ON THE AVENUES: Let's lift our voices for another verse of "Talking Seventh Inning Blues."

On the Avenues will move back to Thursdays, beginning next week.

World Cup soccer star Megan Repinoe's principled decision to refrain from singing the "The Star Spangled Banner" prompts one of those questions we ask the friendly 800-lb gorilla in the corner.

In short, why do we play the national anthem before a sporting event, but not prior to opening the doors at a frilly boutique, muffler shop or dive bar?

Imagine the plight of the 24-hour mini-mart, forever unable to to find an opportunity to play the national anthem, and settling instead on an endless loop of Lee Greenwood songs.

The 800-lb gorilla isn't finished.

Why do we insist on patriotic rituals attendant to the airing of the anthem alongside overt displays of nationalism merely to sanction throwing a football and shooting hoops, not to mention taking slap shots?

(As an aside, these questions were of relevance long before Repinoe chose silence and football’s Colin Kaepernick took a knee.)

According to writer Richard C. Crepeau in an essay from the mid-200s, the answer is that rote patriotism featuring "The Star Spangled Banner" became a feature of baseball games during World War II.

In 1940, with the fighting underway in earnest and America becoming more conscious of the possibility of war, there was increased talk of the need to hear the national anthem before all baseball games. This was suggested by The Sporting News in June, while at the same time the president of the International League called for the anthem to be played in U.S. league cities, as was already being done in Canadian cities. By 1941, the practice of playing the anthem before sporting events had achieved nearly universal status. At some games the pledge of allegiance was added, and, by 1941, "I Am an American Day" became a feature at major league parks.

It would be nice to say that all of this was due to pure patriotic expression, but of course much of it was created by PR-conscious owners who wanted to make sure that no one would question the patriotism of athletes who played games during World War II while others went off to serve their country. Four years of war, followed by the Cold War and the emergence of the American Empire, solidified the practice and made it into a national ritual.

Since September 11, 2001, another ritual has come into fashion in baseball. Nowadays the seventh inning stretch often is devoted to a commemorative performance of “God Bless America,” for which I’ll soon be suggesting an alternative with less proselytizing. As a long-ago Internet analyst once wrote:

“‘God Bless America’ rings a false note now, as it did when the song was first written (by Irving Berlin, 1939). Woody Guthrie, wrote the song ‘This Land is Your Land’ in 1940 after hearing Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’ one too many times.”

But first, since I’m perfectly willing to be the iconoclast in this particular hometown locker room, another question: Is it really necessary to bring religious devotion into the seventh inning stretch?

Or: Where is the imperative for a deity to “bless” America in the first place, quite apart from sports?

Perhaps a better question is this: If we deploy societal peer pressure to encourage a conditioned response by requiring people to participate in a ritual intended to remind them of a noteworthy event, aren’t we trivializing the event?

Shouldn't folks remember on their own?

To be sure, the events of September 11 are an indelible memory for current generations. Furthermore, and on a far less savory note, the invasive logic of the security state arising in America since 2001 has affected our lives more deeply than we realize.

Still, active memories of 9-11 will fade, just as recollections of human slavery's toll, the efficacy of vaccination and a merits of a living wage have disappeared into the mists of rear-view mirrors.

In my world, instead of mandating participation in sing-alongs during sporting events, a better way of understanding history’s lessons is to take an interest in historical facts. Some sweet day we all may rise as one from the bleachers, precariously cradling ours beers and brats, and listen as local actors and television luminaries read relevant passages from Howard Zinn.

Too few of us can sing well, anyway.

---

At this point the hackles of some readers surely are popping to life: “What -- don’t you love your country?”

Well, this depends on what the meaning of “love” is.

Speaking only for myself, I cannot regard the word “love” as a concept applicable to one among many nation-states into which I was serendipitously deposited by the fickle finger of fate. Rather, during my adult life the extent of my personal attachment to the concept of the United States of America has been conducted in a cerebral way, not in terms of blind allegiance.

(I do love my wife, but each year at tax time my feelings take a back seat to hard mathematics and fluency in bureaucratese; lacking both, I immediately hand the dossier to my accountant to be assured it's done right.)

Somewhat amazingly my teachers succeeded in convincing me that to be an American bears an intimate connection with an intellectual process, not an emotional one. I accept that a philosophy of governance came first, this being a rational undertaking incorporating thoughts, ideals and the historical record, not misty eyes, the fevered thumping of a chest or identification with a piece of cloth.

At the same time, my acknowledgment of this political construct does not imply acceptance of its imperfections. As Tina Turner might have asked, “what’s love got to do with it?” The Constitution as a document is a starting point, and it is to be regarded as a work in progress, not another gilded icon to be revered sans examination with a critical lens.

Because how could the nation's founders have devised perfection when Walt Disney had yet to be born?

All of these considerations matter owing to one’s personal conscience, and the minute we seek to align the conscience of the many individuals into the potential blunt instrument of the one, it’s time to be vigilant.

A brief survey of history reveals that soldiers on all sides have consistently marched off to war in the patriotic belief that God is on their side, and when one considers the catastrophic results of war, it should be obvious that this equation is irreparably skewed, as is any other pertaining to the abstract entity of nationhood -- especially as such abstractions come from hearts and not heads.

My views in this context understandably aren’t mainstream. I think love for other persons can be crazy, blind, binding and inexplicable. Beyond that, brains are there to be used, not lobotomized.

There weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, were there?

---

Returning to what it means to be a baseball fan, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" is the only patriotic song we've ever needed. For decades a staple of the seventh-inning stretch at ballparks large and small, from California to the New York island, this music was most delightfully defined by the late Harry Caray’s boisterous press box version.

Baseball possesses its own sort of quasi-religious faith; if not, why would Baltimore Orioles fans buy a single ticket in 2019?

For me the substitution of “God Bless America” for “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is like inserting an advertisement for organized religion where it doesn't belong, whatever the variety.

Of course I’ve nothing whatever against the old-school songwriter Israel Beilin (Irving Berlin), who died a famous, feted American in 1989 at the age of 101, this wonderful and welcoming country having provided a beacon to his family of immigrants escaping nasty pograms in Tsarist Russia.

Among Berlin’s hit songs I prefer “Cheek to Cheek” or even “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “God Bless America,” in which Berlin appealed directly to a simple love of country with groundless theism, prideful chest-thumping and a mawkish sentimentality, neither of which suits my cosmopolitan (read: cynical) internationalism.

---

Conversely, if we simply must have a 7th-inning tune other than the historically correct one, why not sing “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s far superior response to Berlin?

Why not sing it instead of the national anthem?

“This Land Is Your Land” is sublimely ecumenical, addressing the natural and human wonders of America without resorting to the divisiveness of those many supernatural elements.

I suppose the drawback is that when it comes to the imperative of emotional manipulation required by engorged corporate capitalists, Guthrie’s work isn’t as simplistic as Berlin’s schmaltzy paean to blind obedience.

Better yet, we might all wear “This Machine Kills Fascists” t-shirts whilst happily harmonizing from the third base side. It is through Guthrie’s legacy that this phrase has become immortalized. For many years my former brewing company used “These Machines Kill Fascists” as our motto, alongside a graphic of brewing vessels, and even today, with me being long gone from NABC, I never tire of telling the story of its origin.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-1967) was an iconic American folksinger. He was born in Oklahoma and came of age during the twin pre-WWII crises of national economic collapse (the Great Depression) and regional environmental catastrophe (the Dust Bowl).

Musically inclined from childhood, Guthrie followed the westward drift in pursuit of work, eventually landing in California alongside numerous other Okies. In doing so, he played a living, breathing part in novelist John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” and as a direct result of what Guthrie experienced during these troubled times in America, his political views evolved in progressive, leftist directions.

Many of Guthrie’s subsequent songs -- he wrote thousands -- chronicled the hardships of ordinary people, expressing empathy for their lot and support for what he saw as curatives: Worker rights, unionizing, and racial and gender equality.

Guthrie eschewed the feel-good and the flag-waving, both so often deployed to mask deprivation and trivialize injustice. His annoyance with “God Bless America” spoke to this feeling.

For all of Guthrie’s leftist tendencies, he remained a staunch patriot as well as a firm, committed believer in the potential of America, albeit a more idealistic and hopeful vision of the American experiment, one not defined entirely by wealth and privilege. The Second World War put his beliefs to the test, and he responded admirably.

It is instructive to remember that during World War II, the United States (a democracy -- of sorts) aligned with a hereditary monarchy (Great Britain) and the USSR’s Communist gulag against the military aggression of Germany, Italy and Japan. Such was the greater threat posed by fascism.

Guthrie viewed his music as an integral part of the war effort, and so he scrawled “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his acoustic guitar, meaning that music and ideas were as much weapons against fascism as guns and bullets. Guthrie enlisted in the Merchant Marine, and whenever performing, he used his own machine, one that he considered vital in killing fascists.

The same phrase was written on machinery in factories throughout the United States, as those millions of people in America’s industrial work force made a similar point: The person operating the machine that makes the supplies used to defeat fascism are helping to kill fascists, too.

Co-opting religious imagery to further the imperatives of a war machine driven by wealthy elites, or returning to the egg and reminding us that “we the people” might yet resemble universalism and in self-governance?

I appreciate Irving, but I vote for Woody -- now and always.

---

As a postscript, the lyrics.

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

---

Recent columns:

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: Challenges are forever, but downtown New Albany's food and drink purveyors keep on keeping on.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: "Pints&union, where the classic beer hits keep right on pouring."

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Where do we go from here?

May 6: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Ghosts within these stones, defiance in these bones (2018).

Big cheer for the Orioles: "Baltimore is the only major league franchise to regularly play 'This Land Is Your Land,' which it does at Friday home games."

I've been here before, most recently in 2013.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Talking Seventh Inning Blues (2010)

For a baseball fan, the only patriotic song that really matters is “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” for decades a staple of the seventh-inning stretch at ballparks large and small, from California to the New York island.

Unfortunately, the purloining of this sacred tradition commenced shortly after 9-11, reaching a predictable nadir during the annual playoffs and World Series, which prompted an exciting, new activity in my heretical household: Scrambling to be first to thumb the mute button, thus sparing us yet another performance of “God Bless America.”

Delightfully, the Orioles "get it" -- not often enough, but we must start somewhere.

Orioles Deliver a Seventh-Inning Message: This Song Is Their Song, by Ben Strauss (New York Times)

BALTIMORE — In the middle of the seventh inning of the Baltimore Orioles’ game against the Arizona Diamondbacks two Friday nights ago, the public-address announcer asked the crowd at Camden Yards to stand and celebrate America’s diversity. Three singers then stood on the first-base dugout and did a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” the famous folk song written by Woody Guthrie.

By the time the end of the third verse arrived — “All around me a voice was sounding, this land was made for you and me” — fans had joined in.

In a tradition that dates to the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, “God Bless America” is played in major league ballparks around the country, including in Baltimore, during the seventh-inning stretch of Sunday games. The song can also be heard during assorted holiday games, and the Yankees play the song during the seventh inning of every home game.

But Baltimore is the only major league franchise to regularly play “This Land Is Your Land,” which it does at Friday home games. And the song, long considered an anthem of the left because of its populist themes, is meant to be more than a Camden Yards singalong. It is a subtle, yet intentional, message from the Orioles’ management that at the intersection of sports and patriotism, one size does not have to fit all.

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Talking Seventh Inning Blues (2010).

ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Talking Seventh Inning Blues.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor. Today's July 4 rewind was originally published in November, 2010, and is dedicated to the Floyd County Health Department.

“‘God Bless America’ rings a false note now, as it did when the song was first written (by Irving Berlin, 1939). Woody Guthrie, wrote the song ‘This Land is Your Land’ in 1940 after hearing Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’ one too many times.” -- Democratic Wings

---

For a baseball fan, the only patriotic song that really matters is “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” for decades a staple of the seventh-inning stretch at ballparks large and small, from California to the New York island.

Unfortunately, the purloining of this sacred tradition commenced shortly after 9-11, reaching a predictable nadir during the annual playoffs and World Series, which prompted an exciting, new activity in my heretical household: Scrambling to be first to thumb the mute button, thus sparing us yet another performance of “God Bless America.”

I’ve nothing against the songwriter Irving Berlin, whose family escaped pogroms in Tsarist Russia by immigrating to America. It’s just that in appealing to what Berlin perceived as the common American’s simple love of country, he was prone to overt chest-thumping and mawkish sentimentality, neither of which suits my cosmopolitan internationalism.

Why can’t we sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the game, and save the Pat Robertson Bible College advertisement for his cable empire, where it belongs?

---

Conversely, if we must have a 7th-inning tune other than the historically correct one, why not sing Woody Guthrie’s far superior response, “This Land Is Your Land”?

It is sublimely ecumenical, addressing the natural and human wonders of America without resorting to the divisiveness of those many supernaturals. I suppose the drawback is that when it comes to the imperative of emotional manipulation required by moneyed corporate capitalists, Guthrie’s work isn’t as misty-eyed as Berlin’s schmaltzy paean to blind acceptance.

Better yet, we might all wear “This Machine Kills Fascists” t-shirts whilst happily harmonizing from the bleacher seats.

It is through Guthrie’s legacy that the phrase has become immortalized. For what seems like years, my company has used “These Machines Kill Fascists” as our motto, alongside a graphic of brewing vessels, and I never tire of telling the story of its origin.

Guthrie (1912-1967), the iconic American folksinger, was born in Oklahoma and came of age during the twin pre-WWII crises of national economic collapse (the Great Depression) and regional environmental catastrophe (the Dust Bowl).

Musically inclined from childhood, Guthrie followed the westward drift in pursuit of work, eventually landing in California alongside numerous other Okies. In doing so, he played a living, breathing part in novelist John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” and as a direct result of what Guthrie experienced during these troubled times in America, his political views evolved in progressive, leftist directions.

Many of Guthrie’s subsequent songs – he wrote thousands – chronicled the hardships of ordinary people, expressing empathy for their lot and support for what he saw as curatives: Worker rights, unionizing, and racial and gender equality. Guthrie eschewed the feel-good and the flag-waving, both so often deployed to mask deprivation and trivialize injustice. His annoyance with “God Bless America” spoke to this feeling.

For all of Guthrie’s leftist tendencies, and in stark contrast with the way that today’s right-wingers typically malign them, Guthrie remained a staunch patriot as well as a firm, committed believer in the potential of America, albeit a more idealistic and hopeful vision of the American experiment, one not defined entirely by wealth and privilege. The Second World War put his beliefs to the test, and he responded admirably.

---

It is instructive to remember that during World War II, the United States (a democracy -- of sorts) aligned with a hereditary monarchy (Great Britain) and the USSR’s Communist gulag against the military aggression of Germany, Italy and Japan. Such was the greater threat perceived in fascism.

Guthrie viewed his music as an integral part of the war effort, and so he scrawled “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his acoustic guitar, meaning that music and ideas were as much weapons against fascism as guns and bullets. Guthrie enlisted in the Merchant Marine, and whenever performing, he used a machine that he considered vital in killing fascists.

The same phrase was written on machinery in factories throughout the United States, as those millions of people in America’s industrial work force made a similar point: The person operating the machine that makes the supplies used to defeat fascism are helping to kill fascists, too.

With “These Machines Kill Fascists,” my company honors Guthrie. As machines, the brew kettles, mash tuns and fermenters we use to make craft beer are our weapons against fascism in the beer world, where there are aggressive multi-national industrial brewers such as AB-InBev (as when shopping at Wal-Mart, your Bud money goes overseas, folks), and smaller, local, anti-fascist entities like us.

One of them better symbolizes Guthrie’s view of the American Dream.

If one cares to read more into it, interpretation surely is a privilege whenever listening to song lyrics. Speaking personally, my leftist proclivities are well documented, although at the same time, while historical accuracy demands that we use the phrase as originally rendered, I’d probably prefer killing “fascism” rather than “fascists.” Beyond that, I remain convinced that daily craft beer production indeed kills fascists.

Drinking some of it never hurts, either.

“Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.”

Of nut jobs and nut jobbery, American-style.

I see that another of our born-and-bred American nut jobs has wreaked havoc with bullets. It’s like an assembly line that never stops running.

Before the verbal shelling begins, this is not to suggest that rhetoric alone, whether left, right or middle, is responsible for nut jobbery, only that American soil is an eternally fertile incubator for nut jobs.

Worse, like Lear’s lifeline of a Fool, we seem to crave the presence of nut jobs among us in ways that do not bode well for the future of public safety, or personal sanity.

Permit me to explain my viewpoint.

In other Western countries, nut jobs are just as prevalent as here, but lacking freely available ballistics – and more importantly, denied an accessible soapbox owing to societal indifference – they soon become reabsorbed into the hinterlands from whence they came.

Indigenous nut jobs hang out at (for instance) Norwegian or Maltese dive bars, pulling their beards, waving their arms and muttering a lot, and if particularly entertaining, they find that bored patrons will buy them drinks, treating their conspiratorial gibberish and nonsensical ramblings as part of the nightly floor show, and nothing more.

In America, nut jobs are oddly venerated, somehow emerging as role models in the strangest and highest places, ranging from the televangelist’s pulpit (Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker) to the vice-presidency (Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle), and excluding neither major league sportsmen (Dennis Rodman, Al Davis) nor captains of industry (Charles and David Koch).

Existing below this somewhat rarified level of tabloid nut job notoriety are the garden variety, localized nut jobs, who at one time in the nation’s innocent, Mayberry RFD period of post-war stolidity, may actually have been as harmless as Otis and today’s Euro-cranks, but now increasingly are feared (and rightly so) due to the easy availability of weapons of significant, if not mass, destruction.

Even more bizarre, only in America do we deign to speak to this nut job fringe of miscreants as though they mattered, and in vaguely political terms, rather than consigning nut jobs to their rightful place on the ends of bars where the spittoons used to stand, forcing me to conclude that our degraded political parties – one in particular – actively desires their votes.

In fact, America’s twisted history offers dozens of examples of pre-emptive nut job cajolery, almost always emanating from those of its kissing cousins on the right, and generally meant to counter the widespread assumption among conservative elements that unless they take the initiative to blatantly lie first, unacceptable numbers of ordinary, aimless nut jobs just might fall into the dreaded hands of leftists, socialists, miscegenationists, feminists and homosexualists, and stage a second coming of the Bolshevik fury, with Red Massacres, rapes, art exhibits and the like.

Even worst: If not properly frightened into a state of amok anti-liberalism, nut jobs might take to committing crimes against property, not people – and then what?

That’s why the historical record of armed, frothing, left-wing nut jobs takes up vastly less space in the nation's Big Chief Tablet of a hate crime ledger than the population of heavily armed survivalists in a single Idaho county (pick one, doesn't matter which, and the ratio surely will hold true).

One of them may already have been elected Senator out there.

Verily, we just don’t do left-wing nut jobbery very well in America, and at this exact moment, I’m finding no consolation whatsoever in grasping this truth. Like violence and extremism, nut jobbery is a trait that baffles me. Too bad we can't do something about it. I've often though it must be constitutionally protected.

Do we ever learn?

Wait – don’t answer that question.

It's a thinking man's game ... and country, for that matter.

After listening to Patti LaBelle brutalize "The Star Spangled Banner" last night prior to Game 4 lf the World Series in Philly, I got to wondering how the tradition originated.

Why do we play the national anthem before a sporting event, and not (for instance) prior to opening the doors at the pub?

Is it just because the pub is socialist?

Why indulge in an overt display of nationalism in order to sanction the throwing of a football or the shooting of a basket?

The explanation I eventually on-line found strikes me as plausible.

The Sports Song of Patriotism, by Richard C. Crepeau.

First, it is important to note that there was no official national anthem until the 1930s. During World War I, however, President Wilson declared the "Star Spangled Banner" the unofficial national anthem, and the intense display of public patriotism during this period led to it being played on many public occasions.

It is generally accepted that its first appearance during a sporting event was the 1918 World Series. To demonstrate major league patriotism, baseball teams had the players march in formation during pre-game military drills while carrying bats on their shoulders. During the seventh-inning stretch of game one, when the band spontaneously began to play the "Star Spangled Banner," the Cubs and Red Sox players stood at attention facing the centerfield flag pole. The crowd sang along and applauded when the singing ended.

Given this reaction in Chicago, the "Star Spangled Banner" was played during the seventh-inning stretch for the next two games. When the Series moved to Boston, the great theatrical Red Sox owner Harry Frazee pumped up the show biz: He brought in a band, and the song was played before the start of each game.

When the war ended, the song continued to be played, but only on special occasions when a band was present — such as opening day, special holidays or the World Series. On opening day in Washington, D.C., it was played before the president of the United States, and local politicians in other cities learned to participate in the
events.

The "Star Spangled Banner" was finally declared the official national anthem in 1931. Even though by 1934 some ballparks had public address systems, it still was not played at every game. The coming of war in the late 1930s changed all of that. During the 1939-40 National Hockey League season, the Canadian anthem was played at games in Canadian cities as Canada was already at war. Then the practice spread to Madison Square Garden and from there it was transferred from hockey to baseball.

In 1940, with the fighting underway in earnest and America becoming more conscious of the possibility of war, there was increased talk of the need to hear the national anthem before all baseball games. This was suggested by The Sporting News in June, while at the same time the president of the International League called for the anthem to be played in U.S. league cities, as was already being done in Canadian cities. By 1941, the practice of playing the anthem before sporting events had achieved nearly universal status. At some games the pledge of allegiance was added, and, by 1941, "I Am an American Day" became a feature at major league parks.

It would be nice to say that all of this was due to pure patriotic expression, but of course much of it was created by PR-conscious owners who wanted to make sure that no one would question the patriotism of athletes who played games during World War II while others went off to serve their country. Four years of war, followed by the Cold War and the emergence of the American Empire, solidified the practice and made it into a national ritual.

I began this essay by noting that Patti LaBelle brutalized the national anthem last evening. By this observation, I’m not implying that she did a grave disservice to the song in the sense of treading atop a revered symbol of Americanism. Rather, I believe she fouled it musically. For me, that’s enough. It’s equally hard for me to imagine a serviceable version of the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” played with accordion and spoons … though Weird Al’s probably done it.

Since September 11, 2001, another ritual has come into fashion in baseball. The seventh inning stretch, once defined by Harry Caray’s boisterous version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (arguably baseball’s real national anthem) is now taken up more often than not by another standing observance as “God Bless America” is performed.

Is it necessary to bring devotion into the seventh inning stretch? Why must there be a God to “bless” America? But a better question is this: If you require people to participate in a ritual so that they’re reminded of an event, aren’t you trivializing the event?

I’d venture to say that for current generations of living Americans, the events of September 11 are an indelible memory. To be sure, someday that memory will fade, just as the memory of slavery has disappeared from the rear view window of far too many conservative apologists. Either way, is being required to listen to a song during a baseball game do anything at all to explain what actually happened, and what it means?

At this point, a reader somewhere is asking, “What – don’t you love your country?”

Depends on what you mean by “love.”

I don’t use the word “love” to describe my thoughts about a country into which I was serendipitously deposited by the fickle finger of fate. My personal attachment to the concept of the USA as a nation has been conducted in a cerebral way for more years than I care to remember, and not in terms of blind allegiance.

That’s because my teachers actually succeeded in convincing me that to be an American bears an intimate connection with an intellectual process, not an emotional one. A philosophy of governance came first, and it is a rational undertaking that incorporates thoughts, ideals and the historical record, not misty eyes, the fevered thumping of a chest or identification with a piece of cloth.

To me, all of this matters because of conscience. A brief survey of history reveals that soldiers on all sides consistently march off to war in the patriotic belief that God is on their side, and when one considers the catastrophic results of war, it should be obvious that this equation is irreparably skewed, as is any other pertaining to the abstract entity of nationhood, especially as such abstractions come from the heart and not the head.

My views in this context aren’t popular. At the same time, I wouldn’t legislate these rituals out of existence. My job is to persuade you.

That’s the very essence of being American, isn’t it?