This Friday July 4, 2014, I sat in Avery Fischer Hall at Lincoln Center and listened joyfully as the NY Philharmonic, about one hundred strong, played a brilliant version of the National Anthem. As I listened, all I could think of was how thrilling it was to be part of this great country and how privileged we all were to partake in our flawed but still world class democracy.
At the same time I had a picture flashing across my mind of an angry, ugly, middle-aged man, swathed in an American flag hat, waving a sign and screaming vitriol at a busload of terrified young refugee mothers and children. Why was that man so angry at these women and children for trying to gain safety and a meager living in our country? What were they taking from him? And why did he think, as indicated by his costume, that his actions were at all patriotic when in fact they were the antithesis of American patriotism, as we know it. I couldn’t help but think about that all through the concert.
Then, a few days later I watched, horrified and nauseated, as a mob of bigoted degenerates, waving American flags and acting like Nazis, terrified a busload of frightened children who had already undergone the horrors of a journey from Central America to here, trying to stay alive, faced with rape, extortion, beatings and death, without in many cases parents or friends. They finally make to the promised land and they are faced with AMERIKANS, the most horrible danger of their awful journey.
What has happened to the citizens of this country? None of the degenerate trailer park trash that was out on those roads in Murrieta, CA, Vassar, MI or Oyster Creek, Texas, are native Americans. They are all, themselves, the children of immigrants. What has made them such vicious fascists?
They stand in the road armed to the teeth, (guns have replaced balls in modern America), When I was a kid we didn’t need guns to show our manliness. Anyone who pulled a weapon of any kind was immediately branded a coward.
But not only are these despicable bigots and cowards, they are also either brute stupid or unbelievably misinformed. Phil Gingley, a GOP congressman from Georgia who is also a doctor is roaming airports around the country telling reporters that we have to defend ourselves against these children who are bringing disease into the country. He has even called on the CDC to cover the border. It seems that Gingley is worried about the Ebola virus making its way into the country with these kids. This fool is a doctor or so he says, but I wouldn’t want him treating my dog. This moron doesn’t know that Ebola is a disease from Africa not Central America. Or maybe he doesn’t know where Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are. So morons like this guy say shit like that; and the other morons who listen to their Right wing leaders take it as gospel. Well, it is about as factual as the bible.
Our country has been carried through many hard times, in its history, by waves of true patriotism, but it has also been crippled at other times by like waves of false patriotism and it seems to me that this is one of those times and the west, even more than the rest of the nation is the breeding ground for this type of misled, misinformed individual who has branded self serving ends, as the goals of patriotism.
In recent weeks we have seen a bunch of armed gun nuts, go to the support of a greedy, dishonest bigot who wanted a free ride form the taxes he legitimately owed and called it freedom from tyranny. By stealing the taxes he owed, this slime was stealing from all of us. This was no poor dirt farmer but a big time crook who owed over a million bucks at the time of accounting. This wasn’t some poor rancher trying to eek out a living but a rich thief crying wolf and expecting the dumb trash to rush to his aide. And they did.
Then over in Idaho a bunch of lazy, stupid ATV owners decided that they didn’t want to drive an inconvenient distance to have their sport, or to pay someone for the privilege of tearing up their land, so they organized a rally along a US Parks Department road that had been off limits to ATV’s because of the damage they would do to archeological relics buried in the adjacent ground. They used the old bullshit about it being their rights as Americans, to use this land and that BLM was denying them their rights. What they were too stupid and self-serving to see, was that the land belonged to all Americans and that heir kind of usage, which destroyed uncounted quantities of American Indian relics, took something away from all of us. They didn’t care, and they covered their selfish acts with a phony flag of patriotism.
Then this week, down in Texas, where else, a bunch of greedy pricks decided that they could mine the Red River using air pumps to pull out the gravel that holds small quantities of gold. This process destroys the breeding ground of Chinook Salmon, practically the only living thing left in that river. These fools had made the argument that what they were doing was a patriotic act since it was following in the footsteps of our early gold miners, an American tradition. The only tradition they were following was that of American greed and a failure to value the planet.
But these assholes all see themselves as patriots. They are the first to wrap themselves in the flag, the first to sing the praises of the American way and unfortunately the last to live it. American literature and American movies built for us a tradition of a way of life that we all hope exists. Unfortunately it doesn’t, at least not among the people who were the progenitors of that legend. John Wayne, the charming bigot, who in the end saw the error of his ways has emerged as a madman from Murrieta, California, garbed in flags screaming obscenities at small, terrified children. Is this our American way, today? Is this the guy we want to emulate? I think not. This guy has nothing to do with any thinking American’s idea of being a patriot. He generates no pride in country or ethos. He is the poster boy for bigoted, fascist, degenerates. He is also, although they don’t want him to be, the poster boy for the Tea Party’s anti-immigration stance; another patriotic attitude that is anything but.
The GOP has decided that anything they like is patriotic and anything they are against is a communist, socialist, degenerate, liberal scheme to destroy America. Of course they’re wrong. They’re wrong with a Southern accent and a double-wide stupidity that staggers the imagination. They’re wrong with a small minded, self-serving short sightedness that refuses to see how their super rich masters are using them to extend their power over the people who make up this rich land. They are wrong with a willful pride that refuses to see how their refusal to work with others is destroying just what they want so desperately to make true. They are wrong because their goals, though sometimes religious, are not moral enough to support the kind of country that will be good for all of us, not just that small segment that they wish could maintain power for all time. These people are not patriots, they’re just pisants.