On Flag Worshipping

Let me preface this piece by stating that the U.S. can't provide clean drinking water in Flint, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi...in the richest country the world has ever known. They can't keep the power on in the entire FUCKING STATE OF TEXAS...in the richest country the world has ever known. (Consequently, a young child FROZE to death in his trailer home...in the richest country the world has ever known.) In the "Land of the Free" they incarcerate more people, many needlessly, than does communist China.

Despite all that, however, they CAN sell 780 BILLION dollars worth of war toys to Israel so they can bomb the living hell out of Gaza. THAT they can do. They can spread the bullshit about such things fairly thick through the propaganda media apparatus, too. At THAT, my friends, they're time-tested experts. Which brings us to the article proper, I suppose.

An Olympic athlete, Gwen Berry, has turned her back on the sacred Stars and Stripes, the object of eternal veneration and near-religious adulation worldwide; and, damn if I don't know what all the fuss is about.

Is she, like, a sinner now? Will she go to "Patriot Hell," to be boiled and roasted forever and ever, amen, by slavering nightmare ghoulies that all, faintly resemble a Matt Gaetz Pez Head (one that dispenses red, white, and blue flavored Rohypnol when you cock back its plastic noggin)?

Patriotism is a ruse, a con job. The Rulers, Ruling Class, System Pigs, What-Have-You, they USE IT.

They USE IT.

Against.

YOU.

When they want to force some outrage down the collective throat of the suckers (er, I mean, citizens), they wave the flag. They beat the drum. Lo, they sing the same tired refrain. BOOM. They have a bunch of eager young cannon fodder from the economic wastelands of the YOU ESS EH, willing and eager to go get their legs blown right the fuck off for some international gangster from the military-industrial complex, some criminal. They will swallow the lies from the political puppets of the machine of "democracy" (another concept we are told we must, oh simply must, "revere or be damned"). And many of them will die for it.

Thus, the Marks can be sent packing to interminable overseas wars. At home, their so-beloved country may be failing in every metric, falling apart at the seams: it may have hundreds of thousands of homeless, jobless, an income gap of inequality grown vast; crime, violence, mass shootings--the damn place probably verging on dystopia. However, they'll STILL have their mystical sense of PRIDE. May it long sustain their delusions.

I suppose it is still of paramount importance that we all be compelled to fall on our knees and grovel before the national idol.

No.

It is an interesting fact that nearly forty-five percent of the homeless in this country, according to an article posted at Washington Post Dot Com, are actually EMPLOYED. Those unwashed bums sleeping on park benches? Many of them have actually done more meaningful work in the last thirty days than Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon, who paid no Federal income tax one year. (Most likely, many years and last year as well, but I'm perhaps a cynic about these things.)

America is one of the wealthiest nations in history. America lacks universal health coverage for all its people. In America, proles go broke when they get sick. They end up homeless in a country with MILLIONS of vacant dwellings. They aren't offered a living wage; they're offered damn little of the "pie in the sky" promised by the Worship My Flag religion. Their programming, some of them realize, doesn't seem to accord with the brutal reality of their situation.

They get angry. (You expect them to NOT be angry?)

But, the Ruling Class has to keep a tamper on such hostile feelings. The chaos and disorder of last summer showed them that the peons and serfs can be...problematic, if not placated. The pandemic nightmare of the last eighteen months or so has shown the United States to be beyond incompetent at managing the deadly virus in a manner as efficient as that of say, Vietnam or one of those socialist hellholes in Northern Europe. The huge glut of mega deaths resulting are more than a shame, more than an embarrassment of systemic failure. They are an indictment of a system that privileges some, while condemning and damning others. A system that punishes the poor. A system that reels from corruption, greed, capitalist excess, and a society gone, perhaps irreversibly, in decline.

But, damn, well, we still have our pride, right?

Defy that, oh Freedom-Loving American peon, AND WE'LL GLADLY PILLORY YOU.

What was it Erasmus said? "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

You better believe it.

***

I wrote this earlier on a comment for a YouTube video by some frustrated and outdated, vaguely "alt-right" journalist, who should have been left back in 2016:

Patriotism is another form of religious worship. Only suckers, marks, and herd mentality sheep feel compelled to a "mystical spirit" of America, one that doesn't even hold out the carrot-on-a-stick of "eternal life" to the devoted; basically substituting a weird kind of "ancestor worship." It DOES function as a good tool for the ruling class to get the masses marching in whatever direction they want, be that more austerity as they line their pockets, or compelling the sons of the proles to go and get their legs shot off in phony wars started for fraudulent reasons by international gangsters and criminals in the political and military-industrial complex. Should I be compelled to genuflect to your cross? Church and State are twin heads of the same snake.

And every word of that is truth, as far as I've come to understand it. So, compel me not, sirrah, to carry thy cross, bow to thy idol, or venerate thy cheap piece of cloth stitched together in a sweatshop somewhere near Beijing.

Fuck you. I don't believe in gods.

Be they the ones proffered by the Church, or by the State.

The only more appropriate response would have been for her to bend over WHILE she turned her back.

THAT, my friends, might have risen to the level of true art.

You go girl.