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Flag Waving Is Not My Kind of Patriotism
Robert Higgs
Lew Rockwell.com
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Independence Day would seem to be an especially ill-chosen time to denounce what passes for patriotism in the United States. But maybe not, because on this day Americans express their patriotism – in truth, little more than worship of statism and militarism – in extraordinary displays and celebrations, thus presenting more prominent targets to those who have no sympathy for patriotism as it is commonly understood in this country.
I suppose that already some readers are thinking, “Higgs is an America hater. Why doesn’t he do us all a favor and get the hell out of this great country while he still can?” Anyone who is thinking such a thought, however, is utterly mistaken. I do not hate this country, though I do despise the governments – local, state, federal, and hybrid – that now rule it.
Bill Clinton once felt moved to scold the people who took offense at some of the government’s especially monstrous recent crimes by saying, “You can’t love your country and hate your government.” Au contraire, Slick Willy. I am living proof that you can indeed. I do so in every waking minute of every day, and sometimes in my sleep, too. To be perfectly frank, I have trouble in understanding how any decent, halfway honest person who loves America cannot hate its governments, inasmuch as by their laws, their judicial decisions, their regulations, and their daily conduct they prove themselves a standing reproach to every ideal embraced by the men who shed their blood to establish this country’s independence from the British Empire. Do you recall those first patriots’ declared devotion to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Can anyone today look upon the pack of scoundrels, liars, thieves, and (in all too many cases) murderers who control the governments of this great country and feel anything but the most wrenching revulsion?
But if I feel this way about our glorious government leaders, how can I then maintain that I love the country? It’s really easy. I simply recognize that everything I love about it – and there is a great deal – stands to its governments more or less in the same relation that matter stands to anti-matter. To qualify for my affections, a person, place, or thing almost by definition must exist (or have existed during its time) outside the sphere of government and its manifold evils.
Thus, I feel no shame about loving many of the physical places of this country, from coast to coast. Who can look out across Puget Sound toward the Olympic Mountains at sunset and not fall in love with the place? Who can resist the tall, slender pines and the sturdy, spreading live oaks, draped with Spanish moss, that adorn my present home in southeast Louisiana? The deserts of the Southwest are often strikingly beautiful, as are, in different ways, the Rocky Mountains, the Cascades, and the rhododendron forests near the Delaware Water Gap. In these places and a thousand others, a man may feel that he is fortunate to call these magnificent exhibits of God’s creation part of his home country.
The America I love embraces not merely places, scenes, and settings, however, but innumerable persons whose accomplishments down through the ages glorify their country and testify to its people’s courage and humanity. If you seek an example of honorable bravery, then consider how William Lloyd Garrison, at great risk to life and limb, persisted in publishing an uncompromising abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, declaring: “I will not equivocate – I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD.” Or remember Harriet Tubman, for whom her own heroic escape from slavery was not enough, so she returned again and again to the slave region, ultimately helping hundreds of others to gain their freedom via the Underground Railroad. Do you want an Independence Day event to remember? Then forego the vacuous speeches by politicians bloviating about U.S. soldiers’ heroics in wars (most, if not all, of them unnecessary bloodbaths brought about by wicked, ambitious politicians) and recall instead July 4, 1939, when the great Lou Gehrig, though already suffering from the disease that would soon take his life and now bears his name, walked slowly to the microphones in Yankee Stadium and said, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
When I think of the America I love, I hear the language I love – American English in its countless accents, cadences, and idioms. Not that I claim it’s the best language anyone can speak, but it’s the one I’ve heard from birth, studied with care, and enjoyed immensely as I’ve listened to a great variety of its speakers, from illiterate men I worked with as a youth on the ranch to accomplished poets and scholars I’ve been fortunate to hear. For six months in the early 1970s, I lived in England. At first, I was amazed at how articulate the English people were: it seemed to me that they commanded their spoken language with a precision that hardly anyone in my native country could match. Yet, after a while, I began to miss American English. The English of England felt increasingly cold and stiff. I found myself longing for the cozy, idiomatic, slang-ridden speech I had absorbed as an American in America. My mother and father were people of little education but a wealth of idioms and folksy turns of phrase. Prizing my education in formal English, I grew up to speak differently, yet, as a young adult, when I would call my parents on the telephone periodically, my wife would remark that after a minute or two on the phone, I began to “talk like a damned Okie.” Fine with me. To this day, I am likely to lapse into this kind of speech when I tell a long-winded personal story.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
Yet the language of this country is not always English, and I cherish the other kinds of speech that Americans use, as well. In the little San Joaquin Valley town (Firebaugh, California) near which I grew up from second grade through the twelfth, I would walk along the main street on hot summer days and bask in the smell of stale beer and the sound of música ranchera that spilled out of the open doors of the many Mexican bars that lined the street (air-conditioning was not a part of that time and place). The barbers who cut my hair, like many other people who lived there, spoke a combination of Spanish and English, often mixing the two languages in a single sentence and passing seamlessly back and forth from one language to the other. Theirs was a kind of American language, too, and today when I recall its sounds, I get a warm feeling. Spanish is a beautiful language in its pure form, but for those of us who grew up immersed in Spanglish, it also makes a lovely sound – and a peculiarly American one, to boot. It is something to cherish in a world gone looney with stupid, ignorant ethnic hostilities.
If I am such an obvious America hater, why do I esteem so highly the country’s legends and folkways? You don’t expect an al-Qaeda agent to cherish Mark Twain’s story of the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County or the legend of Paul Bunyan and the Blue Ox Babe. And what commie would invariably smile at the thought of John Henry, by any standard a remarkable American from birth:
When John Henry was a little bitty baby
Sitting on his daddy’s knee
Well, he picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel
He said, This hammer’s gonna be the death of me
Lawd, Lawdy
This hammer’s gonna be the death of me!
(Commie version:
When John Henry was a little bitty baby
Sitting on his daddy’s knee
He picked up false consciousness and surplus-labor speed
He said, Wage slavery’s gonna be the death of me
Lawd, Lawdy
Wage slavery’s gonna be the death of me!
Ugh! That is so un-American!)
As the old Chevy jingle put it, we Americans love baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. Well, for me, three out of four ain’t bad. (Any love I ever had for General Motors went down the drain long ago as its incompetent management and rapacious labor union drove it to ruin – of which there is none more ignominious than the recent government takeover.) At my age, with my decelerated metabolism, I must go very lightly on the hot dogs and apple pie, but life would scarcely be worth living without baseball, the thinking man’s great American sport. As a boy I enjoyed countless hours of playing the game, or just hitting, catching, and throwing the ball when not enough boys were available to play a game, and as an adult I have followed baseball pretty steadily throughout my lifetime. Hardly anything brings me more pleasure than sitting around with my old friend Henry Leng (we go back to 1954 together), recalling the great teams, great players, and great moments – not to mention the veritable mountain ranges of statistics to mull over. This country does not need Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, or Barack Obama. Life would go on just fine without them and their ilk to tell us what to do. But life in this country would be vastly diminished without baseball.
Unlike U.S. imperialism, in which this country’s armed forces set out to intimidate or kill the various allegedly troublesome brown people of the earth, the “imperialism” of baseball shows us what great gains we may realize through peaceful relations with others. America gave baseball to the world, and the world has returned it to us embodied in the great Latin American and Asian players who now elevate the quality of play so gloriously. Aggressive U.S. foreign relations have earned this country the hatred and enmity of the world’s people, whereas the spread of baseball has brought us Vladimir Guerrero and Ichiro Suzuki.
By this time, I hope that the reader understands what I’m driving at: loving America has nothing whatsoever to do with loving its governments and their actions. Moreover, everything about this country that truly warrants a free person’s love is antithetical to the operations of its governments. The country worthy of our love most emphatically does not consist of its disgusting politicians or of its hired killers (soldiers) or of its petty tyrants acting as regulators, police, and other wielders of unwarranted – and all too often unchecked – coercive power over their fellows. Above all, the country worthy of our love does not consist of its blessed wars. The most that anyone might truthfully say of any of these wars is that it was a necessary evil. For my part, I will not go even that far. In my view, every one of them was an unnecessary evil, including the American Revolution that some people may happen to recall amid today’s pseudo-patriotic bacchanalia.
The good that this country embraces does need defense, of course, but the protection it most urgently requires is defense against those who falsely purport to be its guardians and saviors.
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24 Responses to “Flag Waving Is Not My Kind of Patriotism”
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July 4th, 2009 at 5:17 am
No, flag waving is faux patriots kind of patriotism .And blind devotion to the Gov/military/media/authority in general. Im a faux patriot. I think that protecting war criminals is patrioitc. My boy Sgt., Fury agrees with me. So does my fellow brainwashed brother Truthteller.
eat me Reply:
July 4th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I’ll burn the flag before display it because of what it stands for. People like you for one.
Might as well be flying the swastika.
idonteatshit Reply:
July 5th, 2009 at 8:13 am
it is the swastika dummy
Responder. Reply:
July 4th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
What a refreshing bit of candor.
July 4th, 2009 at 5:44 am
Ask your self this ONE VERY IMPORTANT QUESTION:When the citizens of the soverign nations of planet earth–see THE AMERIKAN FLAG…WHAT DO THEY SEE? Freedom and justice for humanity? Or death, destruction and lies?
July 4th, 2009 at 5:44 am
recon marine—you are a dirty example…of what is wrong with AMERIKA…
July 4th, 2009 at 10:37 am
In order to live free in america one needs an understanding of law equivalent to a law degree, access to law books, the willingness to assert your rights, the willingness to spend a night or a month in jail to allow a judge time to find out that your within your rights. There are roughly 3 million laws on the books most of which go against some of our rights, but if we don’t know and claim them we lose them,so we still have our rights , but almost everyone including the police and judges don’t even know off hand what they are, so if you do assert your rights the police might well use deadly force against you in the course of your rightfull assertation of rights you still have. and that sucks.
July 4th, 2009 at 10:40 am
STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP REsponding to RECONIDIOT
MAYBE HE”LL GO AWAY!
July 4th, 2009 at 11:01 am
just one for instance. it’s a fact that no one was ever involuntarily drafted into the armed services in the united states, although many of our ancestors have been inducted, but that is only a subpoena, of which it is required for you to appear at the induction center. If you want to not be drafted into the service when they line you up and tell you to raise your right hand and repeat after me, and at that moment you exclaim loudly, wait a minute, would doing any of this waive any of my rights? , if you do that they will immediately escort you out of the induction chamber out of sight of the rest of the inductees, upon which they will threaten you with jail, threaten to beat you up. but after about fifteen minutes they give you a bus ticket home. now , none of my ancestors knew that. luckily, I stumbled onto it at georgegordon.com audio files.
July 4th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
#####PETITION OF THE CITIZENS OF EUROPEAN UNION COUNTRIES AGAINST LISBON TREATY RATIFICATION#####
Sign:
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Say “no” to a one world (criminal) government!!
**INFO**
- – -a member state is unable to ban a particular chemical on its own, not even if it believes it causes cancer. Only the non-elected Commission can propose a change in the relevant EU legislation. Not a National Parliament … not the European Parliament …Not the voters.
Environmentalists want to forbid 267 chemicals. The Commission will only investigate 7 of them. The 260 unwanted chemicals cannot be banned by voters in any member state by means of any election.- – -
READ ALL:
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&
EU ACTIVITIES, LIST:
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VIDEO:
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video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4291770489472554607
(wiseupjournal.com/?p=173)
July 4th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
The Republic has been shot in the head point blank several times in the last few years. She has been completely hijacked by hard core Fascist criminals. Its really hard for me to celebrate the 4th of July this year being that I am in morning over the loss of what once was a free and great country. What am I celebrating? An idea that no longer exists? Im afraid that the country that I was willing to give my life
for is only a memory now. Do I love and honor her majestic, awe inspiring nature or the ingenuity and free spirit of her people? Absolutely, but this 4th of July instead of jumping up and down with a flag in my hand I think I’ll sit quietly, turn inward and reflect on how “We the People” became “We the Sheople”.
——————————
—-”No people are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free”—
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
kebcreation Reply:
July 5th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
We need to start a new flag because the pirates own old Betsy Ross’ one.
July 4th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Of course, the American People are going to what they do BEST on this July 4th—-NOTHING. Let’s not kid ourselves here—-if they American people were truly dissatisfied with the way things were, they would have organized and carried out a people’s popular revolution and an overthrow of the US Federal Government a long time ago. The very fact they have NOT proves once and for all that the American people are completely satisfied with the way things are. I am not speaking sarcastically or fecitiously—-this is simply an objective observation of what I am seeing in the population. Think about it—-if the people were truly enraged and wanted the government out, this government wouldn’t have stood an icycle’s chance in Hell. We can only assume, with everything we see going on, that the people are, by and large, happy and satisfied with what they have been given. The reason the peoples of other nations are starting to fight back against their governments is because they are ANGRY AND DISSATISFIED. Not so in America. This whole thing about the American people not rising up because they are “manipulated by the media” or “apathetic” is total and complete HORSESHIT. The reason, as I’ve stated before, is that they LIKE living in this country and enjoy the fact that they can do the things they do.
July 4th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
The Most Powerful Military Force in the World is the American People
http://www.pentwhistle.com/
July 4th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I think this was a very well written, mindful article. Yes, I remember that America too. Or at least used to believe it was possible. Happy 4th Mr. Higgs and God bless.
July 4th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Americana the good old days before the banks controlled the government. The flag has no meaning in a world government.
July 4th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
I’m out’a place here, but does anyone remember Gordon Call or Randy Weaver? Gordon is dead! Lotta questions there! Ran into his court case doing law school research back in my young days when I was a wanna be lawyer and reading “The Spotlight”. Two mutually exclusive clubs. I don’t know much about Gordon’s issues, but I can remember I was the only one where I worked that defended Randy and his family, at least verbally. He didn’t have a “compound”, believe me no one had such a facility in Northern Idaho who actually worked for a living. It was only after his court case that my “so called friends” started thinking. And began repeating back to me everything I had ever said in defense of his situation. I Know this seems to be an inane rambling, but my point is…people sometimes can pull there own heads out of their own posteriors when they take time to think on their own. It don’t happen often, but it does happen!
July 5th, 2009 at 3:05 am
The American Revolution was unnecessary? Would a second revolution, due to the tyranny cited above also be unnecessary if it gets worse? What is the alternative?
If not for the American Revolution, wouldn’t we be by default under British Common rule?
I understand your libertarianism, but this is anarchism. If you are against the American Revolution, shall I assume that you are also against the Constitution?
Usually the articles at Lew Rockwell’s website are well written and thoughtful, from what I have read, but no this one. It is baloney that almost seems satirical.
There is a tyranny unfolding in this country and it is being implemented by people who want to remove our national sovereignty and pride. I must ask, whose side are you on? The side of the Founding Fathers of this country, or the New World Order?
This article is dismissed as a horrible FAIL!
July 5th, 2009 at 8:11 am
Our country was founded on the idea that we might govern ourselves.
Jefferson clarified the idea of the Constitution for me in saying “Speak to me no more of confidence in man, but bind him from mischief from the chains of the Constitution.”
When we use the term ‘government, we need to be able to distinguish between foundational principles and the ever present agenda of having a centralized global authority.
With the privately-owned, central banking agenda / authority so obviously subversive to the principles of liberty, I have to wonder why early lawmakers didn’t pass more stringent laws in making anyone found guilty of trying to instigate a central banking authority guilty of treason?
meanjean Reply:
July 5th, 2009 at 9:46 am
That’s true, however, the Elites don’t want self-government, they want to destroy this nation so they can usher in their NAU which will be part of the NWO, so they can enslave us. Who here now thinks they are truly free? Sure, you can still buy guns, go where you want, associate with whomever, but if you look at the gov since Eisenhower, who rightly warned us of the military/industrial complex, they have been chipping away at us and encroaching further and furhter into our lives. Chemtrails, floride, processed GMO foods, lab induced flue pandemic, etc have all been designed to sicken and weaken us so we can be taken over. How do you fight it? Run to the hills? How would you live there in this day and age? And if everyone did just that, it would become another city, which you originally tried to escape from. All local law enforcement agencies are now being militarized, and returning soldiers from Iraq are now being trained for any “terrorist attack” biological attack, civil unrest and riots on American soil. Do you think our own soldiers would shoot us down like dogs if we protested?
July 5th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Finally got to washington in the middle of the night
I couldnt wait
I headed straight for the capitol mall
My heart began to pound
Yahoo! it really exists
The american international pictures logo
I looked up at that capitol building
Couldnt help but wonder why
I felt like saying hello, old friend
Walked up the hill to touch it
Then I unzipped my pants
And pissed on it when nobody was looking
Like a great eternal klansman
With his two flashing red eyes
Turn around hes always watching
The washington monument pricks the sky
With flags like pubic hair ringed round the bottom
The symbols of our heritage
Lit up proudly in the night
Somehow fits to see the homeless people
Passed out on the lawn
So this is where it happens
The power games and bribes
All lobbying for a piece of ass
Of the stars and stripes of corruption
Makes me feel so ashamed
To be an american
When were too stuck up to learn from our mistakes
Trying to start another viet nam
Whilke fiddling while rome burns at home
The boss says, youre laid off. blame the japanese
Americas
back, alright
At the game it plays the worst
Strip mining the world like a slave plantation
No wonder others hate us
And the hitlers we handpick
To bleed their people dry
For our evil empire
The drug were fed
To make us like it
Is God and country with a band
People we know who should know better
Howl, america riles. lets go to war!
Business scams are whats worth dying for
Are the soviets our worst enemy?
Were destroying ourselves instead
Who cares about our civil rights
As long as I get paid?
The blind me-generation
Doesnt care if lifes a lie
So easily used, so proud to enforce
The stars and stripes of corruption
Lets bring it all down!
Tell me whos the real patriots
The archie bunker slobs waving flags?
Or the people with the guts to work
For some real change
Rednecks and bombs dont make us strong
We loot the world, yet we cant even feed ourselves
Our real test of strength is caring
Not the toys of war we sell the world
Just carry on, thankful to be farmed like worms
Old glory for a blanket
As you suck on your thumbs
Real freedom scares you
cos it means responsibility
So you chicken out and threaten me
Saying, love it or leave it
Ill get beat up if I criticize it
You say youll fight to the death
To save your worthless flag
If you want a banana republic that bad
Why dont you go move to one
But what can just one of us do?
Against all that money and power
Trying to crush us into roaches?
We dont destroy society in a day
Until we change ourselves first
From the inside out
We can start by not lying so much
And treating other people like dirt
Its easy not to base our lives
On how much we can scam
And you know
It feels good to lift that monkey off our backs
Im thankful I live in a place
Where I can say the things I do
Without being taken out and shot
So Im on guard against the goons
Trying to take my rights away
Weve got to rise above the need for cops and laws
Let kids learn communication
Instead of schools pushing competition
How about more art and theater instead of sports?
People will always do drugs
Lets legalize them
Crime drops when the mob cant price them
Budgets in the red?
Lets tax religion
No one will do it for us
Well just have to fix ourselves
Honesty aint all that hard
Just put rambo back inside your pants
Causing trouble for the system is much more fun
Thank you for the toilet paper
But your flag is meaningless to me
Look around, were all people
Who needs countries anyway?
Our land, I love it too
I think I love it more than you
I care enough to fight
The stars and stripes of corruption
Lets bring it all down!
If we dont try
If we just lie
If we cant find
A way to do it better than this
Who will?
you shall not bow down to them nor serve them
July 5th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Soon there will be
nothing left to breath
nothing left to read
nothing left to watch
nothing left to touch
nothing left to walk upon
nothing left to see
nothing left to be but
garbage garbage garbage
and this is the nail on the head; Soon they’ll read in history books, about financers and other crooks, and futileism and slavery, and nukes and all their navery, their histories just been there consigned with many other kinds of garbage.
Thanks Pete Seger, no wonder they tried to shut you up.
July 5th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
I happen to think that true patriots (and I don’t really dig that expression) are those who brag the less about it.
I see plenty of idiots waving flags and chanting but knowing shit and doing jack about what’s going on.
I found myself being actually far more patriotic (and again, I can’t stress enough on how I dislike this) for the US, UK, countries in Europe, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela and so on than all those vocal flag wavers.
I actually found that I cherish the idea that people should lead their own country as they see fit, be masters of their own cultures and destinies, outside of any evil influence.
When I read http://eutruth.org.uk for example, I can feel rage growing despite the fact that it’s been a long time since I had any true emotional and cultural link to this country.
But we’re nearly all getting screwed up anyway.
July 5th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
Boycott the boobtube … boycott the public educational system … boycott GM(O food …
boycott the one party political system … boycott the Federal Reserve and IRS …
boycott the Nazi Flag !!! … when our north american republic is finally restored ,
then , and only then , will the American people no longer need to boycott anything !!!