There used to be widespread agreement that "patriotic" was a good way to be. Now there's widespread opposition to this idea. If people feel emotionally attached to their own countries, some say, how can they ever put tribal squabbles behind them and become citizens of the world? Isn't eliminating the whole idea of separate "nation states" the key to world peace?
Well, no, actually. Not having national governments would make it a little harder to wage war in the conventional sense, but what would we have instead? Global government would be bigger and less efficient than national government. People would have lots of hard feelings to "demonstrate." I suspect that not having national governments would merely make it harder to contain the wars that would continue to rage as various groups of malcontents attempted to overthrow the guaranteed-to-be-corrupt-and-out-of-touch global government. For a start we do not live in a world where very many people are ever going to accept that it's their duty to be governed by a dowdy little place like Brussels. The capital of the world ought to be a place with a record closer to success than the rest of the world has ever seen, like Washington! No, it ought to be a young, cutting-edge place like Bangalore! No, the majority of humankind are already accustomed to their government being in Beijing! People would fight. Nobody but Saturday morning cartoon villains would want to take responsibility for a global government--so that's who'd be leadng it. I think global government would be an unmitigated disaster. I think the idea of global government is coming straight from the cosmic Evil Principle, which is inherently opposed to an idea as good as a nice, modest, reasonable, global mediation service that people respect enough to use it.
We in the United States have certainly failed to produce world peace, and have often fallen short of any reasonable standard of keeping peace among ourselves; but we have done better than most of the nations on Earth with our concept of independence supported by keeping a good healthy distance from one another. I think those ideas might help people in other countries.
Imagine Putin waking up to the noble truths enshrined in our historic documents. "Governments depend on the consent of the people governed. Am I governing Ukraine yet? Of course not. I don't have their consent. I must have been out of my mind. A more useful question to ask might be why I ever thought I'd want to try to govern people who would rather be governed by Zelenskyy. What kind of people want to spell their names with double Y's, anyway? How badly do I want their real estate and why didn't I just offer them the money and buy it?" Well, no, he wouldn't think that, because it's the sort of thought that occurs to people who think in English, but you get the idea.
Since our support for Ukraine has officially cut off e-friendships with Russia, this web site has lost its Russian audience, so I don't suppose anyone will show Putin this suggestion. That doesn't matter. It won't mean anything to him unless he's guided to it by the Spirit of Truth, which does not depend on any individual or group to impress a message on a human mind.
"Well," someone says, "if you think Putin must have been out of his mind, isn't that something for Russian people to be ashamed of?"
I don't know who elected him, or why, but that's not what this post is about.
It's about being at home, or as close as makes no difference, plugged into a computer for pity's sake, on a public holiday when all public-spirited people are parading around their towns, buying overpriced drinks, wailing about the heat, ignoring the sour notes from the high school band, networking, and generally displaying patriotism and public spirit until the fireworks start.
By admitting that I'm online on the Fourth of July, how exactly am I labelling my brand?
Old?
Sick?
Grumpy?
Devoid of Public Spirit?
All of the above?
Well, intermittently I am those things. That is part of my glyphosate reactions. Because this country does not yet have laws about using products that are sold as "pesticides" for the express purpose of harming people whose real estate you might happen to want, and saying so in the form of death threats, in front of witnesses, I've had more of those reactions in the last three years than I did before the coronavirus panic. The cumulative effects become more conspicuous. I suppose glyphosate reactions always did have some influence on whether I could wear my skinny britches or had to wear fat pants on any given day, but ever since the great salmonella poisoning mess in 2021 it's been much more noticeable. The skin's been stretched out of shape and pops right back during each episode. The waistline literally expands by 50% due to a combination of internal gas and tissue damage. On Friday morning I had a 24" waist. Now I'm sitting here watching my waist slowly reappear after puffing up to 36". It didn't interfere with breathing or moving the way the salmonella episode did, but the sensation was not exactly pleasant. The gradual reemergence of the waistline means that this is not a day when I want to be waiting in line outside a restroom. So I'm still staying home, just as if I were in quarantine, just as if there were still a need for statewide quarantine.
I have some opinions about a country that does not have very clear laws, and a very clear procedure for making sure that, if this kind of thing happens once, it cannot happen twice. I expect they're similar to the opinions Russian Christians, who try to practice good will toward humankind, have to have about a leader who makes Christian noises while attacking other countries. Anybody making Christian or patriotic noises, these days, is asking for me to yell at them: "What price that total ban on glyphosate that was supposed to have been voluntarily effected by the companies, as of last year? Put your money where your mouth is! Stop defending torture and murder!"
Because, of course, geriatric as I may seem in cyberspace, in my home town I'm still one of the youngest and most active and healthy adults we have. Other people's glyphosate reactions are worse than mine, and last longer, because those people are older and sicker at best.
And so far I've not been writing about those of us who are older, sicker, grumpier, and lower on public spirit than I am and also in deep mourning.
I'd be lying if I said I've not been mourning for my Significant Other--I have--but I'd also be lying if I claimed that it was deep mourning, the kind many of my townsfolk are going through after losing parents, husbands, wives, who were living in their homes. The world lost an extraordinary man last winter but he and I had been living apart, the relationship consisting mostly of phone calls, for years while we only hoped to get back into business together. My town is now full of people who were braced to lose a few very old elders to coronavirus itself--who might even have felt more relief that those people were out of their pain than grief for the loss of their company, which in most cases had happened years before. That was bad enough but by now we've lost people who were not vulnerable to COVID and didn't die of it--whose untimely and unexpected losses might have been caused by reactions to the COVID vaccine, in some cases. Or to glyphosate.
I know what deep mourning feels like. I've been there. I'm glad I'm not there now.
"But I hadn't heard anything about that lately," some people will say. "Wasn't that several years ago, when those old people were awarded billions for cancer and those 'scientists' supposedly 'proved' that glyphosate didn't cause cancer, so it's back on the market, and it's safe and effective, and something else is causing all those chronic conditions people have, all of which flare up on the same days so nobody is any fun to deal with on the Bad Days we all have at once."
Google is still showing the world Bayer's lawyers' answers to the question why Bayer reneged on their pledge to get "Roundup" off U.S. store shelves: "Roundup is still being sold because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not found the active chemical, glyphosate to be harmful to humans. As a highly effective herbicide that is perfect for treating genetically modified organism crops like corn, soybean, and wheat, Roundup works as it is intended."
Outright lies. How quickly the TV audiences forget. Those of us who don't get our facts from corporate-censored television aren't getting the truth about glyphosate from any big commercial magazine or newspaper, these days, either. They've entered a censorship alliance that calls itself the Trusted News Initiative, a really Orwellian name. Any news media associated with TNI, we should not trust, and I personally won't even read any more. (I miss my Washington Post. I miss the BBC. NBC, CBC, the New York Times--the correct name is Corporate Censored Media, and I recommend letting them rot.) The truth about glyphosate is hard to find on Twitter, too, though a lot of us have been tweeting it. Watch for the e-mails from the Glyphosate Awareness network to be tampered with, next.
As Dennis Prager explained in a video, I don't know how long ago but I heard it at some time this weekend, the Democratic Party can now be described as split between two mutually opposed, really irreconcilable factions. (That's the D Party spox, Gentle Readers. He completely ignored what are probably still the majority of D voters.) "Leftists" and "liberals" would be two opposing parties if they weren't united by their pathological fear of conservatives. Liberals oppose censorship; they defend your right to say things with which they disagree, because they know their right at least to try to say things that make what you say sound idiotic depends on your right to say what you say. Leftists know their only hope of gaining power is to be able to enforce censorship.
Conservatives, Prager said, are not liberals' enemies. The perception that they are is based on a fear so laughably outdated that it can fairly be called a phobia. Liberals and conservatives disagree, and hammer things out, but they're not enemies. Leftists are the ones who want to be enemies--who want to use force and violence to overthrow the system that allows us to hammer things out.
Hiding behind the soiled coattails of the D Party, leftists have acquired considerable control of the commercial media; they always did--covertly--run the Internet, and they're in the process of co-opting all the big corporations. Raytheon couldn't be called an evil corporation, except in reference to its manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, even a few years ago. Now it can. Dow made other toxic chemicals, but their hands were clean as far as glyphosate was concerned, until recently. Dow is no longer clean. Pfizer has moved into a position right beside Bayer, Lilly, and Merck on the line-up of evil corporations with blood on their hands. The majority of the name-brand groceries we buy, which used to be produced by different competing corporations, are now all owned by Blackrock, which some are adding to the list of evil corporations, and which is certainly big enough to call for a breakup under existing anti-monopoly laws. Microsoft, Google, Twitter, F******k? All of them are well on the way and of course, because of the Gates family's involvement in Monsanto, there's always been some principled opposition to Microsoft. But I'm not sure it's even worth the trouble to try to identify the most evil corporations beyond those directly involved with glyphosate. We have to choose our battles, and as long as government allows big corporations to operate as monopolies, call for censorship (as in anything beyond individual letters to the editors of news media that inform the public about complaints and lawsuits against products), generate huge amounts of campaign funding for elected officials in both major parties, etc., any corporation that's not doing anything really evil today is likely to be absorbed into one that is, tomorrow.
Liberals have always thought of their enemies as big unethical corporations--Dow used to be the first on the list, back in the Vietnam War era--and they need to wake up and smell the coffee. Their enemies are now within what most liberals still regard as their own party. Are now funding that party, which means they are driving it.
Are the majority of Ds liberals or leftists? I say neither, but that's another topic for another day. I just want to call attention to the fact that the majority of Americans in both parties do have "Enemies Within," and although their real agenda is neither R nor D and their current primary strategy is simple bullying without regard to party affiliation, they are currently working within the D party.
But on the Fourth of July we're supposed to be able to stop bickering about elections and party disagreements, and just enjoy being Americans. Glyphosate, which was sprayed along road verges and railroads in my town last week, has made that unnecessarily difficult for a lot of us. (That rain-every-day routine we've been seeing has made this weekend less miserable than it would have been if the weather had been more fireworks-friendly.) Can we still enjoy the holiday? Can we still be patriotic?
Of course we can.
When I started writing this post I caught myself rewriting what C.S. Lewis said about "love of country" in The Five Loves (or The Four Loves; some publishers count only the four human loves, some count the love of God). Why bother doing that? Lewis said it so much better and all of you, Gentle Readers, ought to own copies of that book.
Basically, he said that although we can hold beliefs about abstract ideas such as numbers and philosophies, and although those beliefs may include a belief that some abstract ideas are important and should lead us to certain courses of action, we do not love abstract ideas.
"Humankind" and "global" anything and "world citizenship" and suchlike are abstract ideas. Nobody feels anything about them. Some people believe they can potentially be made useful ideas that may someday accomplish things about which people can have sincere feelings, and some don't; in any case that kind of words are, so far, just words. If we understand those words to mean anything, it's not anything we really love.
We don't, Lewis said, really love England, or America, or wherever else. We love our homes--the ones in which we grew up, and the ones we built for ourselves. We have the emotional feeling of love about sensory impressions: pictures, sounds, smells, tastes, sensations. The "home" category include the view from our window, the foods on our table, the songs we know "by heart."
Even for siblings who grew up in the same house, with the same parents, the sensory impressions of "home" are likely to be very different. When I think of my childhood home I think of being the eldest, or responsible, child of young parents, radically Christian and radically Green, with black hair. When my natural sister thinks of her childhood home she thinks of being effectvely the only child of old, sad, despondent parents, richer and more indulgent than the parents I had but evidently much less fun to know, with white hair. Our childhood memories overlap in a few places, but they're different stories. But even when siblings were close together in age and shared the same experiences, like Lewis and his own brother, exactly what they love about their homes is likely to be different because they're different individuals.
From "home" our ability to form vivid memories and strong feelings about them expands outward as far as "neighborhood." We love our extended families as well as our immediate families, our childhood schools, churches, shops and neighborhoods as well as our childhood homes.
Then, beyond that point, we form our senses of "country" and of "humankind" by analogy. We know some people who share the feeling of love-of-home for some of the same things we do, who love the same foods or songs or landscapes. After learning that these people exist, that each of them loves some of the same things we do and some different ones, we are able to reason by analogy that people outside our own neighborhood presumably feel about their neighborhood the same way we feel about ours. At this point, Lewis said, we form what Prager would call the liberal view of people who are "diverse" from us: "Once we understand that the French like cafe complet just as we like ham and eggs, why, good luck to them and let them have it." At this point Englishmen like Lewis could fight for Frenchmen's homes and cafe complet, and they did. They recognized the French as very different from, usually incompatible with, themselves, and then, like good liberals, they defended the French's right to be as French as they liked.
Whatever else may be going on in the rest of the country, its government, its cities, any of its neighborhoods other than our own, may affect our reasoned judgments about the nation, but it does not affect our emotional feelings about our home. Home, we always love.
Even if our home was a dreary little flat in Leningrad, or a tent dragged around the old familiar reindeer herd in Siberia.
In the United States we celebrate Independence Day on the Fourth of July. We read the Declaration of Independence. Sometimes someone feels ambitious enouogh to read the Constitution. We sing patriotic songs...
The late singer Lloyd Marcus used to ask audiences if they could sing our official national anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner." He thought every U.S. citizen ought to be able to sing it.
"The Star-Spangled Banner" is a challenging song to sing. The tune, which had previously been the theme song of an amateur musicians' club, was popular because many people need some formal voice training to be able to sing it properly. I don't remember now who it was that wrote that that's what makes it a great national anthem--that it really calls for a crowd to sing it in unison, the crowd being sure to contain some people who can be sure of reaching the high and low notes and others who know better than to try to sing them out loud!
My mother could sing "The Star-Spangled Banner"; one afternoon, when I was eight years old, she decided to teach it to me. I can sing it; whether I can do it any sort of justice is for others to judge.
If I had a suggestion for how old, sick, grumpy people, who are running low on public spirit, and who may be in deep mourning, should celebrate this holiday, I'd suggest that we at least try to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Everyone in the house needs to do this at the same time. The best way to endure what someone else is likely to make of certain notes in "The Star-Spangled Banner" is to keep your attention focussed on reaching those notes, yourself.
Thus, The Nephews should know, by now, that their Auntie Pris's voice is likely to fade out on the first "la-and of the FREEEEE," although it can still be relied on for the last one, and they need to be prepared to let the word "free" be heard. We are not singing about the la-and of the [feeble whining noise].
Lloyd Marcus was one of America's leading advocates of inclusive sing-alongs, so singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" is a proper way to remember him.
Almost all of our other national songs are more accessible, though. So sing them too.
Whatever else is happening, it's always good to remember our homes and feel love for our homes, and let our minds move outward from there to thoughts of other people's love for their homes.
