Mood in the US: If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel - a cynical Old European dictum that few Americans of any political stripe would accept - then Bolinas is the last refuge of the 1960s.
This tiny town just north of San Francisco, is often lost in fog, and frequently seems lost in time and space.
To make it less accessible to those who might not share its flower-power ethos, or might come to gawk at the ageing hippies as well as the richest birdlife in the US, the locals have repeatedly torn down signposts supposed to guide visitors through the maze of hills and estuaries on the coast of Marin County. The authorities - if there still are any left out here - no longer bother putting them back up.
But the US-Iraq war has found its way to Bolinas, and brings back bitter memories of Vietnam for some of the inhabitants. Last Sunday morning, a veteran whose injuries require him to use a walking frame stomped up and down the town's only street, from café to library and back again, like a caged animal. He encountered a teenage couple, whose blissed-out condition wreathed their faces in fixed beatific smiles, and he lost the run of himself.
"You've no right to smile this morning," he roared. "You've never seen your friends lying in pools of blood. You've never seen them with their arms and legs blown off. This war is hell. All war is hell. You can't smile this morning." The couple beamed back at him, bemused.
By the end of this week, as the war dragged on and seemed to be going nowhere, smiles were rare on either side of the debate that divides America. Radio and TV coverage sometimes seemed almost paralysed by the fact that there are no more quick victories to report. Families of US casualties spoke with heart-wrenching pride and dignity of the patriotism of their abruptly lost children. But some of them added that their offspring had joined the army because they could find no other jobs, and, somewhat naively perhaps, had never expected to face combat in the field.
Flying to Madison, Wisconsin, two-thirds of the way across the country from Bolinas, I met conservative academics who were deeply concerned about the radical foreign policy the supposedly conservative Bush administration has embarked upon.
"Can anyone seriously argue that this adventure will produce less Arab terrorism, rather than more of it?" one of them asked. "All great powers seem to fall into the trap of hubris. I can't see how we are going to get out of this."
Was the Bush agenda being set by fundamentalist Christians, I wondered. "Not entirely," I was told. "Don't forget the influence of right-wing Jews. That phrase used to be an oxymoron in this country, but not any more."
It would be ironic if a war so positively viewed in Israel might start to undermine that country's highly privileged status in the US establishment, if Operation Iraqi Freedom begins to get really bogged down.
Some callers to radio stations, where such seismic geopolitical shifts are rarely discussed, do argue that the war is essential to protect American citizens from terrorism at home. "Why don't the anti-war protesters realise that our soldiers are fighting so that we don't have to give our children gas masks going to school?" was a question asked so often that it began to sound like an organised campaign.
A group of children near Bolinas did not think the war was protecting them, and were worried about its effect on people their own age on the other side of the world. All under 10 years old, they spent an afternoon at a crossroads, with placards saying "Don't kill Iraqi kids!". They asked drivers to "honk for peace". Most did, but this region is far from typical. Anti-war protests, which have seriously disrupted traffic in major cities in the past week, are often regarded with mixed feelings even by those who oppose the US intervention, and as something akin to treason by those who support the war.
In Smiley's Bar in Bolinas, two young women said the protests were adding to their stress getting to work in San Francisco.
Back in Madison, I found a Veteran's Museum which documented local and national participation in every conflict since the American Civil War. I found the following quotation in the Vietnam section: "We are under no illusion that success will come quickly, but we have no doubt that success will ultimately be ours." These words were spoken by Robert MacNamara, Secretary of State for Defence, in the mid-1960s - a decade before the US was finally forced to withdraw from its south-east Asian war. They had a very contemporary ring about them.