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With Independence Day approaching, and with some correspondence at hand which accused me of holding unpatriotic attitudes, I figured some improvement might be in order. As I often do when I don't know where else to turn, I called my favorite inside source, Ananias Ziegler, media relations director of the Committee That Really Runs America.
Ziegler started by explaining that I lived in the wrong
part of the country to be truly patriotic. According to
our studies, which cover everything patriotic from military
enlistments to the proclivity to elect wholesome
God-fearing Republicans, the two most patriotic regions are
Utah and the old Confederacy,
he said.
But those are the only two regions that ever engaged in armed conflicts against the United States, I objected, noting the Mormon War of 1856-57 and the Civil War of 1861-65.
That's one of your problems,
Ziegler said.
You know too much history to be truly patriotic in any
way that would get the approval of the Committee. If you
really loved your country -- well, would you hire a private
detective to dig into the background of your spouse? Is
nosing around in someone's past the act of a loving person?
Doesn't your country deserve the same
consideration?
I could see his point. As Bob Dole once said, certain
overzealous historians might cast doubt on the nobility
of America,
and that's certainly no way to encourage
patriotism.
Ziegler interrupted my musings. Another important
aspect of contemporary patriotism is the flag.
Of course. It is the national symbol, and should be respected.
One acceptable patriotic way to display that
respect,
Ziegler said, is to use the flag to draw
attention to your enterprise. If a used-car dealer puts up
a string of gaudy flashing lights to attract notice, he
might violate an oppressive sign code. But if he flies a
huge 40-foot flag, he's being a good patriotic American,
and of course, it's merely a coincidence that the flag
draws attention to his car lot.
Glad that he had cleared that up for me, I asked about other flags.
That depends,
Ziegler noted. If you're in
Miami and standing in the street waiving a Cuban flag while
protesting the actions of the United States, then it means
you're extremely patriotic and American politicians should
cater to you, lest they be accused of being
unpatriotic.
This was confusing, and it got worse. And if you're
anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line,
Ziegler
continued, and you display the Confederate battle flag,
that's another indication of hard-core patriotism, and
again, American politicians will leap through hoops to
cater to you.
I recalled Sen. John McCain recently apologizing for his equivocation about the Confederate flag in South Carolina earlier this year.
That just goes to show you how unpatriotic it was to
like McCain,
Ziegler said. Talk about a tough spin
job. Here we've got this decorated veteran with a sense of
honor and a sense of humor, spent more than five years as a
prisoner of war, a lot of that under torture -- and we made
it unpatriotic to support him.
That was an impressive spin job, I agreed, and I asked Ziegler if he could explain how the Committee did it. At first, he demurred, saying this operation was as proprietary as the Microsoft plan for world domination, but eventually, I got him to talk.
It was simple,
Ziegler finally boasted. We
just tied McCain to the Biased Liberal Media. Everybody
knows that you're a bunch of unpatriotic left-wing jackals,
and so anybody that gets good press must be a threat to the
American way of life.
That would be the ability to buy elections, I foolishly wondered aloud.
See what I mean,
Ziegler said, then continued.
Now we're positioning the Shrub as the great patriot,
even if his Vietnam service consisted of being in a Guard
unit for the well-connected. And we've got another big
spin problem.
What was that?
At the start of 1999, it was an act of noble
patriotism, as expressed by the Republicans in Congress, to
want to make Al Gore president,
Ziegler explained.
And now the Committee has to make it sound unpatriotic to want Gore to be president, I interjected.
Precisely,
Ziegler concluded. Now you see why
it's unpatriotic to know about anything that happened
before last week.
AN UPDATE: The day after the Sunday column was written, Salida Mayor Jaime Lewis decided that Salida could have July 4 fireworks after all, being as we finally got some rain in this millennium.
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