Somehow, it seems, he never learned of the near-sacred regard with which the Chinese hold the freedom to travel. Somehow, it seems, he had a "one-dimensional view of America as a land of random violence." Living in "expat bubbles," he never even discovered that "cheese and chocolate and other luxuries" were unavailable in China.
But how could he? What with all the healthy skepticism going around, Mom and Dad never seemed to get around to mentioning such things -- or at least not until Junior hit adolescence and it was too late. Small wonder the little darling came home to Connecticut, and, upon being asked not to wear "his favorite homemade T-shirt" ("FREEDOM IS A LIBERTY/BURN THE AMERICAN FLAG!"), the boy sulked, built an illicit fire on the backyard barbecue and grilled up the Stars and Stripes.
At this, Elliott, who wore Mao suits back when her Harvard profs "somehow left me with the impression that the Cultural Revolution was one of the great social experiments," fell into a retrospective vertigo. "Six month before, when we were still living in Hong Kong, I might have been more laid back," she writes. "But with stories about John Walker Lindh, the confused young American who had ended up fighting for the Taliban, swirling in the press, I knew I had to do everything I could to understand what Oliver was going through."
Looking back at the Vogue portrait of the family posed before the mantelpiece (adorned with a giant poster of Chairman Mao), you realize Elliott never quite nails exactly why "confused" Oliver "ended up" burning the flag. But maybe it doesn't matter. The boy is now happy at Brooklyn's St. Ann's school, "a bastion of ultraliberal thinking and creativity." (The Web site features a gallery of third-graders' painting of "Comrade Lenin.") Ms. Elliott may have plumbed the depths of denial to distance herself from her own possible influence on Oliver's jaundiced views, but she really didn't have to. The same multicultural horizons her family focused on across the globe, much to the detriment of the children's American roots, are the same multiculti principles taught within sight of the nation's capital -- much to the detriment of all our children's American roots.
Which is one reason I wonder how it is that we hope to be successful at passing on our democratic traditions to others, when we're not too good at passing them on to ourselves.