlitz and waits for the fireworks.

There will be fireworks in the evening. But now America's getting drunk -- vast, sloppy, stupid, greedy, shallow America born of English bullets and French philosophy drunk! America staggering on unsteady pins in her unimaginable 200th-odd birthday drunk! America trying to wear the empire with dignity drunk! America every year on the Fourth at the barbecue called up on stage to boogie a few hits with the band drunk!

America's joints groan as she does the old rebel shuffle because she's not the chick she used to be. She's no vagabond stepsister hitching a ride to Memphis. She's old, she's drunk but she runs the fucking world.

Then there's another fictional character who often comes to me. He's an 80-year-old Normandy vet who lost the hearing in his right ear on Guadalcanal and came back to the States to become a caterer:

It's the Fourth of July and I've got hair in my nose and a baseball for a prostate. I've got earlobes like ripe pears. I lost my hearing on Guadalcanal. And then fucking Normandy, body-strewn, bullet-pocked. Uncle Sam and God both crept out back for a smoke when they saw what was coming there. And fuck, we did it anyway. Kali. Kaliuga. This age of ours.

I loved them all, those men of mine who died around me on the beach. I carried their souls back with me so they could rest here in their homeland among the maple and the elm. They're around me all the time now, those men. And that was what America was about back then: my brothers giving it up against Hitler and Mussolini.

Mussolini. Tetrazine. Tortellini. Makes me hungry. After the war all I wanted to do was eat. So I became a caterer. So here I am, feeding Americans in Bermuda shorts on the Fourth of July.

About what could there be less disputation? Except the young know nothing of sacrifice. They will die one day a conquered people if they cannot remember Normandy, if they cannot remember a time when it was hard and they were hungry. I will be long gone then, so what do I care if the country falls to a foreign boot? Still it makes me sad.

We are weak; we have no heroes and we do not care enough. Or we care but not about what awaits our children and what is happening to our cousins in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Brooklyn. And if we were in the shoes of those deafened cousins sprinting under strafing jets toward broken stone walls to cringe in rubble, praying for deliverance from bombing runs and the rounding up of men, our prayers would be as they are everywhere: Please God let the bombing stop, and let them stop rounding up our men and shooting them.

And our prayers, thus uttered, would be acted on with glacial slowness by celestial clerks.

"You want miracles?" the clerk says. "Here's a miracle: You're alive! You want the strafing jets removed? We can't even keep flies off shit. We just make the stuff ... Hold, please, there's a call ..." For years you hold the phone, watching the red light blink. In the meantime borders shift. Families bundle their treasures in tablecloths and head out across the mountains, listening for the jets.

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