Hell Yeah

Democracy, too, is a religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

-Mencken

Across the street from the bar, two dozen protesters under the watchful eye of a statue of Adolph Coors waved American flags, blew air horns and revved motorcycle engines. "Al Jazeera is terrorism," announced one sign. "Go home, Al Jazeera -- Voices for al Qaeda and bin Laden," proclaimed another. The protesters had shirts printed up for the occasion, saying "Buffalo Rose/Tokyo Rose" in English and Arabic, although they botched the Arabic translation.

One biker covered his T-shirt in thoughtful, handwritten messages, such as "Islam Sucks" and "Al-Jazeera: Anti-American Pond Scum."

-Milibank

The extremes to which a bunch of mooks who despise their country in all its specifics will go to defend its generalized honor never ceases to amaze me, and I am in general very difficult to amaze. I grew up, and my folks still live, in pre-apocalyptic, post-coal Appalachia--Fayette County, PA. Hillary Country, for all you Barry O. fans. Child of privilege though I was, Dad knew how to play to local political necessities, and unlike most of the other local scions, who lopped off to Shadyside or Mercersburg, I spent my un-formative years truckin' around with the local yokels, getting stoned, drinking Natty Ice, bashing mailboxes with baseball bats, furtively jerking each other . . . Well, what happens at Ohiopyle stays at Ohiopyle.

Curiously to me then, my family, to whom this nation had given everything, was ambivalent about its blessings, skeptical about its uniqueness, fond of foreign cultures and cuisines, and uninterested in the chest-thumping, penis-pumping nationalism of locally popular holidays like Flag Day. Oh, we liked America just fine; liked how big and scenic it was; preferred it to Nicaragua or Zimbabwe or North Korea. After 9/11, Mom and Dad even put up a little American flag, although by the time I came home for a Thanksgiving visit, it had come down. Meanwhile, the families I knew in decidedly different circumstances, with one parent out of work and the other toiling for under ten bucks an hour, living in a double-wide, cursing the boss, cursing Washington, clucking miserably at the evening news . . . these managed to evince a xenophobic nationalism bordering on monomania. My grandmother loved airplanes, and used to take my brother and me to the Latrobe Air Show every year. In the late nineties the newly in-production B-2 stealth bomber made an overflight, and I watched in something between hysterics and horror as an immensely fat, trucker-capped man in an American-flag tee-pee tee-shirt shouted himself redfaced--"America! Yeah! America! America!"--squeezing his just-opened Iron City can so hard that it sprayed into the air like a geyser. I later saw the guy in the parking lot, hauling his huge ass into a jalopy pickup with a UMWA bumper sticker.

This is not to suggest that the well-to-do are beyond nationalism. Most of them are not. The rest of the American flags in my neighborhood were far larger and stayed up much longer. But I am unfascinated by the lower end of the upper class getting off on the pro-corporate bellicose Americanism of whichever party. It makes sense that this would be so. On the other hand, there seems an astonishing capacity among those most shit on and most deprived to actually give a fuck, to such a degree that a foreign news gang can rouse them to screams and threats, even as a mere twelve miles down the road their own conational betters continue to chart the course of their ruin.