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2001-06-01 | 9:45 a.m.

Driving my sister to work this morning, she mentioned that her attorney (she is suing to get out of this drug charge; the DA dropped it down to a misdemeanor but she and the attorney think they can make the whole thing go away, since it was a bogus stop) is the number-two counsel for the nut job who shot and killed our town's beloved K-9 cop last year.

"Good luck," I said. "Maybe she can get him a toilet that flushes."

"Yeah, well," she said, "I think they're going to try to give him the death penalty."

"They might just get it, too," I said. "People don't like that."

I thought about how I had walked down to the high school football field with the kids to attend the police officer's memorial service. All the K-9 officers from miles around were there, too, with their dogs.

"Not even crooks!" she said. "I mean criminals, crooks ... they have that 'honor among thieves' thing."

She chuckled at the implication that the police were also thieves.

I don't know if it is true that criminals hate cop-killers. I seem to recall stories, perhaps apocryphal, of inmates giving standing ovations to cop-killers. But she feels this way, and I feel this way, whether or not anyone else does.

My family is very patriotic and conservative about some things. Last night at the school International Night, some little kid got up and started reading the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish, off cue cards. My mother immediately shoots me a five-alarm look and mouths, "We should stand up!" I feel a twinge of guilt but shake my head no. He is halfway through the pledge, it's in Spanish, and no one else is standing. But I still feel a little guilty about it. But then, I feel weird sitting down at home when I'm watching sporting events on TV and they sing the national anthem. It's one of those trees falling in the forest things. Like when they do those studies that find that almost nobody (well, 11 percent) wash their hands in a public restroom when no one else is in the bathroom. But then they always do if other people are there.

I think performance art has sort of ruined my generation. We're very hesitant about bold gestures. My Mom has no problem with having a personal rule that if the pledge of allegiance is recited, she will stand up. That's because unlike me, she can't really imagine a situation where a guy is standing onstage, reciting the pledge, holding his dick in his hand, pissing, while 13 nudists behind him burn the flag and strains of the "Macarena" drift through the auditorium. It's a slippery slope.

Of course, in that situation, I'd probably want to stand. Because people like me are also fond of ironic gestures that call attention to ourselves. (Maybe not so much now, but definitely when I was in my twenties.) But not my parents' generation. My father did not adopt an ironic stance toward the war; he re-enlisted after Pearl Harbor (he first went in at 15---he lied about his age). He was there at Normandy, on a ship, when the war wound down.

At approximately the same age, I was making friends with Joey Johnson, the Texas flag-burner whose case later went all the way to the Supreme Court, whom I met when he was arrested along with my ex for resisting arrest at an anti-apartheid protest. But I never joined the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, despite Joey's passionate rhetoric. Not even close. I never wanted to be a Communist because I was very cynical about the idea of the "vanguard" and had no place in my heart for an ideology that discouraged individual achievement. I was the kind of kid in school who, after being assigned to a group project, would wait after class to ask the teacher if I could just work by myself. I've always been more of ACLU type of person, really.

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