Superpatriotism

I've been slowly sorting through audiobooks that I stole decades ago, and continue to amass. Because, I'm a packrat.

In the course of this endeavor, I came across some recorded talks by Michael Parenti. He was a rabble rouser that passed away at the beginning of this year. He gave a talk titled Superpatriotism in Boulder, CO in August, 1988. Funny, still pertinent today, even more so.

"The super patriots love America for its history and culture. Again, I'm really skeptical of that because it's my impression that they know very little about American history and culture, or rather much of it is rather unappreciated by them."

It seems to me it's inevitable. One who is superficial enough to 'love America' under all circumstances, one is lazy enough to delve deep into what this country is all about, the good and the bad.

"Furthermore, there's a terrible side to our history that's really not all that lovable."

But this is irrelevant to the superpatriot. It's all about the symbolism, not about the content.

Another interesting tidbit from this endeavor. I have the text from the talk, which is not readily accessible on the Internet. I pulled the transcript from one of the many youtube videos, could not do so without the timestamps. I asked Perplexity to remove the timestamps, it did, but was imperfect. Left lines like the one below.

"sits main substance is militarism the pacifist in political scientists and activist ... sgood pacifists are all not passive they're pacifists and they're quite active the pacifist and activist milford"

Put it to my local model, and it was much cleaner.

So then I asked Claude to find lines similar to the provocative one above. I don't know if seeing the computer actually use the browser will ever get old.

What follows is Claude's version of what would be provocative....

⚡ Claude's Provocative Cuts ⚡

Here are some other lines from the transcript that carry a similarly sharp, provocative edge:

On the bigotry lurking within "patriotism":

"I would bet that these super patriots don't particularly love whole sectors of the American public, especially the more bigoted super patriots in fact rather dislike to associate with or have any positive identification with certain people because of reasons of ethnicity, religion, race, and class."

On "loving the flag" as hollow abstraction:

"The flag, as you know, is a piece of rag on a stick, and it's got colors and things, and if you love that flag and that flag's a symbol of your country, it's a kind of love that doesn't seem to have any real content to it."

On what super patriots actually mean by "number one":

"The best I can tell from the super patriotic utterances is that it gets down to two things: wealth with no concern as to how the wealth is distributed, how is used and what affects; and military power with no concern again with how that military power is used and for whose interests that it might serve at home and abroad."

On super patriot corporate leaders:

"Super patriot corporate leaders have taken to abandoning our communities and exporting our jobs and bringing factories off to Taiwan in Argentina and South Korea where they can work for slave labor wages, which when you think about it is not the way for super patriots to act really."

On the inversion of morality:

"Super patriotic morality is an inversion of individual morality. For the super patriot, the nation state is something more than an instrumental value... The state becomes an entity of force unto itself, a powerfully abstracted symbol that claims our ultimate and total loyalty."

On class interests masked by flag-waving:

"One of the functions of super patriotism is to blur the differences in class interests in order to convince us that we're all in the same boat: rich and poor alike... In truth ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters on almost every issue we the people are not in the same boat with the big financiers and companies."

On super patriots' obsession with "selflessness":

"We can't be like the super patriots; they're selfless. They want to die, they want to kill, they want to die for their country... they're selfless because they never worry about the quality about life."

That last one especially has the same biting irony as the line you love — it flips a supposedly noble virtue (selflessness) into a critique of uncritical militarism.