The P Word
I visited the old neighborhood the other day. That old neighborhood, aka Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY, USA, Earth, can be seen in historical context in the movie Saturday Night Fever. Much has changed since then, including the replacement of White Castle (where Tony Manero and his gang got rowdy) with a large mixed use building and Fisherman's Corner (where Tony and Stephanie had lunch) with an an auto leasing storefront.
Lenny's Pizza, where Tony (betraying all that is good and proper about pizza) double-stacked his slices, is still going strong, but that's eighteen avenues over, in Bensonhurst. The Verrazano Bridge (slowly being renamed Verrazzano to address a historical error) is, by the way, also still there.
Locals of a certain age know that the movie isn't geographically accurate (Lenny's is nowhere near the hardware store, for one thing, and cars are routinely driving in directions that don't match their destinations), but that detracts very little from the neighborhood pride that emerged when the movie became a monster hit.
One rather recent addition to the old stomping grounds is the mural depicted at the top of this article, located at the 86th Street entrance to the northbound Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
The artist, Scott Lobaido of Staten Island, has painted over a thousand American Flag-themed murals across the nation, and embraces the sobriquets "relentless patriot" and "patriotic artist."
What struck me, and saddened me in realization, is that we (or I, at least) have been conditioned by a relentless drip-drip-drip of cultural dominance by a faction that isn't very fond of America to think, if only for a moment, that it takes guts to display the Red White and Blue in some parts of the country nowadays. Or, that it's seen as an act of defiance in others.
Yeah, yeah, I get it. I get that we're supposed to look upon the nation with shame, because it didn't live up to the principles the old white guys who wrote the Declaration and Constitution set to paper a couple centuries ago. That, because slavery took an extra 77 years to outlaw, and because it took another century to kick Jim Crow to the curb, that the entire project is debauched.
This thinking has been shoehorned into the collective consciousness by a combination of Dunning-Kruger simpletons, cynical power-seekers, and intensely stupid intellectuals who played on our aversion to being called racist and our desire to do right by those who've been wronged. There's no subtlety in this, until you drill down and realize that, consciously or unwittingly, these same people are socialists looking to take control of, or steal outright, Other People's Money, and have absolutely no compunction in doing harm to good people in the process.
This is a far cry from the America that millions, native-born and immigrant alike, embraced across its existence, even when beset by bigots and worse.
Amerigo Bonasera, the undertaker whose "I Believe In America" declaration opens The Godfather, was an Italian immigrant who would have endured prejudice and worse coming into New York in the early part of the 20th Century. Yet he, and countless others, came here with the understanding that the nation’s promise stood far above its warts.
Today, however, "patriot" and patriotism are quaint notions at best, and seen by many of the self-styled Best-and-Brightest as nefarious telltales. That one is a "Florida Man"-esque rube, or secretly racist, or resentful that undeserved and unearned "privilege" is being threatened, or simply an uneducated clod who needs to be managed and kept down until he is finally “enlightened.”
Hold that thought.
This is encapsulated by the plethora of derogatory 'Murica! memes and jokes.
These, in turn, reflect the cocktail party crowd's contempt for the rest of the country.
Travel the byways of the nation and you will, however, overwhelmingly meet good, decent, friendly people. People who are happy they live in America, and who, in conversation, talk up the nation's foundational and aspirational values, rather than cast them as irredeemably corrupt and as a false flag (pun intended) for the perpetuation of oppression.
Or, as a dear friend with far more poetry in his soul than I’ll ever have and a passion for traveling those byways and meeting those people, offers:
Venture beyond the metropolis' boundaries into the country’s industrial and agricultural bread baskets… Here we encounter the uncomplicated, with their sense and sensibility in a nimbus of sunshine. Where Mother Nature and the three R’s are given equal berth in educating the inhabitants. Here we find America’s Joan of Arc. — SW
Indeed.
For the record, I love Florida Crazy Man Challenging Hurricane Matthew.
Back to that enlightenment bit.
Human civilization is about 6000 years old. For over 90% of that span, humans looked upon (and treated) those not of their tribes as enemies, to be slaughtered, subjugated, or enslaved. Yes, enslaved, something done by everyone to everyone across history, and codified in laws and religious texts around the world, across (and within) all origins, tribes, ethnicities, religions, locations, and skin colors. It is only the Enlightenment, the intellectual movement that emerged in western Europe in the 17th Century, that broke from the acceptance of slavery as a normal and routine part of human societies.
Yes, it was old white guys who taught the world that owning other humans was a Bad Thing, and who laid the five core Enlightenment values - happiness, reason, nature, progress, and liberty - that formed the philosophical foundations for a nation that aspired to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That it was old white guys doesn’t matter. The principle stands on its own, as do the principles upon which America was founded.
America's government, as codified in the Constitution, was a radical - yes, radical - departure from the governing norms of the world at the time, and even those of the nations that birthed the Enlightenment. The world was a collection of hereditary monarchies, and a government that not only lacked any sort of familial succession at the top, but specifically eschewed royalty and nobility in favor of "The People," was seismic. That this idea took root around the world, spawned dozens of imitators, and produced prosperity and enormous strides in living standards for the masses speaks to its greatness.
Believing in and supporting the nation's principles, born of the Enlightenment, characterized in the Declaration, codified in the Constitution, and standing as an ideal worth both pursuing and defending, is what I call patriotism. It should not be scorned, sneered at, or deemed the result of inferior mind or education.
And, since the nation is not the government, one can consider oneself a patriot without needing to endorse whatever the politicians du jour are doing or trying to do. We can feel pride in the country and the flag while criticizing things our government does that we don't like, while acknowledging that the nation and society haven't yet fully achieved Enlightenment ideals, and while continuing to embrace that those ideals remain the pinnacle of human aspiration.
The critics and denigrators, it cannot go unsaid, offer in their stead principles and systems of government (see: variants of Marxism) that produced untold misery, subjugation, death, and poverty everywhere they've been tried. That there are people in America who'd rather drape themselves in a Soviet Union or Red China flag instead of the Red, White, and Blue is the real tragedy.
That tragedy is born of a co-opting of the educational system and popular culture by people who hate freedom (and by extension, their fellow humans) itself.
So, fly that flag, and embrace patriotism, no matter your political leanings. With a smile, with warmth and comity for your fellow humans, and with a sense of unity. Believe in America, and believe in liberty-loving Americans.
In closing, a word of caution. Don't fall prey to the conflation of patriotism and nationalism/nativism. The latter are not unifiers, not in a nation of immigrants, and the false conflation of the P word with those two N words feeds the Left's false narratives, drives a wedge between those who believe in liberty and those who believe in big government of their flavor, and produces skewed views of the nation's best path forward. Nor should you fall prey to the haters’ guilt-by-association gambits, wherein the use of the flag by some with decidedly illiberal and freedom-hating views means those views are conveyed by Old Glory.
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Peter.
So good! God bless America!🇺🇸