Patriotism

My woman died a couple of years before the Feebs arrested me. I sure wanted to meet a new woman once I got out. I started attending the Highlands Senior Society, met women galore. I made a whole new class of enemy, enemies galore – Americans hate whomever they've wronged – but at least my bed had two people in it more often than one. I even got into the dances for free, since I agreed to teach the dancing.

Nobody dances like you, Paul.
Joyce, LineDancingMarine

There was a penalty though that was hard to bear. Before lunch, we'd listen to announcements. Then a flag was wheeled out and we'd have to Pledge Allegiance to the Flag: then sing America the Beautiful. I was never a patriot. I couldn't have easily become a disciple of Christ if I'd been a patriot. If I'd been a patriot how could I have tried to debrief people on their enslavement via compulsory education? How could I possibly have invented an internet to offer as an alternative? Flag-saluters don't try to redesign everything.

Patriots stood behind me during the patriotic exercises, threatening me behind my ear: "America! Love it or Leave It!!" But by that time I was also dancing with a table full of widows a few miles south at the Lake Placid American Legion. There these days I mostly dance with the girl I met at the Senior Social, but we dance before murals of tanks blowing the shit out of everything, ships sinking in oil slicks ... And, more often than not, before we finish for the night, the band plays patriotic songs. The socializers stand in a circle. The lyrics proclaim, "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free."

Free? Since when? I was forced to go to school. There was no law that compelled university attendance, but it's all-but compulsory in this culture: certainly it was in my family. In my life time I've watched people become even more illiterate than they already had been while garnering ever more degrees, at ever higher prices: while wages skyrocket. Too bad there's ever less worth buying. Was getting put in jail for what I'd written an example of freedom? Was getting censored?

I suppose putting Jesus on the cross was an exercise in freedom as well.

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Wasps sting whatever is not wasp that's intruding on the nest. Mama risks her life to grab baby from under the truck; momma does not risk her life to get the truck from under baby. So: I can understand Hatfields preferring Hatfields to McCoys. Even more fundamentally I understand me preferring me to you.

Sure we should give aid to our own, but try being a Good Samaritan to the other guy now and then. That's the way I see sense in a Christ saying, Prefer other to self. Just as a counter-measure! Not, Let's turn everything upside down; but, Why not not go whole hog every damn time.

I can understand Hatfields preferring Hatfields to McCoys: both families may be Scots-Irish, but any Hatfield genes will likely be closer to the genes of any other Hatfield than will any McCoy genes. Not absolutely necessarily, but probably, in general, you know? I can understand Hitler wanting to advance the blue-eyed: kind of Christ-like actually, since Hitler was himself far from blue-eyed, was anything but fair. I can understand Hitler hating the Jews: so did nearly everybody else in Christian Europe, right? I can understand Hitler wanting to kill the Jews: my life might have been easier if I'd wanted to kill anyone standing ahead of me on line to get into Birdland.

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I wrote the latter first, then inserted the former. Next session I'll merge them better.