The Brave Have No Homes.

These smarmy voices are on every channel, overlaying the noisy show of popping lights. They are all smiley and shiny heads in front of the fireworks as I click over them, snipping their festive moods in pieces.

It's another Fourth of July celebrated by warming up leftover spaghetti and seeing some faint bangs and pops on telly. I'm comfortable, in a comfortable life, right?. But not without a price.

I can't not know that, especially now, no matter where I sit. They keep showing this stupid helicopter against the backdrop of the flaring bursts just to cement it all. They actually fully intend to make me wince at conscious irony. It's just another acid reflux moment. They give the government and the military and middle America its prescribed dose of Patriotism.

They play a dead Ray Charles singing O Beautiful (But Wait a minute!), a dead James Brown talking about eye to eye, station to station. A long part of an old speech of Ronald Reagan's and that stupid cowboy song about being proud to be an American.

They play the anthem about the bombs bursting in air as we're still doing all that, just the other way round these days, onto them for us; not on us and against them.

They do look like rockets bursting in air even when they're singing about his truth marching on. His truth? always was a curious turn of lyrics to me.

I wonder about China, where the folks make the bright explosives -- the noise originally made to scare away the evil spirits. For all the tons of them we send up, it never seems to work.

In that old Ronald Reagan speech his words echoed and wafted about keeping freedom safe for others, not just for us. But to me, except for the Olympics -- where all can participate and be proud -- the age of flags is dead in my mind, and that's all that's really going on in my government, our idea of a flag of freedom, always only our idea, of which we're so smugly sure. I would feel ever so much better if they were celebrating someone else, someone who really supports true freedom.

I'd have to turn back to the country we originally ran from to do that. And to a handful of others elsewhere, everywhere, the ones living out of backpacks and bullet-riddled hotels. I would support the ones who look in the eyes of every checkpoint guard with steely firmness while their palms sweat. The ones who will make it there by tomorrow, even if they have to hire some driver who might take them where they'll never be heard from again.

The day they shoot a volley of praise up for the BBC Radio or Radio Free Europe, I will stand up. I will be saluting then.

The day they list all the stringers on warzone insurance, I will be proud.

The day all the writers of actual fact in Darfur,
or the ones who have to smuggle their film cannisters out of North Korea,
or are hustled away in burkas through furious crowds in Gaza, are handed their due, and their words heard and acted on, instead of this mawkish faux allegiance to only one flawed government's ideals,
that will be a day for fireworks.