THE BELL CURVE:

I’m in Brevard, N.C., where Friday I’ll celebrate my birthday on what has become almost a traditional trip. Three years ago, I wrote a Fourth of July column from here of reflections about my own country. Very little has happened since then to change those reflections, and I’d like to cheat a little and repeat some of them here because we are about to embark on the most critical election in my long lifetime.

The atmosphere is right for such musings. I am staying with old friends Cliff and Rae Hicks, where the martinis arrive promptly at 5, along with good and wistful talk, on their screened porch that floats above the top reaches of evergreens overlooking a waterfall.

We will drive into nearby Brevard Friday — the closest place I’ve found outside rural Indiana to a Court House town — to see a parade and sample food stands and street fair games.

There used to be a trip to South Carolina to buy fireworks, but the locals put a stop to that and now we will have to settle for the same kind of modest fireworks that cause such a hassle in Costa Mesa.

There will be a concert that will end with the band playing the songs that mark each branch of our military service. Veterans will be invited to stand when their music is played, and we will. Mostly proud old guys. And I will think, as I have every Independence Day for the past eight, how the people running my country during those years have damaged that pride. And how terribly important it has become to remove them so we can get to the business of restoring the principles those of us standing in that band shell once fought for.

Then, home, where — after just enough martinis to induce mellowness — there will be a birthday dinner of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and thick gravy flecked with crisp bits of meat, homemade bread and a white cake with caramel icing, tilted deliberately as an inside joke aimed at our chef who many years ago produced such a cake accidentally. And that will be followed by a fiercely contested game of hearts at a dollar a corner, where honor more than money is at stake and disputes over the rules are frequent and passionate.

For five delicious days, we will be awash in the kind of Americana both Cliff and I envisioned we were fighting for more than 60 years ago. We share the bond of military service in our last holy war, of growing up in county-seat Midwestern towns, of a working life devoted to journalism, and social and political convictions that have hardened over the years.

At this late point in our lives, we share the same concern that the things we fought for and deeply embraced have been almost offhandedly trashed in a country we no longer recognize as our own — where the ends always justify the means and lies are permissible, even encouraged, in seeking public support for actions taken in my name and yours without our concurrence or knowledge.

I know how easy it is to look to the past as the good old days and yearn for their return. But that would ignore the critical domestic problems in this country after World War II — especially in the area of civil rights — that were acknowledged and addressed. And we paid dearly in lives and a deeply divided country for Vietnam without learning anything from that dreadful mistake. We sent an incumbent president back to private life for escalating the war in Vietnam, and we should have done the same thing four years ago to the president who took us into Iraq. Neither Vietnam nor Iraq involved a direct threat to this country or issues the men and women asked to risk their lives could easily define.

The word “moderate” once had real meaning in this country at both ends of the political spectrum — meaning that helped us regain our footing when we lost our national balance. Now, nothing seems right except the peace of mind and thought to be found with good friends on their screened-in porch at dusk.

We’ll talk about the kind of country our grandchildren are now stepping out of college into.

The Greatest Generation seems a distant echo today. The nation we came back to after four years of citizen soldiering has been kidnapped, and our kids and grandkids will be asked to pay the ransom.

In the time we have left, the least we can do is to demand our country back for them — and to say it loud and clear in November.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.