esrosedotblog

COUNTRY LOVE

There's parent love and lover love and brotherly love but nothing is as contentious as "country love".

I remember when we lived on South Street in Plymouth, MA, one of the neighbors, a guy who beat his kids and didn't work and was on the dole and was working his way to being the town drunk, had an "America, love it or leave it" sticker on his battered up car.

Proud to be an American but an utter failure as a human being. There is too much of that.

Then you have the professional country lovers. The full time paid flag wavers. The type who fit the aphorism about the "last refuge of the scoundrel".

Joel Stein, who is marvelously funny, captures all this posturing in his column today in the LA Times.

Republicans Are Blinded by Love

What I like about Stein is that he goes to the source. Here, an interview with the crazy CNN soon to be Fox guy Glenn Beck.

I saw him once when I was on vacation and searching for a weather report on the teevee. A foamer.

Stein also talks about that other super patriot Sean Hannity who can raise the hackles on my neck just by his smug demeanor.

These flag wavers need to be brought down a peg but we won't do it. They will sink in their own craziness or run headlong into a scandal or something equally self destructive.

They have always been with us, these people.

When I was a student in Boston, we would go of a Saturday or Sunday to the Commons where guys like this were on a soapbox. We would heckle them.

I learned right then that they were un-hecklable. Immune from criticism in their bubble of country love. The heckler became an instant appeaser, traitor, communist sympathizer. Whatever.

This was before we had teevee. The good old days.

Stein asserts that the universal solvent of humor may take these guys and disappear them. I doubt it. But, in the meantime, we can at least have a good laugh at their posturing phoniness.

Labels: patriotism