And meanness?
The Fuck-your-feelings crowd is all about theirs. All the time. And America, fuck, yeah.
But what besides flag-waving and chest-thumping and damp-eyed singing of Lee Greenwood’s anthem does America mean to them?
Created equal?
Hanging together or hanging separately?
E pluribus unum?
Equal justice for all?
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?
Not damned likely.
It doesn’t seem MAGA holds any values more aspirational than every man for himself, cultural grievance, and not seeing white dominance slip. Their America is more about shibboleths and empty symbols, about tribes and owning the libs. In Jesus’ name. “The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs” (if you know the reference).
Everyone else? Fuck ’em.
I posited to two vets over lunch recently that this country holds up the military as America’s best. Service. Duty. Sacrifice. Everyone has a job. Everyone gets fed, housed and clothed, medical care. Leave no team member behind. A code of honor: you watch my back, I watch yours.
But inside the fence line only. Step outside into the civilian world and America is dog-eat-dog. Taxes are theft. I’ve got mine, screw you.
I asked, “What’s wrong with this picture?”
The vets, puzzled, shook their heads. For good reason.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) opposes President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness proposal.
Apparently, asking Americans to help out fellow Americans for the benefit of America is un-American. Legally and morally wrong, says Cotton.
Hell, Tom, this American paid decades worth of taxes to fund tens of thousands of miles of interstate highways I’ve never driven. And for a court system I’ve never accessed. My parents and grandparents’ taxes paid for rural electrification even though they always lived in cities. America is a better place for it. For everyone. Your point is?
How about Sen. Mike Lee, Republican of Utah. whose goal is to tear out Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by the roots and make the USA a meaner, poorer place where Americans too aged and worn down to keep toiling die sooner and in poverty?
Everything we’ve added since the 1930s is government overreach, in Lee’s view.
I tweeted in reply: “Mike, I kinda like knowing hurricanes & tornadoes are coming my way & using GPS to find my way, that my hamburger won’t kill me & produce grown via New Deal aqueducts is trucked over Eisenhower interstates & my plane won’t crash into yours & I won’t get polio.” I could add much more to that list, of course.
Is making the U.S. a grimmer place where life is solitary, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” what MAGA Republicans dream of? Because America can no longer afford Americans? Fuck, yeah?
And fuck the Ukrainians too? Because America (its spotty record nothwithstanding) no longer attempts even the pretense of pulling for underdogs fighting for survival against tyranny?
What feels the fuck-your-feelings have.
The only thing American about them are their birth certificates.