Shooting a minnow in a barrel with a grin-ade? Oh, Mr. Livesay, I’m so sorry for you! Harvey Rifkin, one of the wisest men in town, needs no defense, so I make no remark on the excellence of his editorial, “The symbolism and substance of patriotism” (Oct. 12.) I mention only that your cramped outlook can’t understand any of it. Talk about goofy? Bobby, you open your trap door and side windows to public revelation by your “Unpatriotic insult” (Oct. 14.) Like a starving macaque trying to defend its feeding area with teeth, your attitude insults the very idea of adult patriotism. You’ve bonded with red-shirts marching like ring-tailed lemurs toward Fascism, all blindly atavistic.
Ideas set in concrete, heads buried in sand, feet in air you march, kicking and steaming. Pity the poor country your wishes ever get to govern. Your real leaders, unknown to you, don’t give a fig for your blind patriotism except to use it for attacks our own people and on yet some other country to fatten the self-serving, Military-Industrial Complex and the more uncaring members of our richest Two-Percent. The international bankers and transnational, corporate executives lick their chops awaiting your self-destructive victory. Ha-ha, they laugh, we’ve bagged ‘em again. Tie the cord, back into the bush we go!
If you could understand Planetary Patriotism and put on a blue-green tee-shirt, it would help you distinguish real Americanism from narrow, absolutistic, authoritarian, cross-eyed, unbalanced nationalism. I fear you and for our country’s near future. You silly reactionaries have no creative ideas of your own, no strategies, no philosophy. Nothing but the threadbare, regressively rhetorical tactics your Pied Pipers keep playing to you. Onward to yesterday. Upward to nowhere worth life or loyalty.
Were I no more than names you pin on me, I would gladly shout, “Yes, I’m for communal solidarity,” and raise the genuine Red flag of honest revolution. But, I don’t want to kill you, whatever your lack of spiritual humanism may deserve. I don’t want Socialism or Communism. I want you whipped at the polls. You don’t deserve to win even if you pick up enough seats to thwart democracy for another two years. By winning, you’ll lose more than you’ve ever understood, your whole life long.
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