Double Flee A

Oh say can you see

I'm all for the American dream. I define that as upward mobility, a house in a good neighborhood, family, friends, and turkey on thanksgiving. There are things about America that I have identified as bad and then gone back on, thou

Just a minute. The whole ninjas thing on the internet is crap and everybody knows it, but why do they have to say that samurais are "less than"? You want to dress up in a black outfit and hide, fine. But don't mess around with samurais.

Ok, there are things I thought were American that I didn't like, that left a bad taste in my mouth. The one thing that sticks out from the others is the expectation that I stand up whenever somebody plays the national anthem. I go to a Twins game, it comes on. I watch aTimberwolves game, they play it. Vikings, Gophers, Wild game, they trot out the national anthem. How much is enough? Enough in this case is damn close to too much. Who decides how much is enough? Oh yeah, we do. But dollars are the new votes, so we're voting for corporatization, which encourages ideological apathy. Wait, wrong article.

So there's patriotism, and there's nationalism, and they're different.

Too much symbology is a fairly reliable indicator that somebody's trying to sell you something. So many people know this that it's crossed my mind that the best thing that could happen to the left wing in this country would be to ramp up the anger to a pitch the right wing calls background noise. The brothers-in-law Procter and Gamble made an ad for Ivory that asked people not to buy it because they couldn't keep up with demand. Their soap then flew off the shelves and hit a guy named Joe in the head, causing an incurable speech impediment. (Which reminds me, there should be a word meaning "[drum fill]", that we can use after our rotten jokes. Boycott had a word named after him when he pissed off too many Irish farmers, so why not mine for this?) Shipley. (I like the sound of it.) Anyway, we can accomplish this in a number of ways. One that I like is to make a neo-conservative radio or television host that, more thinly than O'Reilly or Limbaugh, covers the fact that his show is, factually speaking, an obvious pantload, meant only to entertain. Maybe I don't pay enough mind to the two real-life hosts to know that that's what's happening, in case it is. Another thing they could do (a more straightforward thing) is something I wanted to do on the internet with flash, a cartoon making fun of people who believe all the pro-America stuff that anybody can think of to throw at them, and the hilarious misadventures that result. In my version their names are "Honky" and "Tonky". They could act like America acts in daily life, blowing up the convenience store owned by an arab, building a fire in their yard that stinks up the whole town, making fun of the customs of other people living nearby and then saying out loud the things they believe, not stopping for a moment to think about how goofy they are, you name it. Hell, the thing writes itself.

I was on the way back from an Indian reservation (I didn't start with this in mind, but this is another purely American tradition, paying Indians for being Indians. You should see this guy's house. Big.) when a friend and I stopped at a fast-food restaurant (And it now occurs to me I can't credibly maintain that these parenthetical statements are in fact incidental and expect you to believe it but it's true nonetheless, but isn't fast food an American invention, too?) when I saw the car lot next door. Was somebody afraid that I'd forget what country I lived in? The place was decked out in more American flags than the whole country should own. If the typical reaction to the flag is one of fondness and pride, what does this many flags do to you? Does your heart jump to the front of your chest, demanding to have a hand placed over it?

Why yes, it does. It's Pavlov's heart, and the flag is how you bait it. It sees only the love, love, love of its country. Love, by the way, means a lot of things, which I would not have accidentally internalized had I not read the semi-ancient Don Quixote. Love is not only the one-dimensional means to an end that consumer culture begs it to be. The product called "love" has historically sold without peer, dating from the world's oldest profession to the selling of singular "love" for your country (death in the armed forces) today. Well, what did you expect? The love we know about today, the swamp of love on daytime tv, the love we get by living in our country, is modeled on monotheism. There is one kind of love and that's the only one there is and that's the end of it. In Tennessee there are bumper stickers that say "God said it, I believe it, that settles it." Well put, honky tonky!

Out of all the ways love is packaged, isn't it strange how narrow the definition becomes when you aren't loving something the way someone else is?

You're either with love or you're not. The fact that that bears a resemblance to the non-president's most famous quote is no accident. Not being with the single-minded "love" of the country (hallelujah and hell be damned and look out), is being a counterculturalist.

There is one thing that keeps pace with the product called love, which is of course, love's productness. Money. Try building something without it. Money dug in and ruined love. And money liked the with or without strategy. Those that understand the power of the imagination sold the world to itself and here we are with the products called what they used to be. I promised to tone down the religious stuff, but the question begs to be asked, isn't it easier to collect money by way of a god that you alone communicate with, Roman Catholic church, than you can with a polytheistic, folk-generated religion that the people control to begin with? Protestantism missed the point. They took the most profitable god in the world and gave him away for free. Really guys, what were you thinking? Either show me some imaginative curses like Cicyphus or knock it off with the incomparably dry morality.

What's my main point here? [scrolling up to the top]

Oh, yeah. Don't sell me any ideas because it's all a bunch of shit I can make better myself. Keep your shitty version of love, and keep your shitty version of patriotism to yourself. And don't even get me started on your shitty version of spirituality.

The first time the national anthem is known to have been played before a baseball game was in 1918 in Fenway park in Boston. The start of the game was delayed because the players thought they weren't getting paid enough. They wouldn't take the field because they wanted a bigger share of the take. Somehow the players decided to go ahead and play anyway for all the wounded veterans in the audience, and the owner of the Boston Red Sox, about to celebrate his team's last world series victory to date, told the band to play the national anthem. If you think the players just went out there because they hadn't thought about how entertaining (supporting?) the troops was a good idea, whew. The New York Times ran a headline the next day saying "NATIONAL ANTHEM OPENS THE AFFRAY", so out of the ordinary was the playing of the song.

An old expression but a useful one here is, "bought it for a song". It means something was cheap, maybe even free, and the background of that expression, now that I think about it, might go back throughout folklore, to or even before the Pied Piper of Hamelin, based on a guy who took thousands of German children away from their families and starved them to death crossing the Alps in the name of the children's crusade. It's only in folklore that I ever heard (thanks mom), really, about the dangers of the cult of personality, but maybe I can get to that another time.

So was patriotism co-opted by big bucks? You bet your ass it was. And I'm not standing every time they play that song, because I'm a patriot who supports his country by paying his taxes. Who loves his country by asking if its policies are good for its future. Oliver Cromwell said "Do not trust the cheering, for those persons would shout as much if you or I were going to be hanged." You won't hear any rah-rahing out of me. Hand over your heart for the national anthem, class. No, I only pound my chest as a joke, when I'm good and drunk.

posted by dale @ 10:56 PM