When War was for Right, not Might?

Today I attended the funeral of my great uncle. Savvy man, got into the computer/data business back in the early sixties when key-punch cards were today's Wikipedia entries. Or something analogous. He served in World War II, stationed for nearly two years in Bombay. Contracted dengue fever while over there. At the service today, veterans from the American Legion gave him a three-gun military salute. Old soldiers, having served no later than Korea. Back when patriotism was a little more than a PVC bumper sticker (kudos, John Edwards). The flag was folded with precise reverence for what the three colors represent: the free sky above our heads, the bloodshed sacrificed to earn it, and the peace which it has ensured for our nation.

Really? That's what the flag represents? It's not the chlorine blue of an inground swimming pool, the red sheen on some dude's Camaro, or the white mayonnaise that gooshes out when someone chomps into a double quarter-pounder?

Because, as I said goodbye to Uncle Fred, a man I did not even know very well, I also said goodbye to another chink in the faded armor of a byegone generation. This was the last time that the nation went to war as a whole, with a firm, undeniable purpose in mind. Before Vietnam, before Iraq I and Iraq II: Neocon Boogaloo. That people still think, still deluded by the government and themselves, that the current war was some type of valiant quest to preserve freedom. Syriana is no Casablanca, and George Clooney is, regrettably, not Bogie. Things are muddier, blurrier, and not so crisp as a digitally restored black & white film. The emotions, the national consciousness that the older folks attending must have felt. Real pride, real spirit, not this lacquered, ultra-bleached smiling, factory-farmed eggshell-brittle notion we now have of freedom & patriotism. Sweetened with high fructose corn syrup before serving, how could I forget. But this war to end all wars also gave us the fallout: we can build and raze a flagship Target store in the time it took to secure Iwo Jima (now Iwo To). What shockwaves will come out of this national epic?

Better color interpretations yet: blue for all the pent-up hypermasculinity of today's society, red for our lusty flights of passion with the shopping mall, and white for the blank void of a national psyche that once stirred hearts and minds.