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Why Don't We All Celebrate Patriots' Day?

Why Don’t We Celebrate Patriots’ Day?
- J. Boulevard

As we approach our annual celebration of July 4th , let’s consider the word “patriot.” The misuse of patriot by the radical rightwing neo-conservatives begs an extremely serious question: is this the most misunderstood word in American English?
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2003) defines patriot as “one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests.” Okay, I got it. But, can’t we constructively criticize its authority and interests? Is that un-patriotic? Whatever happened to freedom of speech and the First Amendment?
Patriot evolved from Greek and Latin roots, pater (father), into the Middle French patriote (compatriot), and became the French patria (lineage) and patrie (native country). It entered the English language in 1605 during King James’ reign. By 1726 the word had become an “ism” and “patriotism” (“the love for or devotion to one’s country”) entered our lexicon. In 1757 we formally gained the adjective “patriotic.” Notice how patriot’s linguistic evolution ramped-up to the American Revolution? Notice how the word derives from an age of patrimony, back when men wore the pants (and wigs and ruffled collars) and kings propagated unchallenged views.
Today, what’s so patriotic about depleting our nation’s treasury and engaging in reckless foreign wars that profit only our leaders’ cronies? Weren’t reckless foreign wars the problem in 1776 for the British? (Of course, the British fought to maintain a colony whereas America is fighting in Iraq to establish a colony.) Like the British army, our soldiers are now fighting a rag-tag guerilla army, and like the British “Red Coats” marching in formation into ambushes by friendly Indians and American revolutionary patriots, our convoys of Hummers are driving into ambushes by Iraqi “insurgents” and “foreign freedom fighters,” also called “terrorists.”
Why are we repeating that past of a previous King George? Is this serving the American people’s interests, the public interest, or only the Bush administration’s private interests in awarding pork-barrel war contracts to cronies like Halliburton? What’s so patriotic about invading a foreign country on false pretenses in the name of spreading democracy, while all the time it’s a “get-richer-quicker” scheme for the administration’s cronies to seize Iraq’s oil and give American taxpayers the bill, now up to $8 trillion borrowed dollars that we primarily owe to Japan and China? Our $8 trillion dollar deficit is bigger than all the deficits in history from 1776 to 2000, added together! The Bush administration has transferred our public wealth, (past, present, and future) to private interests, in historic proportions and not without historic repercussions.
That’s the legacy the “patriots” in the Bush administration are leaving to us and our children: an $8 trillion dollar and counting I.O.U. to foreign creditors. They funnel the eight trillion to private accounts and their children will have trust funds; we get the bill and our children inherit our horrible national debt to pay-off to foreign creditors. Imagine how our children will regard us, and the “patriots of the Bush administration”? What happened to the neo-cons promised “New American Century”? Instead, in the twenty-first century we got what economists and political scientists are calling “The Chinese Century.” And we owe the Chinese, big-time. Imagine our country’s current unchallenged greatness gone on a global scale.
Globalism, the euphemistic buzzword of multi-national corporations, is the new world order. This new world order selectively regards national laws in the same way the Bush administration selectively regards Congressional and judicial and international oversight with his 750+ signing statements. Their argument is: it’s for the greater good. Whose greater good? Again, private interests masquerade as public policy. Bush’s government has encouraged a class war between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” It’s a concerted effort to establish an international oligarchy. Isn’t that what our European ancestors fled from when they came to America?
Bush has even globalized and outsourced the spying on Americans. A Brussels-based banking consortium, called SWIFT, data-mines the financial records of all Americans. Do you feel more secure knowing that a private European banking consortium is sorting through your financial records with their proprietary system, all in the name of domestic security? When The New York Times reported this story, Vice-President Cheney said the stories were treasonous and endangered national security. (Some say, when an administration threatens to do that, the media must be getting this one right.) Yet, ever since 9/11, Bush has told us he would go after the terrorists’ source of funding. They’re global too. The problem is, now Bush and company seem to suspect every American of being a terrorist. What’s so patriotic about engaging in wholesale disregard of the Fourth Amendment by spying on domestic citizens’ phone calls, emails, and banking transactions? Is this the new global world order?
What’s so patriotic about giving-up our freedoms to fight Bush’s bogey-man, Osama Bin Laden? Why doesn’t Bush make him give up his freedom? Or is that because Bush needs Bin Laden, just like cops need robbers, to continue his crime of all time robbing the American public of its financial future and the Iraqui people of their oil. Multi-national corporate influence on governments, dubbed (pardon the verb) globalism, charades in the name of patriotism. But, to whom? SWIFT? Halliburton? British Petroleum? Exxon/Mobil?
Now, a breaking news report by Bloomberg on the Friday before a four-day July 4th weekend, cites a June 23, 2006 legal filing in New York federal court that claims the NSA asked AT&T to help it set-up a domestic call monitoring operation seven months before 9/11. This changes everything. This destroys the Bush administration’s arguments about wholesale domestic surveillance being necessary to fight the war on terror and reveals an Orwellian police-state since pre/9-11, 2001 wherein “Big Brother is watching you.” How patriotic is supporting the creation of a police-state?
Confusing patriotism with private interests and private power points to the dangerous expansion of executive power being perpetrated by the Bush White House. During the Watergate era, President Nixon invoked his mantra of “executive privilege” and claimed he was untouchable. Now, we have President Bush declaring, not so eloquently, “I’m the decider.” Is he? The megalomania of King George: isn’t that what our founding fathers, real patriots, would call it? The original idea of American democracy was government serving the people, not the people serving the government.
Why don’t we all celebrate Patriots’ Day? We all remember that day, don’t we? In Maine and Massachusetts it’s a legal holiday, the third Monday in April, that commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775 – “the shot heard round the world” as the American Revolution began. But, wait a minute; aren’t these patriotic New Englanders commemorating extreme complaints and criticism of a government that was serving foreign private interests and not the American public interest? What’s so patriotic about that?

posted by J. Boulevard @ 8:14 AM