Letter From America: Patriot Games.(Brief Article)

Years ago, on a Hollywood soundstage, an actor threw such a tantrum that the next day he felt compelled to apologize to an assembly of the cast and crew. This is not as rare as it sounds: most actors, after a big meltdown scene, like to follow it up with a big apology scene. In this case, the actor made a tearful show of it, abjectly throwing himself on the mercy of a group of people who owed him their livelihood. Surprise! They forgave him!

"You gotta understand," he had explained, "what I've been through this month. A friend of mine is sick, my girlfriend and I are having problems and I've been through an earthquake." He was referring to the Northridge quake, which devastated parts of the San Fernando Valley, felled a freeway overpass and killed more than 50 people. But to this actor--and I suspect he's not the only person in the entertainment industry who felt this way--everything is personal. Earthquake? My earthquake. Holocaust? My Holocaust. As Daffy Duck once shouted to Elmer Fudd, trying to keep him from pulling the trigger, "I'm different! Pain hurts me!"

The personal statement is very important to us in Hollywood. And these days, the most ubiquitous personal statement seems to be the proud display of the American flag in a variety of places: car windows, jacket lapels, umbrellas, $600 cashmere sweaters, you name it. In Manhattan the American-flag lapel pin signals the wearer's remembrance of those lost on September 11, support for our troops overseas--and, maybe just as crucially, the fact that he has a lapel to pin something to. Which means he's wearing a suit jacket, which means he has a job. Or else he's wearing a black, silk T shirt.

What's remarkable, of course, is that there are any American flags flying at all, lapelwise or otherwise, on the streets of Manhattan or Los Angeles. The two big media cities are home to a rather less traditionally patriotic crowd, the kind who prefer their Americana with a dash of irony and a hefty pinch of condescension. Last summer I was invited to a Fourth of July party at a friend's house in Malibu. "We're going to do the whole 'American' thing," the hostess told me, with a kind of aren't-we-zany smile. "I mean, hamburgers, the flag, the whole bit." Now she has an American flag clipped to her Range Rover.

It's called, I think, the New Patriotism. Europeans are terrified of it. They have always imagined that the ...