Never Forget!. . .(light cream, no sugar)

Our private pasts don't exist, they're immaterial and are best left forgotten. Right? Or haven't you ever dabbled in a 12-step program.

Then we have our collective past--the one that we are compelled to grapple with though it be a slippery, indefinable varmint.

First, though, I gotta tell you, I see this past as neither here nor there.

But what so many believe (or bought hook, line and sinker) is that what we have he'ah are hallowed remembrances of not-so disparate iconic values--call it the "campaign stump past". You know the one. It's the demagogue's feeding trough. It is the torch standard we obsessively try to pass from one age demographic to the next. It is the bona fide, indisputable, rigid inner core of our civilization's mantle. Dubious? You betcha! But it's what kept Reagan in office for eight years.

Now, I could buy into all of this if, say, my grandparents had been shoeless, straight-off-the boat, steerage-class sod busters, and their children, my parents went from being yearning, tempest tossed and huddled and envolved into shabbily shod (but shod nonetheless) townsfolk who street vended rags from a push cart, chanting in heavily accented but choked by on-again off-again TB'ed English, "we gotta some (hack, hack) mighty fine'a rags'a fer sale" (hack, hack), and then if I were, well, maybe what I am, an English teacher with a closet full of knock off Nikes and Polo shirts, and a hybrid midwestern twang with a touch of a south Louisiana drawl.

If this were the case, that within two generations my gene pool went from mucking a living out of the muck to me, then I would concede that in some way I should respect my grandparents' and parents' fortitude enough to at least light the odd votive candle for them the next time I happen upon a Cat'lick or Buddhist or Hindu prayer grotto.

But the truth is, the only corporal AND spiritual difference I see between my grandparents', my parents' and my life is that the old Hollywood studio system has been forever changed by the rise of provocative, low budget indies. Other than that, everything is just planned obsolesence and retro-or neo-what-have-you.

Lookit. My grandpa would've done Lauren Bacall. My father would have done Lauren Bacall. And hell, I'd do Lauren Bacall.

That Bacall remains a most doable octogenarian is something hardly worth proclaiming on Flag Day.

Now. Round here, and by "here" I mean in filthily oil enriched instant-civilizations up and down the Arabian Gulf, there exists the same sort of reverence for ancestral traditions. But unlike where I'm from, these Gulf Arab types did sort of have sod busting grandparents. But instead of the log and mud hovels of sod busters, they lived in similarly impoverished dwellings--in tents in the desert if they tended goats or in one-room, date palmed thatched huts along the coasts if they fished or dove for pearls. They commuted to these limited vocations generation after generation after generation going back to triple digit A.D. centuries by donkey or camel. Or they walked.

So just a few years after the big, big bucks surged in like a gold capped tsunami, my students' parents didn't have to learn pearl diving or goat herding; they went on to become make-work bureaucratic townsfolk. They drove cars. They enjoyed central a/c. They began to face the tough choices that my people face--like pizza or Chinese tonight?

So, in as much time as it takes to get three films out of Terrance Mallick or to see the New Orleans Saints get into the play-offs, these Gulf Arab Romes were built in a day (or two). And my students, they have satellite TV bringing them 85 channels with nothing to watch, X-Boxes loaded with Grand Theft Auto 1 through 4, Nano-Pods with playlists full of I-Tunes downloads ranging from thrash metal to gangsta. They drink Red Bull to keep themselves hyper active and wear Crocs on their feet to get them around the newest world's largest mall--at least one of these opens up every month.

First there was no mountain. There was a mountain. Then there was a bigger, newer and improved mountain, then there was the world's largest 7-star mountain--all told, this happened in less than fifty years. Many of those pearl diving grand folks are still around to tell their tales of life before half nekkid white women walked the streets.

As a result, Dubai Eye TV news special reports, student PowerPoint presentations, the ubiquitous heritage villages are constantly going on about preserving the past which seems in comparison to my culture, a distant almost Biblical past--that just so happens to be in relatively recent memory.

And the symbol of that heritage, the emblem of their communal, collective consciousness, that tie that binds. . . is coffee.

We have our flag and it represents the first thirteen colonies--a generation going back many, many, many generations to those who had big brass balls, told their King to sod off then went on to forge our civilization by the sweat of their brows, the shedding of blood-theirs and whose ever got in their way.

Gulf Arabs, a fiercely proud, loose confederation of bedouin tribes have their "Never Forget" eternal flame. It's the coffee pot. The coffee pot is their Fleur de Lis, their Liberty Bell, their Lion and Unicorn. They erect monuments to it throughout every city in every souvereign oil rich state. It seems to be proclaiming: Lest we forget, by the grace of God, we bear witness that coffee is the absolute representation of this dominion, and no other beverage ought to be of any consequence within this sacred realm.