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The news stories say people don't go out as much as they used to before Amazon.com. Before COVID-19. Before "remote days." Before. Before. Before.

People drink less alcohol, I read. Some studies say young people aren't having as much sex as they did a decade or so ago. Before.

In the midsize city next to my suburb, the weed stores are doing a smoking business, testimony to the new America, where we stay home, get high, watch porn clips on the computer and wait for the Amazon delivery.

It's a full life if the world outside is on fire.

Which it is.

There's a creep job in the White House who flips off auto workers, and his best friends are guys who like girls so young they look natural clutching a Barbie doll. No one in the middle votes anymore. In America, you can be sure that the most regular voters are the political Amish on both the left and the right. You've either got purple hair or a Marine Corps haircut.

Words like "Communist," "traitor," "coward" and "pedophile" used to be so serious, you couldn't say them without swallowing hard first. Now, we fling those words around like Frisbees with razor blades on the edge.

Everyone is wounded. Everyone has just triumphantly slain their enemy. Everyone has plans for those traitors on the other side.

It's the biggest video game ever made, and the newspapers are fooling you, but some ding-dong junior college dropout podcaster can tell you the "real truth," even if the word "truth" doesn't need the word "real" as a qualifier. We're addicted to superlatives, meanness, absolutes, pills, pistols and porn.

America is a bad neighborhood where something's always on fire and the gangs tell you where you can and can't walk. I knew a woman who lived on one of the worst streets in the midsize city where I used to be a reporter.

"I live on the good end," she used to say.

She did not live on the good end, unless she meant that no one in her building had been shot in the last 12 months, at least not fatally.

But what was she supposed to say? Was she supposed to say, "I failed. I failed in my whole life, and now I live in a ghetto?"

Same reason more people fly the flag outside their homes every year.

What are we supposed to say? "We got high and mean and the whole country became a ghetto of hatred"?

Better to get the flag up there.

"Yeah," the flag says. "We hate each other very much, but we have this flag, and it's heroic as hell."

Right now, the flag is just another broken promise.

And what was the promise?

Venezuela? Only two pronouns? Bullets? Communism? Fascism? The hot breath of a sneering Jesus on the back of our necks? Tear gas? Social anxiety? A rainbow flag? Cheap gas? Longer prison sentences? An open border? A border closed like a fist?

Who knows? Who cares?

America tastes like gasoline and fentanyl, and ramen noodles, and no matter how much fentanyl we shoot, it's always someone else's fault for bringing it in.

The flag's an excuse. It's clothes for a puppet.

We're high as hell, and thank God. That way, we won't see the promise slip away until it's gone.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called, "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.