The Rockets' Red Glare

AMERICA turns 204 today. All it wants from me is a little token of appreciation, only my name and address and social security number.

I love birthdays, always have. I even like shopping for birthday presents, giving being good for the soul and all that. But this year I'm having some doubts.

When I was a kid, before I understood the importance of appearances and tokenism, I was a hard-headed pragmatist in the best free-enterprise tradition. Gifts were rewards for behavior I approved of; on occasion I would inform my younger brother that if he didn't give me the baseball bat he would get no birthday present. The implication being that Christmas might be equally as barren.

Maybe it's time to return to that practice. Let's trade a little, Mr. Carter. Stop building the MX missile, and start apologizing to Iran. Maybe pass the ERA. And perhaps the Supreme Court, after a brief rereading of the Constitution, might overturn last week's abortion ruling. All I ask is a little progress, and I'll be first in line at the post office.

Funny how the same people who advocate laissez-faire individualism in everything else are the first to demand patriotic conformity to the draft. "Defending your country" is a phrase that gets tossed around quite a bit. Maybe, with a little persuasion, I will. Maybe not. At the very least, I'll send a card. --W.E.M.

AMERICA--in the form of 51 men and 2 women--is being held hostage in Iran. The Defense Department decided that eight helicopters were enough and lost three men in the desert. Congress is spending $56 billion on what one politician has called "mass transit for missiles." And in Miami, Black and white people are fighting each other in the streets for jobs.

America--it's day 244 now--is being held hostage in Iran. Congressmen are taking money from FBI agents dressed as Arab sheiks. FBI agents are taking money from mobsters dressed as shipping magnates. And in suburban Virginia, Vietnamese refugees cannot find homes or jobs.

America--Time magazine, you may recall, named the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini its man of the year--is being held hostage in Iran. The Supreme Court has ruled that the government won't pay for the poor's abortions. Harper's magazine has gone away. And in California, the largest Congressional district in the country may send a member of the Ku Klux Klan to Capitol Hill.

America--Abolhassan Bani-Sadr will be included in the next issue of Who's Who-- is being held hostage in Iran. In Detroit, garbage is piling up in the streets and the Republicans are coming to town. Everybody wants a tax cut. And in Washington, President Carter smiled when he revived registration for the draft.

America--no, Charlie Beckwith did not play Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now-- is being held hostage in Iran. Mt. St. Helens has blown up three times. Sugar Ray Leonard lost--and got $10 million for an hour's work. And in Dallas, people are dropping dead from the heat.

America--Cyrus Vance, you may recall, resigned as Secretary of State--is being held hostage in Iran. In South Korea, they've locked up all the students for being students. At the Pentagon, a broken 46-cent circuit almost started World War III. And in France, they've built their very own neutron bomb.

If they miscalculate when the war starts and hit New York instead of Moscow, analysts believe they'll only kill half the people living on Long Island. But the Statue of Liberty will still be there.   --R.O.B.

I CAN'T HELP WONDERING if this Fourth of July I'll feel that tingle down my spine when I hear the 1812 Overture and see Old Glory blazing in red, white, and blue fireworks against the black night sky. I'm not concerned with America's birthday this year. It may be selfish, but I'm thinking about my birthday and the fact it places me in the first group of 20 year-olds that must register for the draft.

I--and, I suspect, everyone else born in 1960 or 1961--can remember watching the draft lotteries of the late 60s and early 70s--Bingo games of life and death--on television. I always looked at where my birthday fell in the lottery, thankful that no matter how low the number, I would never have to go and hopeful that somehow the same would be true when I reached draft age.

It may be irrational, but visions of draft lotteries have entered my mind again after a long hiatus because the law now requires me and four million men my age to register in just a few weeks. I do not object to a meaningful commitment to one's nation; what bothers me is the blatantly political evolution of this particular method for showing patriotic devotion.

But are my objections so great that I would break the law to demonstrate my displeasure? That is the dilemma I, and countless others, now face. And it threatens to take the sparkle out of this Fourth of July, which, for me at least, is more a day of reflection than of celebration.   --B.F.J.

THE IMMIGRATION department has a word for me: "alien." 'I prefer "Canadian." Funny that, while I've been embroiled for two years in a futile effort to get an American social security number, most of my friends now wish they didn't have one. Or at least, wish they didn't have to surrender it to the menacingly acronymed SSS.

Ah, irony. Although I hope Ronald Reagan will stop hinting at a "North American union," I still extend best birthday wishes to my southern neighbors--in the hope that reason, against mounting odds, will prevail.

But I remain cynical. While I have faith that the nicks on the face of America are not scars but scratches--and that scabs heal unless irritated--I wonder at the wisdom that will make many 19- and 20-year-olds "aliens" in their own country. President Carter's appeal to the Fatherland for his legitimacy evokes historic appeals to the Motherland. It's too bad you have to fight irony with irony.   --L.S.G.

RON KOVIC was born on the Fourth of July, 1946. When he was twenty-one, a Vietnamese thirty-caliber slug tore through his right shoulder, blasted through his lung and smashed his spinal cord to pieces.

He had been born on the Fourth of July, he had been their Yankee Doodle Dandy, their all-American boy. He had given them almost his whole being in the war and now, after all that, they weren't satisfied with three quarters being gone, they wanted to take the rest of him. It was crazy but he knew that's what they wanted. They wanted his head and his mind, the numb legs and the wheelchair, they wanted everything. It had all been one big dirty trick and he didn't know what to think anymore.

In August, 1972, Kovic and many other Vietnam Veterans Against the War arrived in Miami to protest the war and their treatment upon return to this country. On the night of Nixon's acceptance speech; Roger Mudd interviewed Kovic on the Republican convention floor. "If you can't believe the veteran who fought the war and was wounded in the war, who can you believe?" Kovic asked America.

We'd eat lots of ice cream and watermelon and I'd open up all the presents and blow out the candles on the big red, white, and blue birthday cake and then we'd all sing "Happy Birthday" and "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy." At night everyone would pile into Bobby's mother's old car and we'd go down to the drive-in, where we'd watch the fireworks display. Before the movie started, we'd all get out and sit up on the roof of the car with our blankets wrapped around us watching the rockets and Roman candles going up and exploding into fountains of rainbow colors, and later after Mrs. Zimmer dropped me off, I'd lie on my bed feeling a little sad that it all had to end so soon. As I closed my eyes I could still hear strings of firecrackers and cherry bombs going off all over the neighborhood.