Letter From Boston/Ian Kilroy: As Boston emerges from the harshest New England winter in years it is as if spring has caused the flowering of a strange new plant. It has mushroomed up from every lamppost.
Its red and white stripes flower in shop windows and on car aerials. Huge specimens of it can be found outside the houses of patriotic Bostonians. Everywhere you look, the flag is firmly planted.
Only in the Soviet Union have I previously seen such a fetish made of the national flag. Soviet leaders once wore the hammer and sickle of the totalitarian USSR on their lapels. Now George W. Bush and company have adopted the practice with the US flag.
This new found adoration of the star-spangled banner has spread like wildfire since September 11th, but with a war on it has reached new heights. All over Boston, huge, gas-guzzling pick-up trucks screech by with flags flying from them, or with star-spangled bumper stickers that read "Proud to be an American", or "We'll never forget 9/11".
What increases the feeling of living in a totalitarian state is the Pravda-like coverage of the current war by the major national news networks. MSNBC and CNN are anything but impartial. MSNBC has a wall of heroes, where sentimental and glassy-eyed photographs of US service men and women, with names like Chuck and Chip, are added every day.
As for CNN, it is so embedded with the US military that it is veritably in bed with them. CNN made its name in the last Gulf War, and now it has consummated its relationship with the US military. The union is now so perfect that one is indistinguishable from the other. On the day that 55 or more Iraqi civilians were killed during the US/UK bombing of Baghdad both TV stations barely mentioned the story, preferring to concentrate instead on an Iraqi missile landing in Kuwait, injuring one person.
When the Baghdad casualties were mentioned, both stations let comment pass unchallenged that it was probably an Iraqi missile that had killed them.
Who was it that was bombarding Baghdad again? What was heartening was the tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators that thronged Boston Common in the city centre two days after that fatal bombing.
With a hint of spring in the air, speeches were made, drums were banged, and a massive procession of students, business men, nuns, student radicals, ghetto kids, elderly ladies and gentlemen, artists and old war veterans filled the streets. Older people spoke of decades past, and protests against the war in Vietnam. Younger people were proud to be involved in the largest demonstration in Boston for decades.
At one corner of Boston Common's large green area, however, there was another demonstration.
Although it consisted of only about 70 persons, all 70 were very vocal in projecting their point of view. Here the placards read "Dictators love cowards", "Professional protesters, take a shower and get a real job", "Give war a chance" and "Support our troops".
When the anti-war protesters passed they taunted them: "Call yourself an American? You should be ashamed of yourself", or, more baldly, "F*** you!" It was like a potential battle of Gettysburg was brewing, as if civil war would soon ensue. Luckily, the whole thing passed off peacefully. Boston's mounted police had no need to draw batons, the tear gas stayed in the can.
The ghosts of Boston's passed street battles, notably over the forced integration of public schools, stayed obediently away.
But that night on the news we were back in Soviet mode. The peace rally was not that big, the pro-troops rally was equivalent in importance and size. We needed to remember that we were on an orange terror alert and, by the way, have you seen this picture of Chuck? His wife Peggy sent it in. He's in the Persian Gulf and our thoughts are with him tonight, and with all the fine young men and women that are doing such an important and fine job over there. In this conflict a rift has opened up between reality and the representation of it. Dorian Gray has his horrific portrait, his true face hidden in the attic, and all we are shown is his youthful, beautiful face, smiling beatifically at the world.
Depressingly enough, in Irish bars the length and breath of Boston, sitting under pub portraits of Oscar Wilde, ex-pats tell anti-French jokes. They raise their glasses to toast the push to Baghdad, and furrow their brows to fathom why the country they left all those years ago could be so against this war, and against this great land, which has given them so much.