Love It or Love It

OK, so obviously, massive amounts of controversy to address right out of the gate. Yes, it's true: I didn't post at all last week. I feel terrible about having left all of you all without your lodestar, your waypoint, your blue GAS-FOOD-LODGING sign on the highway that is this life.

In my defense, I can only say: AMERICA. It's was a goddamned holiday. Now, traditionally I would be able to say that I missed my writing window because I was out watching our national day of celebration combining two of our great traditions, drinking to excess and recreational explosives. But you probably know already that I don't drink and since my kids are over the age of 10, they'd rather stay in and play video games with people sitting in other houses playing the same games while not watching fireworks. So we did that. Yes, I could have written. But instead I was playing Star Wars Battlefront II with strangers, OK? It's not that I'm not sorry, it's just that I refuse to apologize. You honor America your way, I'll honor it mine. By lightsabering randos in an explicitly non-euphemistic fashion.

Even in previous years when my kids did want to go out and watch shit blow up in a celebratory simulation of the probable form of the apocalypse, I've never loved the 4th of July. It's not that I'm not patriotic, it's just that there are few things in life that I hate more than expressing patriotism in public. Even now, the right way to lead into the next section of this piece would be to evince my underlying love for my country as a foundational principle on which my identity as an adult human man is built. But holy fuck do I resent having to do that on literally any level.

It's easy to say that the slope from patriotism to jingoism to the soft-landing shit pile that is xenophobia is slicked up pretty good with tears and other people's sweat and, as you get closer to the bottom, not an insignificant amount of human blood. It's one thing to love your country, but in periods of heightened partisanship and internal division, the inherent exclusion and violence in any patriotic position become more and more explicit, more central to the expression.

I'm pretty sure that, 45 years on, we're still in the era largely defined by the calamity of the Vietnam War. Part of this of course because the goddamned Baby Boomers refuse to die. Luckily they appear to be warring directly with millennials, forgetting us Generation X types exist entirely, which is the most Generation X thing ever. But ha, the joke's on you assholes because we prefer to be left alone anyway.

Post-World War II of course was a complete societal recalibration along the lines of military-industrial manufacturing transitioning from a war footing to a peacetime commercial one. The accomplishment of winning the "good war" and the unprecedented expansion that followed were excellent backdrops for swelling national pride.

Vietnam and the whole era around it was a reckoning for the things we forgot to think about during all the moneymaking and baby-having: racial and social and gender inequality and the human cost of any modern, mechanized, chemicalized and potentially nuclearized war (both on the enemy and our own). I'd argue it was a flash of sober sanity to refuse to automatically cheer for the exploits of our military in a situation that forced us to ask hard questions about what we were doing there and what we were doing there. Sure, spitting on returning Soldiers is beyond the pale of basic human decency (please don't spit on anyone in any circumstance, that's my brave position), but the tussle between the civilian population and the civilian government over the control of a military employed and deployed ostensibly in its name is the right conversation to have.

The war ended, which looks like the anti-war people won. But that was after 20 fucking years of engagement. And the bitterness of the fall of Saigon as a last lingering memory... Ever since then, what have we gotten? SUPPORT THE TROOPS. SUPPORT THE TROOPS, all caps, with the implied threat underneath it. And that fucking terrible Lee Greenwood song, an act of pure aggression in and of itself.

Nixon was probably right about the Silent Majority. Those fuckers have gotten loud. And they definitely won.

It's a threatening patriotism now, one based in anger and fear and, primarily, shame. An overcorrecting shame probably from the way service members came back from Vietnam, probably less from the way hippies were mad at them and more the way they were totally abandoned by their government in terms of their mental and physical health. And shame in the way it is wielded like a cudgel against all those who don't deign to immediately genuflect... well, not genuflect specifically because that's kneeling and we all know now that kneeling and patriotism are two entirely incompatible concepts.

The merging of military and patriot, essentially the arming of Uncle Sam, is happening at a faster and faster pace now with a flag-molesting huckster president using the two ideas absolutely interchangeably, like a Venn diagram that is a single circle.

It's possible to feel proud of my country still, in little moments of spontaneity and true unifying good feeling. But more and more acts of non-compliance are being met with hostility, denunciation and in some cases outright violence. Try kneeling during the anthem or even just refusing to remove your hat. Or stay seated during a pledge of allegiance recitation, a ritual that galls me unlike any other. "One nation under god," I mean come on, fuck off already. There's an above-zero chance you will be met directly with an act of violence, or at least made to feel threatened or unsafe.

But then we live in an age defined by a rhetoric of fatherland and blood. That's never come back to bite us in the past. Should be fine.