I used to feel something on the 4th of July, some kind of resonance other than the fact that my maternal grandfather and two of my friends have birthdays today. When I was younger, I actually felt something about being “an American,” something that not even carrying the genetic memory of centuries of oppression nor the education I grew up with could completely shake. I couldn’t necessarily explain it at the time other than in the platitudes I often grew up with.
It was not unlike how I grew up with religion; in retrospect, I understand that’s precisely what it was. Patriotism, nationalism, whatever you want to call it–it’s all religion, with the whitewashed history of the place you were fortunate enough to be born as the scripture and the deity being the pride at not being someone or somewhere else. Regardless of who I was and what I knew, I still clung to that, maybe because it was something to keep me from being too angry or too cynical.
Who am I kidding? It was a childish thing, something that took a little longer for me to put away than anything else.
Nationalism now rings completely hollow, the celebrations and rituals increasingly desperate and devoid of meaning other than as opiates to make us feel useful or special, love of country little more than invocations articulating an increasingly-desperate need to cover up the fact that everything we have, everything we are is a celebration of our selfishness and myopia, and even the excuses of “I’m not celebrating my country; I’m just celebrating the chance to stay with my family” or some such are just exhausting sidesteps.
[time’s up, but I’m going to continue:]
The pastiche culture of the United States is forever attached to the lecherous and exploitative colonial nature of the dominant social paradigm, and because of that it will never truly have any value other than “this is what we stole.” Its moral bankruptcy found its apotheosis in the past twenty years, in which people who had the information and inclination to examine, expose, and repudiate it instead stuck their heads in the sand and retreated into memories of a time in which its excesses and glory came without the immediate reminder of their costs.
I’m neither here for it, nor do I have any interest in humoring it.
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