THE AMERICAN WAY

ANTI-FLAG CALLS FOR A NON-VIOLENT PUNK-ROCK REVOLUTION

The name of the band is Anti-Flag.

The illustration on the cover of the Pittsburgh punk group's latest album "A New Kind of Army" shows a group of mohawk-wearing punk-rock soldiers hoisting a flag in sands-of-Iwo-Jima fashion.

The flag is American.

Upside-down, but American.

The music itself is even more explicit in its attack on the state of affairs in a nation where some kids are killing their classmates while others are being shipped to Yugoslavia to kill at the president's bidding.

"I Don't Believe" finds singer Justin Sane declaring "I don't believe in America or the American dream" on "Free Nation?", he rails against the hypocrisy that leads a racist, homophobic nation to call itself free. On "Outbreak," he goes so far as to accuse our cigar-licking, dress-staining leader of bombing Iraq as a smokescreen to draw attention away from his extra-curricular use of interns.

There's a photo of a dead Iraqi soldier in the CD tray. Beneath his lifeless body it reads, "Your tax dollars at work."

Is Anti-Flag anti-American?

Not on your life.

As it states in a number of places on the album cover, "Anti-Flag does not mean Anti-American. Anti-Flag means anti-war. Anti-Flag means unity."

It means helping America find it's misplaced soul at a time when it clearly needs one.

"I don't hate America," says Sane. "I love America. I grew up here. I'm connected to the culture here. The idea of Anti-Flag was never 'We're down on America.' But there are problems here that need to be worked on. And just blindly saying 'I love everything about America' is defeating the principals America was founded on."

The title, "A New Kind of Army," is explained in the tearaway army poster you'll find on the flip side of the lyric sheet. The A-F Army is "Too smart to fight, Too smart to kill."

It's one of two Sane was hoping to push with the album, the other being a move toward unity and acceptance. And no, not just in corporate America, but in the clique-ish punk community as well.

"It's important for us, if we're going to have a peaceful world," he says, "to accept each other's ideas and differences."

He points to the shootings in Littleton as yet another side effect of living in a nation where people, young and old, are routinely persecuted for not fitting into the master race if cultural conservatives.

"I see it as such a tragedy," he says of the shootings. "And one of the reasons that it seems to have happened is because there really is very little acceptance for anybody that's different. And it seems to me that these kids felt so isolated and were so picked on that...I'm not excusing what they did, but I can almost empathize with them, because in high school, I got messed with for being a punk rocker. And to this day, I still do."

He's noticed, he says, that one thing no one seems to be touching on in the round-the-clock coverage of Littleton is "the fact that America, itself is such an uncariing society. The No. 1 thing is greed and money and pushing the other guy out of the way so you can get to the top. It's not very shocking to me with the values that are pushed on us from the day we're born. Look at the way that Clinton is dealing with the problems in Kosovo. With violence. To me, it just feels like those are the messages that are pushed on us, so it's not hard for me to believe that this happened, as horrible as it is."

He's hoping to get the message of peace & unity out to everyone. And that means reaching out beyond the punk scene.

"There's still a standard held by so many people that you have to do this exact thing to fit in with punk rock," he says. "And we're trying to get away from that. We're trying to say, you know, as long as you're trying to do something positive, then we want you involved in what we're doing. There's this idea of keeping punk rock totally exclusive to a group of 200 people in each city, of keeping it underground, and I just think that's very self defeatist. I want people to heae what we have to say. And if people don't hear it, then it's not gonna make any impact at all."

As serious as Sane and Anti-Flag can be, among the many highlights of the new release , you'll find a hillarious novelty track that finds a parade of knuckleheads asking what Sane says are typical questions.

"Anti-Flag? That doesn't mean anti-the American flag, does it?"

Another sneers, "You know, if you guys think America's so bad, why don't you move to Russia?"

Move to Russia?

Now, that would be anti-American.

He'd rather stay and fight.

In "Got the Numbers," he calls for nothing short of a revolution but not a violent revolution the way Clinton or Milosevic would do it.

"All revolutions don't have to be bloody," he says. "And all revolutions don't have to be violent. What we would hope to do is have a cultural revolution, a revolution in people's minds, that people do become more caring and more accepting. We want people to say 'We refuse tp fight you. You're trying to lead us into war and it doesn't make any sense.' When enough people band together and stand up against something, when soldiers start to lay down their guns and say no, I'm not gonna go break up this demonstration because these people are right, a lot of things can be accomplished."