Bedlam

Mark Twain said that a patriot is, “the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.” Anyone who is paying a modicum of attention to the world around them today will understand this statement clearly. We have patriots by the bushel, the barrel and the gross spread across this land like maggots on a corpse. They thump the Bible, wave the flag and wipe their backsides with the Constitution all in the name of America – their America, God’s America, American Exceptionalism and America the Beautiful.

It is all so hideously insane, so brutally hypocritical. I refer now to the geniuses who want to dismantle the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution after spending months insisting that as purists and patriots they needed to defend the Constitution from healthcare reform. Apparently enfranchising sick children who heretofore have been denied insurance coverage under the pre-existing condition rule would undermine the Republic to such an extent that Jefferson, Washington and Franklin would rise from their graves and make haste to the Nation’s Capitol with muskets blazing. However, the dismantling of the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate the idea that children born in this country are citizens is the patriotic duty of every Constitutional purist. After all people come to this country and have children just to exploit and annoy us. What arrogance – what stupidity.

The most obscene thing that I have witnessed in recent years (believe me that is saying something) is the dance macabre in New York over the Muslim community center. My fellow citizens are jumping up and down like spoiled, dim-witted children in a candy shop because, of course, Glen Beck and Sarah Palin told them that all Muslims are responsible for 9/11. Perhaps I have missed something here, but even though all of the men who flew the planes into the Trade Towers and the Pentagon were Muslim they were also Saudi Arabian. Seems to me that the Right was conspicuously quiet when Bush went walking through the Saudi streets hand in hand with the King sometime after that miserable day in September.

It boils down to this, we seem to need someone to hate in this country. My father was an Italian. When he was a boy it was him – the dirty Diego, the thieving Wop anarchist. The mob mentality, the rage and hatred grew to such an outrageous state that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had no trouble rigging a trial and executing two Italian men, Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, for a crime they didn’t commit. Papa said that it was almost like their blood was the only thing that could quench the thirst of hatred. He also believed that men like Al Capone grew out of that hate. No one ever called Al a Wop and lived to tell about it.

Hatred is in my estimation a degenerative and progressive disease of the mind. While the hater is despicable and disgusting the real monster is the hate monger who stirs it up and feeds off of it for political or financial gain. The fat white men with messianic complexes, the aging beauty queens who couldn’t make it as governor, the Washington hack who will say anything to get reelected are the real threats to the Constitution, the Republic and the America my father wanted so much to believe in.

True patriots stand against the hate making it unfashionable and unprofitable. Eventually they strip the parasites that live on it of their authority and power. Once this is done their slavish followers slink back into the abyss - they always have.