Meme Destruction

Asshats use memes as weapons. Destroying those memes is my avocation. Take patriotism: Love of country. America's founders hated their country. They overthrew it. Loving a country is a sucker's game - can a country love you back? How would it do that? Is it doing it? If not, why throw good love after bad?

Most who use the patriotism cudgel are right wingers. Right wingers are generally unabashed in their hatred of gays, lesbians, undocumented workers (I refuse to call God's product illegal, on ethical and esthetic grounds), liberals, atheists, Muslims, transgendered persons and a host of others . Therefore, it is clear that the PEOPLE of America are not what they love. It's fair to assume that neither the dirt nor the topography nor the contiguous shape of the nation make their hearts throb. So, WHAT DO THEY LOVE? I've not found one who can answer, so I propose liberty.

I love and prize and value liberty and human dignity, and I hate my country to the degree that it deprives any person of those values - and love it ONLY to the degree that it protects and defends those values. Nations are created by

people to serve people, not the reverse. JFK was full of crap. NEVER ask what you can do for your country. Ask, rather, what your country is doing for you. It was created for the express purpose of serving you, and exists for no other legitimate reason. We the people are sovereign and government is our servant - not vice versa. The right wing flips this concept - enshrined in the writings of our nation's framers - on it's head with their pushy, showy, craven, noisy, pathological country-love. They need to get a room.

Military service is another meme right wingers use to get a moral leg up in debates. They are firmly convicined - ask them if you doubt me - that patriotism (pathological and noisy country-love) is the reason they, or those whom they emulate and admire, served. But a quick perusal of military advertising puts the lie to this meme.

The armed services spend recruitment dollars - and manage to fill their alloted slots - on advertisements which offer potential recruits one or more of the following:

1. Adventure: The opportunity to fly a plane, or to do "more before 9am than most folks do all day."

2. Money for college.

3. A career.

4. Manhood - the promise that the service in question (typically the Marine Corp) will "make a man of you."

Not one commercial currently airing has ever used patriotism - pathological country-love - as a selling point. It IS true that once a fellow is in, the services instruct him to believe that it was love of country - not failure to prepare for a better career - which caused his enlistment. And it's a tasty lie to swallow, so it goes down easy, readily embraced and parroted.

To those who toss the ersatz trump card of military service on the table, I say this: You should thank me for MY service, as it was I who prepared for a career. It was I who paid the taxes. It was I who bought your panties and pastries and gave you socialized medicine and a bunk to sleep in and military manuals to read and obey in search of your masculine nature.

I hope you found the manood you sought, as you will rightly thank ME for MY service if you did. And if you wish me to thank you for yours, do please show me the payroll checks which you did not cash - because if, in addition to taking the food and housing and clothing and medical care and education which I and my fellow taxpayers provided, you also cashed the paychecks we gave you, then you've been fully compensated for your service. It is I who have not been thanked for mine - and I am standing by. This is your opportunity to thank me for paying so that the military could provide you with whatever it was you sought: a career, masculine respect, adventure, or just the opportunity to kill brown wherever it is found.

Two memes destroyed in right at eight hundred words - and I, your humble servant, am standing by in a ready state, eager to destroy for you any pernicious meme, from right, left or center, which the lazy and shiftless are given to parrot by the think-tank worm-tongues who serve the corporatocracy - creating memes for dullards and dimwits to embrace and verbally defecate into America's moral and intellectual ideasphere. C'mon, c'mon, puddemup, puddemup. Gimme a meme and watch me bat it out of the park. I was born to kill lies. It feeds me to do so.