Red Admirable

I don’t even know what it means to be American anymore!

[ I would like to connect that ridiculous lament to:

1. What Alex told me about the finely cultivated Soviet sense of irony behind the lionizing of atrocious U.S. rock music in the years before glasnot. It turns out my adoration of Boston doesn't make me tasteless, it just makes me a Novosibirskian teenager circa 1977.

2. A lady with gray pigtails and a felt turquoise hat whose purple pants looked like they'd just wandered in from the Haight. She made the entire store smell of patchouli, cackled "Is anything on sale? Of course not!" without waiting for an answer, and then bought a pair of Chloé rip-offs with an Amex Black Card.]

Luckily, I read the Financial Times online this afternoon. The sidebar images accompanying a list of articles in the U.S. Politics section offered a useful guide to what is American:

(boring white man, flag)

(lady knowing her place; said place being in front of a flag)

and what is not:

(person of color; despair; a flag that is not the right flag)

(Carl Bernstein; the hysteria-induced notion that ladies can be in charge; no flag at all).

You can thank me at the youth rally later today.