The other day I was in one of my
drug-induced deliriums and from the monotony of working a delightful
retail job that was slowly sending my soul into the abyss, and I failed
to note what holiday Monday was. When I asked my father, he was
angry as expected and said he expected a foreigner to ask that
question, not somebody born in this country. It was Veteran's Day,
of course. And I say: big fucking whoop to that. Now I'm being
completely serious here; what have veterans ever done for me, huh?
Fight for this country? Fight for our freedom and the glory of
America? Alright, dandy. But why should I care? Stay with me,
there's more to this.
I'm a man who has always found the
concept of patriotism... peculiar, to say the least. Now with that
said, some people are going to assume that there's some anti-American
sentiment taking place here, and I would call you mistaken. There's
merely animosity. Because in the big picture, absolutely none of
this affects the average person. Those people who were over in the Middle East? Do you
think they're fighting for a good cause, fighting for our benefit,
for our freedom? That the terrorist threat would somehow crawl their
way out of whatever cave they're huddled in at the moment and somehow
through neglect of us lifting our almighty thumb would manage to find
a way to dismantle the American infrastructure, to make sure that
you, you and whatever backalley town or minor city you live in, end
up threatened and your lives would be altered in any drastic way if
these people weren't dying overseas? I mean yes they're dying for
what can be perceived as a morally just and righteous cause, but is
beneficial to you in any way? Probably not, other than a sense of
pride that through whatever collateral damage we're causing policing
the world that occasionally something good might come of it.
Now what about the veterans of
yesteryear who fought for America when the country was legitimately
threatened? Fair enough, they deserve respect for helping preserve
the country in a dire time. But let's talk about general patriotism
here for a second; I don't believe in it. Not to say that I'm not
grateful for being born in this country where I'm given a good
opportunity and an honest shot at making something of myself despite
my apparent squandering of it at every possible turn because I have
time like that to take it for granted. Or do I? Why do people call
this the greatest country on Earth? What are they making comparisons
to? They're comparing us through our looking glass of other
countries. Most of us have lived here for our entire lives, some of
us in a single state or only a handful of them. What arrogance does
it take for you to say that we're the best when you don't know shit?
There could a village tucked away in the darkest jungles of Africa
where all the women have magically developed Saccharomyces
cerevisiae in their tits and are lactating beer and are
willing to have sex with you while their husbands are at work, and
then you go to the bar after work where the husbands buy you drinks
on the house and then ask you if you want to go home and have a
Nyotaimori-styled dinner of barbequed ribs and bacon on their wives
before you have sex with the husband the wife of course the wife
again, only to go to sleep on a pile of sexy young Indonesian boys
even though this is isn't anywhere near Australia but this is my
fantasy so fuck off. And if a town like that exists, fuck country
loyalty I'm going to Africa because that's the greatest city on Earth
and none of your hollow patriotism will change that.
I approach this the same way I approach
race and women: by mindless discrimination and hatred by
asking one simple question; why are you proud of something you had no
hand in determining? You did not choose when and where your dad
decided not to pull out. The definition of pride in the positive
annotation is a sense of satisfaction or pleasure from an accomplishment,
achievement, or qualities/traits that you possess. So while you
could technically be proud of being a woman, an American, black,
etc... what have you done to earn it? What have you done to deserve
it? It was given to you. Now there are loopholes here; you can be
proud to be a feminist because that's a conscious effort to embrace
particular ideals and philosophies, but you can be a feminist without
being a woman. Or hell, when my dad brought up foreigners, I thought
to myself “Well fuck, if anything THEY have a right to be patriotic
or to say that America kicks ass.” I would believe them more than
an American. They're more entitled to their pride because they
earned their right to be here, they fought for it, they have
somewhere else to actually compare America to in order to draw that
conclusion. Most Americans can only reference what they know, which
is extremely limited in scope for the most part. That's ironic to
say coming from somebody who just made an enormous generalization
about pride in nationality who doesn't even know what nationality he
is other than “white” and “just enough Native American to get
free money from the government but not enough to care about the
culture”.
Which also comes back to one of my
other points; you can be proud of or fascinated with a culture
irregardless of whether or not your heritage has anything to do with
it. I'm glad that Spanish people still speak Spanish even though
when we're at work I can't understand a fucking thing that they're
saying. And not just because Spanish food is delicious, either.
They can be proud of their culture simply because it's not in its
original context anymore; it's something they have to actively
participate in to maintain instead of assimilating like the rest of
the mindless beige and peach drones sprouting up in the country.
It's not being handed to them anymore. There's a difference between
that and race. Being black and proud strikes me as odd because
there's little to no impression of actual African culture at this
point; it's a subset of American culture, which aside from the police
hating the shit out of you and being entitled to use the word “nigga”
is by and large remarkably similar to standard American culture.
Of course at this point you can ask
what defines American culture, and the fastest way to find out that
answer is to attempt to live in another country, like somewhere in
Europe, and just see how your mannerisms and personal priorities
manage to be different than everyone else. And then you can be proud
to be an American when you realize how shitty Britain's food is and
how you want to shove some ribs into your facehole while talking
about how much better the world is after we've been policing it.
