Friday, November 20, 2015

Patriotism without Flags

This isn't some angry rant but rather the opposite.

I don't love America because I don't even know what that means.  I love a flag or a rock or Betsy Ross who didn't even make the flag anyway?  Who cares.  I do love some of the things America does and that's the nationalism, not some idiot with a gun who will kill you.  It's the same with krautrock and I love that as well but it has nothing to do with loving Germany, it's simply outstanding music.

I know when I stand up to play, without American instruments and devices, there would be nothing in the kit except the cameras and my only move would be to tell elephant jokes but no-one would hear them because there would be no PA for it.

All the rot on the blog about Boss devices is nothing to do with waving flags and what trivial thing does it add to the economy if someone buys a flag for twenty bucks anyway.  Buying and using these devices does it and people may see what I write and consider buying them as well.  I'm not advertising anything but I don't shy away from naming the devices.  If someone buys even one of them it will do tens of times more for the economy than buying some crumby flag.

Definition of a prize fool: someone who buys a gun to 'defend America or something' ... and it wasn't even made here.


Rhetorical question which people who bust Syrians will never understand because they know almost nothing of the history of the country they say they love: so, do you remember the Know Nothing Party?

Thanks to Cadillac Man on that one as I did not know well enough of them before he was talking about them.  Yah, they hated immigrants too.  As always, the ones who Know Nothing are the ones who don't know the history and perennially try to repeat it.

Note:  the Know Nothing Party was almost two hundred years ago.  I guess the current Know Nothings are a little behind on their reading.

3 comments:

Kannafoot said...

Hating immigrants is an American tradition. It would be impossible to find a period where an immigration wave was not hated. That goes all the way back to the early 1600s! Those damn Quakers are ruining the colonies... Quakers? You mean the Baptists... Then, of course, we get to the early days under Adams and have the anti-Chinese Alien and Sedition Acts. Follow it forward and you have hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Poles, now Hispanics. It goes on and on. I'm not sure what creates xenophobia, but it has definitely been in our culture since the Mayflower.

Unknown said...

For me the sad truth isn't so much these events took place but rather because people have failed to learn basics about American history and are easy preys for what looks more and more to me a deliberate and hugely dangerous play on the Hegelian Dialectic insofar as the worse certain candidates can make Syrians look, the greater the legitimacy of their vicious means to solve the problem.

The Hegelian Dialectic gives me another perspective on the sixties and I was not consciously aware of it but I'm sure it came to me somewhere and I did not join SDS nor did I consider joining the Weathermen. From my current perspective, I see now they were playing precisely to the needs of a state which will crush dissident thinking, something the state usually feels is mandatory during any conflict.

We have another mutual friend who was proud of his participation in SDS and I was somewhat questioning (silently) of the consequence of that but, looking back at the time from the perspective of that Hegelian Dialectic, I'm all the more sure the SDS and Weathermen were too extreme to be helpful to the cause.

And that's the conundrum: if people cannot be swayed by reason then what alternative is there to violence to demonstrate the significance of the point. In my view, we need to find an answer to that before Trump and Carson get them so frothy as to take them beyond any chance of reason.

Unknown said...

All content carried up to a more-recent article: Kannafoot, the Hegelian Dialectic, and a Muttdog Immigrant (me)