ArcaMax

I was working at a medium-sized city newspaper on Sept. 11, 2001. No one had stormed the Capitol yet, there had been no George Floyd riots, we hadn't started the war we were going to lose in Afghanistan, and ICE hadn't killed anyone in the street.

My city had a primary election that day. They considered canceling that election but didn't, because if they did, it meant "the terrorists had won."

It was an easy time to be heroic.

If you didn't go to the Walmart and buy tube socks, the terrorists had won. If you went out for an ice cream cone on your day off, you were making sure the terrorists didn't win.

Of course, eventually COVID-19, television streaming services, DoorDash and Amazon Prime made damn sure no one ever left the house again, so maybe the terrorists did win, or at least the lazier aspects of capitalism won. Online porn got better, too, and now you can make your own AI boyfriend/girlfriend/home-wrecker.

I'm semiretired, so what work I do, I do at home. I've surrendered. My wife works from home one day a week, so she's retreating slowly.

I left work on Sept. 11, 2001, and I drove to a bar because I didn't want the terrorists to win. A big screen television showed the moment of impact over and over again, and a middle-aged man at the bar mumbled "Bastards!" over and over again. He left before I did, so I was left to fight the terrorists alone, which I did with three bottles of domestic beer and a roast beef sandwich on white bread.

I drove a few blocks home, seeing the glow of a television set in every living room, and there was a CD on in my truck, a band called The Texas Tornadoes playing "Soy de San Luis," and that will always be my 9/11 soundtrack. I am not Latin, and I don't speak Spanish, but they were a good band and had an accordion player named Flaco Jimenez who could make his instrument whinny like a horse.

We were supposed to be changed forever on that day. When people weren't saying "Don't let the terrorists win," they were saying, "Everything changed."

Everything didn't change, not in the way we expected.

We started to worship anything in a uniform. If the 19 guys who hijacked those planes drew a hard line between Islam and America, we started drawing a harder line between liberal and conservative, black and white, men and women, gay and straight. The flags on the overpasses faded, and we spent a lot of time hating drag queens because we couldn't let the terrorists win.

I don't know if we like Jesus more than we did before 9/11, but we use him harder. No one can leave Jesus alone, and we're always trying to get him to hate transgender people, or make our wives be tradwives. I got off work on Sept. 11, but Jesus hasn't had any time off since.

The flag is overworked too, most often as an item of clothing, because nothing shows more respect for our noble dead than getting Taco Bell Fire Sauce on your American flag T-shirt. In my neighborhood, there are two homes that work their flag 24 hours a day, rain or snow.

Maybe that's the message.

In a quiet middle class suburb, at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, with just dim streetlights and porch lights, a tired flag droops in the fall drizzle. It's too wet to snap in the wind, but when there's a breeze, you can hear the metal hardware on its rope bang lightly against the flagpole.

She's a grand old flag, she's a high-flying flag.

Tomorrow is the day they pick up the trash. Next to every recycling bin on the street, there are three or four flattened Amazon boxes because we no longer believe we can keep the terrorists from winning, not without more guns, and more tradwives, and the implementation of racial theories last popular in 1934 Alabama.

We're a grand old country, and we're scared to death.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, id called "Mean Old Liberal." It's available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.