The loony left often complains that the loony right calls them unpatriotic but it”s hard to be sympathetic to their complaints when they do everything possible to support it. That article is so filled with rubbish and simpleton talk that it”s hard to know where to start in. It”s rare to find so perfect an example of a stereotype but that woman is the perfect example of a leftist loony toon.
Gee, you come home from your “European idyll” to live in a small town where 80 of the 319 adults are military veterans and you”re shocked (shocked!) that the town might be slightly conservative? Then when your kid comes home with a flier about a Bible class, you panic and call the ACLU? This has to be a parody right? Holy shit, if I had come home with a flier about Satanism when I was 6, I”m pretty sure my parents wouldn”t have panicked and called Jerry Falwell. WTF? At what point did you become so terrified of your own ability to parent that you had to decide to call the ACLU when you find out that a conservative school in a conservative town might be interested in having a time release Bible class? And you”re surprised the principal doesn”t like you any more? Could you be anymore clueless?
Then this little bit comes along:
- Politically, Narrowsburg is red dot in a blue state. It is not named for any small-town frame of mind. . .
God, the condescension is disgusting, implying that a small-town frame of mind is narrow while her European idyll, the war in Iraq is wrong, Bush is Hitler frame of mind is wide open. Unbelievable. Alanis Morissette had a better grasp of irony than this woman and that”s saying something. The rest of the article is just so much drivel. She tells her son our president started a war with Iraq depriving all those innocent Iraqis of their livelihood, ignoring all the difficult stuff like UN resolutions, people being thrown into wood chippers, Saddam gassing his own people. She”s ashamed of something she calls “the patriot-ization of her son” and is clearly thrilled it only lasts a summer. Then she wraps it up with this:
- How soon childish national pride is shed, I sometimes think now, and not a little wistfully. Only once it was gone did I realize that, after our initial discomfort, my husband and I had begun to see our son”s patriotism as a badge of innocence. His faith was a reminder to us that the reason we are devastated by the war in Iraq and the Bush presidency is that we too love America. We too want to believe in its potential for good and brotherhood.
Patriotism as a badge of innocence, worn by those who just don”t know any better. Forgive me if I find it hard to believe she loves America. After putting up 2000 words or so in an attempt to belittle small town America, military service, Bush, Iraq, and the Pledge of Allegiance, I”m just not buying it.
If this wasn”t Salon, I”d be sure this was just a really super parody. The ACLU, the self-satisfaction, the smugness. Instead, I just feel sorry for that child. He”s got a tough road in front of him if he”s ever going to see the world in anything but black and white. People like his mother sneer at religion but she kneels at the altar of one herself. He”ll have a difficult time ever convincing her that thinking for oneself and finding out that issues are almost always more complex than they first appear are attributes of a truly fine mind. Orthodoxy is always the hardest belief to fight.