More Nuts

I recently wrote about religious nuts. The other nuts that drive me bonkers are the patriotic nuts. The “my country right or wrong” brigade. There’s nothing wrong with patriotism but the best kind is that which acknowledges faults and endeavours to put them right for the good of the country in which one purports to believe. Personally I believe patriotism runs a persistent danger of over-spilling into pernicious nationalism – an altogether different species of patriotism to the noble kind.

Here is an example – one of those pernicious, smug little messages that circulate around the internet vie e-mail groups. It was sent to me the other day … I was going to copy and paste it here but have just discovered I’ve deleted it. Anyway the gist of it was “I encountered a guy with a ‘I hate America’ kind of placard, and I told him that my grandfather died in the 2nd World War, my father died in Korea, and my brother died in Vietnam. They all died so that you could stand here and protest. If I had an umbrella I’d stick it up your ass and open it. God bless America.”

What struck me about this, and so many other anecdotes like it, is how factually incorrect it is: the bit about the 2nd World War is right – this was the last major conflict in which the USA fought from the moral high ground and helped defeat the odious Nazis. But as for Korea and Vietnam – they are totally irrelevant to this argument. What did all those American deaths achieve? Communist North Korea still exists, and Communist Vietnam still exists. Indeed the Vietnam war ended with an ignominious American retreat. Finally, you have to laugh (or get very angry) at someone who in one phrase wishes to stick un umbrella up someone’s ass, then in the next phrase invokes the name of God. It’s priceless loony stuff!