Back in April, I went to opening day for the local sportsball team here in Lagos. I’m not a fan of the local team, but I still enjoy following baseball. That and opening day is one of the great traditions of old America. Like everything else in America, the oleaginous grifters in charge of us have monetize the tradition, turning it into a tacky spectacle. If you can look past that, it is a nice reminder of what it was like to have a real country. What I could not look past or even tolerate, was the endless, over the top appeals to patriotism.
Before the game, there were a number of demands to celebrate the armed forces, “first responders” and school teachers, of all things. The claim was that these “brave men and women defend our democracy.” Then there was the singing of patriotic songs and the playing of the national anthem. In the seventh inning, we had more singing of patriotic songs. I’ve always been a bit sentimental with regards to patriotism, but I found the whole thing revolting. I knew what it was like to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany.
Now, a lot of the over the top patriotism is the aftermath of 9/11 and the resulting culture war over the response to it. The neocons cleverly couched their schemes in patriotic terms, painting their critics as un-American. That worked, so the Left is now doing the same thing with the great replacement. After all, America is a land of immigrants! You’ll note that most displays of patriotism in the mass media rely on people who “look like America” by not looking anything like Americans. Patriotism has been turned on its head.
There’s also the fact that the people in charge have nothing much to offer us, so like any business with a bad product, they have invested in marketing. This is a well documented phenomenon in business. When a company’s product is not selling, they ramp up the marketing, promising that it is new and improved. That’s the vibe I get with our ruling class flag waving. You’ll note they never sell open borders and globalism as something good for you. Instead, they appeal to your patriotism, claiming it is good for the country.
The trouble with what they’re selling is it contradicts the sales pitch. If America is just a place where you earn a paycheck and buy stuff, like a big shopping mall, why have any loyalty to it? Who has ever had an emotional bond with a shopping center? If anyone can wander in, become a citizen and vote, citizenship has no more value than a validated parking ticket at the mall. In other words, the patriotism on offer, just ensures that patriotism becomes increasingly worthless, along with tour citizenship.
Patriotism, properly understood, is a loyalty to the citizens who came before you. The emotional draw is gratitude for what they bequeathed. That implies a duty to preserve it for the next generation. If citizenship is just a meaningless transaction, then those citizens who came before us are no more important than the next guy who wanders over the border. Put another way, according to our rulers, our ancestors are strangers and so are our decedents. What possible reason would anyone have to be loyal to strangers?
It’s actually worse than that. The reason America is descending into a transactional land of strangers is that our ancestors decided to piss it all away. Why should anyone feel loyalty to the people who pushed through the 1986 immigration act? Why should we want to preserve what they passed onto us? If anything, we should take this day to dig up their bones and smash them to bits on the capital mall. That sounds harsh, but is there anything more monstrous than denying your decedents a chance to live the life you lived?
There’s another side to patriotism. That’s the loyalty to the institutions. In a liberal democracy, the citizen respects the office, even if he does not respect the man holding the office. Look around at our institutions. They are just as corrupt as the men who are in charge of them. No rational person can look at what is happening with the FBI and not think the entire political class needs to meet Madame Guillotine. After the last chop, send in the bulldozers to flatten the place. Maybe salt the earth afterwards.
For most of my life, I was an easy mark, when it came to flag waving. I believed the stuff they taught us in school and preached to us in the media. Despite her flaws, I thought the ideal of America was worth defending. The trouble is, the people in charge had other ideas. Like a lot of people over the last dozen or so years, I’ve had a change of heart about a lot of things. One of them is patriotism. You can be loyal to people, but you cannot be loyal to ideas or institutions. That’s a sucker’s play and I’m not a sucker anymore.
This post has already been linked to 1012 times!
“…dig up their bones and smash them to bits on the capital mall”. Absolutely. If there was justice regarding the mass immigration catastrophe the immigrants would be politely transported home and the immigration crime trials for the open-borders politicians would start at 8 pm with live hangings beginning at 10.
How apropos. How Stalinesque. What goes around always comes back around. And they really are asking for it.
Epaminondas – what goes around is already here. My comment was hyperbole to make the point.
You are entirely off the mark Epaminondas. Under your skewed view, we would not be able to prosecute anyone for past crimes. Illegal aliens broke the law. They have demonstrated in that very act that they do not recognize or abide by the rule of law. A huge percentage have committed further criminal acts in this country. OF COURSE THEY SHOULD BE “POLITELY TRANSPORTED HOME” and of course those who opened our nation to the invasion should be prosecuted. This has nothing to do with Stalin. We are NOT seizing Mexico and Canada and making them our client states. We… Read more »
Personnel is policy in ancestors as well as governance.
This thread of “the message,” “the narrative,” really resonates. They truly have nothing to offer so our “elites” are now just marketing their reality show 24X7. The cat ladies and fem men eat it up just like they did the Kardashian’s, to the rest of us it’s just boring.
Then call me a sucker! I still love America and still get that thrill when I hear the National Anthem. I honor and respect the Patriots who made this Great Nation and remember them and their deeds. I did three tours in Vietnam but that was my duty not Patriotism. Getting married and creating a family, starting my own business, paying my taxes, being active in my community, supporting my church and most of all never forgetting my responsibility to my fellow Americans is really my way of passing on what my Forefathers passed to me. To me Patriotism is… Read more »
Well part of that Z, is that if you are white, male, and even moderately conservative – no, it ain’t your country any more, nor are traitors like us going to be allowed a say in how it’s run. And – as it descends into wreckage and ruin, it’ll all be your fault too. I know how proggies and ethnics and vibrants work, and the writing is on the wall. As you’ve said eloquently in the past, the third world is what it is because of the people that live there. Now they are here, and they are voting. What… Read more »
“No rational person can look at what is happening with the FBI and not think the entire political class needs to meet Madame Guillotine. After the last chop, send in the bulldozers to flatten the place. Maybe salt the earth afterwards.” Hey – I hadn’t thought of that before. Yes … yes I would salt the earth afterwards. Excellent touch.
Whatever happened to nuking DC from orbit? It’s the only way to be sure.
You know you can find minor league or even minor minor league or smaller in most cities. In my city I have access to the Sunbelt League. It’s incredibly pleasant to go to. It’s generally like $5 and you bring your own food and beverage and sometimes it’s free. In these little baseball diamonds scattered around the city
Z, you’re cynical because the flag, the rituals, have become a creaky puppet show that repudiates the original emotional reaction you associated with the time as a young man when the symbolism meant something real, something that stirred pride in us as a nation. I felt it this morning watching the ritual slobbering over “our brave service men and women who fight for our freedom overseas” (as an aside, I did two tours in Iraq as a Marine artilleryman and machine gunner) and it rang hollow. Its hitching old symbols to multicultural diversity, feminism, sexual deviance, consumerism, bureaucracy, preening politicians… Read more »
Keep your powder dry. We may need you again soon.
We respect the day for the Founding Fathers and those like them. I will happily wave the flag again when the border is closed – and we can call this a nation again – and I’m presented with the several page list of senior anti-American politicians including
1) The times and places of their arrest
2) The names of the prisons they’re in
It’s pretty easy to find online how the military pays to be included in sports ball. Also the military will loan free tanks and airplanes to movies if they can approve the script. So is it really patriotism, if u r paid?
Totally disagree. We haven’t lost our country to the infidels and I have faith that we will undo much of the damage done by the left. Go Trump.
I still have hatred for that piece of garbage David Frum. Some screed of a book where he tried to write out conservatives like Pat Buchanan saying they were unpatriotic. Guillotine indeed.
It’s hard to feel it anymore when it is mass merchandised and promoted by opportunists and traitors. Well, Walmart did remove the Impeach 45 t-shirts yesterday, that’s something.
The important thing is separate the idea of America from the idea of the USA. America is a nation, and nations are people. The USA is constitutional arrangement. The USA needs America. America does not need the USA. At one time the USA was the political and geographical expression of the will and ideals of America. It isnt anymore. Now it is a multinational empire ruled by a globalist elite whose only loyalty and identity is money and status.
Be loyal to America. Be skeptical of the USA.
Hate to point this out but America is a continent, the USA is a nation.
Yes, but he (dirtnapninja) has captured something important in that comment. I think it might just need a bit of wordsmithing …
Hate to point this out, but NORTH America is a continent. America, in the sense used, represents the cultural expression of an entire people, which can be called a nation — in other words, us, the people who call themselves Americans. The USA is, technically, a state: a power structure claiming jurisdiction over a particular segment of North America and some outlying islands. Dirtnapninja is right.
Your paragraph above beautifully expresses what most Southerners (and many Northerners) were thinking in 1861 as they took up arms against the coming merchant/banking behemoth and its immigrant minions. Since then, the focus has been put solely on slavery as the casus belli. Fast forward to 2018 and you see the same propaganda machine in operation on behalf of similar goals. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Deo vindice.
That opening day game you attended was not a sporting event, it was a religious ceremony. The ball players are merely the quire and band. As a former Marine, I too have soured on this unrelenting propagandizing. I get annoyed when I hear people say “thank you for your service” when they find out I’m a vet, because the words mean nothing. It’s nothing but thoughtless patronizing. Those same people’s actions tell the real tail when 5 minutes later they make it clear your vet status actually means nothing to them either. It’s become as reflexive as saying “God Bless… Read more »
Couldn’t have said it better, brother.
Well said. I’ve made many similar observations and agree 100% with your comment. I go as far as refusing to accept (and certainly not asking for) “military discounts.” Discounts are simply marketing and another form of a cheap “thank you for your service,” and they are just a way to make the business feel good about itself and use servicemen for some positive marketing vibes.
http://strike-the-root.com/america-what-good-is-it
America is a wonderful country with pretty good people, ruled by scum.
“By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence….”
…Joseph Sobran
Institutions should not be seen as inviolable entities unto themselves, which could be done respect separate from the persons who happen to comprise the civilization at some specific snapshot in time, but rather as outgrowths of organic substrate of the people of a land. What I’m trying to argue is that it’s wrong to separate institutional from national patriotism. Institutions are abstract outgrowths of the biologically/culturally based patterns of behavior of the people who comprise a nation. Chinese institutions are fundamentally Chinese and serve the interests of Chinese people. The question is, whom do our institutions serve?
“monetize the tradition”
“transactional land of strangers”
“Madame Guillotine”
“I’m not a sucker anymore”
Zman, you’ve hit it out of the park!
Stumbled upon an excerpt of a speech by Charlton Heston about the cultural war by the elites against normal Americans. It’s from 1997! Think you guys will appreciate it: “… the God fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle-class Protestant – or even worse, evangelical Christian, Midwestern or Southern – or even worse, rural, apparently straight – or even worse, admitted heterosexuals, gun owning – or even worse, NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff – or even worse, male working stiff – because, not only don’t you count, you are a down-right obstacle to social progress. Your voice deserves a lower decibel level, your opinion… Read more »
I am not an SNL or Will Ferrell fan. But, this video is a good example of the herd like mentality that allows someone to take advantage of “patriotism”. Sorry for the commercial. You can skip it in a few seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mLsU46h8IA
Patriotism is love of the Patria: the land, its people and their customs.
It has fuck all to do with the government and its goons.
“Why should anyone feel loyalty to the people who pushed through the 1986 immigration act?”
What about the treasonous scum who gave us the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965?