An Experiment in Scotch

The loony left often com­plains that the loony right calls them unpa­tri­otic but it”s hard to be sym­pa­thetic to their com­plaints when they do every­thing pos­si­ble to sup­port it. That arti­cle is so filled with rub­bish and sim­ple­ton talk that it”s hard to know where to start in. It”s rare to find so per­fect an exam­ple of a stereo­type but that woman is the per­fect exam­ple of a left­ist loony toon.

Gee, you come home from your “Euro­pean idyll” to live in a small town where 80 of the 319 adults are mil­i­tary vet­er­ans and you”re shocked (shocked!) that the town might be slightly con­ser­v­a­tive? Then when your kid comes home with a flier about a Bible class, you panic and call the ACLU? This has to be a par­ody right? Holy shit, if I had come home with a flier about Satanism when I was 6, I”m pretty sure my par­ents wouldn”t have pan­icked and called Jerry Fal­well. WTF? At what point did you become so ter­ri­fied of your own abil­ity to par­ent that you had to decide to call the ACLU when you find out that a con­ser­v­a­tive school in a con­ser­v­a­tive town might be inter­ested in hav­ing a time release Bible class? And you”re sur­prised the prin­ci­pal doesn”t like you any more? Could you be any­more clueless?

Then this lit­tle bit comes along:

Polit­i­cally, Nar­rows­burg is red dot in a blue state. It is not named for any small-town frame of mind…

God, the con­de­scen­sion is dis­gust­ing, imply­ing that a small-town frame of mind is nar­row while her Euro­pean idyll, the war in Iraq is wrong, Bush is Hitler frame of mind is wide open. Unbe­liev­able. Ala­nis Moris­sette had a bet­ter grasp of irony than this woman and that”s say­ing something. The rest of the arti­cle is just so much dri­vel. She tells her son our pres­i­dent started a war with Iraq depriv­ing all those inno­cent Iraqis of their liveli­hood, ignor­ing all the dif­fi­cult stuff like UN res­o­lu­tions, peo­ple being thrown into wood chip­pers, Sad­dam gassing his own peo­ple. She”s ashamed of some­thing she calls “the patriot-ization of her son” and is clearly thrilled it only lasts a sum­mer. Then she wraps it up with this:

How soon child­ish national pride is shed, I some­times think now, and not a lit­tle wist­fully. Only once it was gone did I real­ize that, after our ini­tial dis­com­fort, my hus­band and I had begun to see our son”s patri­o­tism as a badge of inno­cence. His faith was a reminder to us that the rea­son we are dev­as­tated by the war in Iraq and the Bush pres­i­dency is that we too love Amer­ica. We too want to believe in its poten­tial for good and brotherhood.

Patri­o­tism as a badge of inno­cence, worn by those who just don”t know any bet­ter. For­give me if I find it hard to believe she loves Amer­ica. After putting up 2000 words or so in an attempt to belit­tle small town Amer­ica, mil­i­tary ser­vice, Bush, Iraq, and the Pledge of Alle­giance, I”m just not buy­ing it.

If this wasn”t Salon, I”d be sure this was just a really super par­ody. The ACLU, the self-satisfaction, the smug­ness. Instead, I just feel sorry for that child. He”s got a tough road in front of him if he”s ever going to see the world in any­thing but black and white. Peo­ple like his mother sneer at reli­gion but she kneels at the altar of one her­self. He”ll have a dif­fi­cult time ever con­vinc­ing her that think­ing for one­self and find­ing out that issues are almost always more com­plex than they first appear are attrib­utes of a truly fine mind. Ortho­doxy is always the hard­est belief to fight.