“You gotta understand,” he had explained, “what I’ve been through this month. A friend of mine is sick, my girlfriend and I are having problems and I’ve been through an earthquake.” He was referring to the Northridge quake, which devastated parts of the San Fernando Valley, felled a freeway overpass and killed more than 50 people. But to this actor–and I suspect he’s not the only person in the entertainment industry who felt this way–everything is personal. Earthquake? My earthquake. Holocaust? My Holocaust. As Daffy Duck once shouted to Elmer Fudd, trying to keep him from pulling the trigger, “I’m different! Pain hurts me!”

The personal statement is very important to us in Hollywood. And these days, the most ubiquitous personal statement seems to be the proud display of the American flag in a variety of places: car windows, jacket lapels, umbrellas, $600 cashmere sweaters, you name it. In Manhattan the American-flag lapel pin signals the wearer’s remembrance of those lost on September 11, support for our troops overseas–and, maybe just as crucially, the fact that he has a lapel to pin something to. Which means he’s wearing a suit jacket, which means he has a job. Or else he’s wearing a black, silk T shirt.

What’s remarkable, of course, is that there are any American flags flying at all, lapelwise or otherwise, on the streets of Manhattan or Los Angeles. The two big media cities are home to a rather less traditionally patriotic crowd, the kind who prefer their Americana with a dash of irony and a hefty pinch of condescension. Last summer I was invited to a Fourth of July party at a friend’s house in Malibu. “We’re going to do the whole ‘American’ thing,” the hostess told me, with a kind of aren’t-we-zany smile. “I mean, hamburgers, the flag, the whole bit.” Now she has an American flag clipped to her Range Rover.

It’s called, I think, the New Patriotism. Europeans are terrified of it. They have always imagined that the great middle of the American continent is a bizarre and jingoistic place, filled with Christian satellite broadcasters, obese children and all-you-can-eat buffets. On their visits they stick to the rim–New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco–and avoid the great sloping bowl in the middle because the big cities on the coasts seem so European and sophisticated and, well, un-American. So it’s with some concern that they notice the flags flying in Los Angeles and the pins on Manhattan lapels.

“What is this?” a French friend recently asked, pointing to the tiny American flag pinned to my jacket. “Well, you know…” I said, trailing off and shrugging a bit.

“It means what, this brooch?” she persisted.

“OK,” I said. “In the first place, it’s not a brooch. It’s a pin. And all it means is that it’s terrible what happened on September 11, I support the war in Afghanistan and, you know, I… um…”

“You what?”

“I, well, I sort of… you know… love my country or whatever.”

She peered at it for a moment, then looked up and squinched her mouth in the French manner. “I do not like the color of the red. It is too orange.”

She was right. Like most great cultural shifts, the New Patriotism has created a fashion issue of its own: the problem is not whether to wear an American-flag lapel pin, but which kind. There’s the simple straight flag, the curved flag that simulates fluttering, the two crossed flags and the round, abstract flag (popular, I think, in the music industry).

Last night I went out to dinner with a group of people. Stung by my too-orange lapel pin, I opted to go flagless. Big mistake. I was shown up by a talent agent who wore a lapel pin of such dazzling redness and such deep blueness that I was forced to ask him where he got it. “From my grandfather,” he replied. “See? Forty-eight stars. It’s that old.” I must have looked mighty impressed, because a few seconds later he pulled me aside. “I’m kidding about the pin. I got it at this military antique place in Culver City. If you really like it, I’ll sell it to you for a hundred bucks.” And so to my European friends who are worried about the wave of patriotism sweeping America, affecting even its most cosmopolitan cities, I say: relax. People in New York and Los Angeles are just as shallow as they always were. And I have the lapel pin to prove it.