COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MICHELLE MALKIN IN CNS NEWS
"America's
Founding Fathers, I submit, would vehemently disagree.'
Not that I am an Obama admirer, far from it, but this piece
is silly rubbish.
I do not understand anyone quoting some guys from over two
centuries ago on vital issues of our own day.
Would you quote any of them on how to run a big estate? With
slaves, of course.
Would you quote any of them on the best way to maintain your
carriage?
Or about heating and cooling your house?
I actually do understand it, but the truth is sad.
The Patriot types are people embracing a religion, for this
kind of Americanism is a religion as surely as Islam or Catholicism. Indeed, it
a fundamentalist form of religion and not just the Sunday-morning-hour-in-church
type.
It goes beyond the normal range of affection for one's own
country we find in most places. It is far fiercer and more demanding. And I
believe dangerous because all fierce, fundamentalist religions are dangerous,
without exception.
It is a secular religion, but it is no less intense in its
beliefs or replete with myths and legends.
It has its own holy writ with documents like the Declaration
and Constitution, documents which in many details are as outdated and backward
as Leviticus.
It has its own Commandments, the Bill of Rights.
It has its own temples and monuments. Washington is packed
with them.
It has a whole list of secular saints from Jefferson to
Lincoln, many of them having great public alters.
It has its own version of Jesus and Satan in Washington and
Benedict Arnold.
It has its own regularly repeated mumbo-jumbo stuff, its
version of the Apostles' Creed, in the Pledge of Allegiance and the
Star-Spangled Banner.
And then there's that strange tenet of faith called "original
intent," as though a group of slave-holding planters from backwater
locations more than two centuries ago had a direct revelation from God of
eternal truths.
There's even something combining elements of the Last Supper
and Jesus in the desert with Satan. It's called Valley Forge.
Well, I don't care if people embrace any religion. It's
their business, so long as it doesn't hurt others.
But that's exactly what is wrong about the American Civic
Religion, as it was nick-named by a clever Irish scholar some decades back, it
does have the effect of hurting others.
Others are hurt in all the pointless imperial wars abroad.
And people, terribly afflicted by those very wars as today's refugees from the
Syria and Libya America worked to destroy, are given no help and often
maligned.
It's much the same with making any real progress of rights
and freedoms and democracy inside the country, too. Look how long it took to
give millions even a degree of equal rights. Concepts like Original Intent and
States' Rights kept black Americans without any rights for a century after the
Civil War.
There is a fundamental problem in trying to maintain a world
empire and in trying to have a decent society. It actually cannot be done.
But faith in the American Civic Religion is just what
mightily assists the imperial machine and keeps it going. Blind believers
following an establishment which couldn't care less about their lives or
welfare, in many ways resembling poor believing peasants in Europe deeply
revering the Pope as he conducted his wars and infamies.
Trump was elected in part over a concern in society that
America's establishment had become a self-perpetuating machine, conducting
endless wars abroad and ignoring its own people. And that was, and remains, an
accurate perception.
But nothing can really change so long as Patriotism in
America is virtually exactly the same thing as Ultra-orthodoxy in Israel.
