Independence Day and the Notion of Pride

We can do better than this.

Curmie has posted here not infrequently on the 4th of July, usually with some commentary on the significance of Independence Day.  One of his personal favorites of the genre comes from 2020, when he riffed on the opening sequence of the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom.”  Our hero, Will McEvoy (Jeff Daniels) is on a three-person panel in some sort of academic setting.  They are asked by “Jenny,” a sophomore at whatever university is hosting the event, to “say what makes America the greatest country in the world.” 

After the other two panelists respond with slogans—“diversity and opportunity” and “freedom and freedom, so let’s keep it that way”—McEvoy responds, “The New York Jets.”  Even a Jets fan like Curmie laughed at the absurdity of that one.  (At least back when that show was filmed, the Jets didn’t completely suck, which they have for most of Curmie’s adult life.) After another evasion, the camera cuts to a woman near the back of the auditorium.  We don’t know who she is yet, but it’s MacKenzie McHale, McEvoy’s ex-girlfriend and soon to be his new executive producer.  She holds up a sign that says, “It’s not.”  She then flips the sign over and writes something else: “But it can be.”

There are 11 seconds of silence, at least in terms of diegetic sound.  There’s another roundabout response, and the moderator demands “a human moment.”  The camera cuts back to McHale, holding the “It’s not” sign.  A moment later, McEvoy blurts out, “It’s not the greatest country in the world, professor.  That’s my answer.”  The follow-up goes on for three minutes.  You can check out the link above or read the transcript, but there are two things Curmie wants to highlight.  There’s the litany of rankings, addressed to “sorority girl”:

... there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.

There are a couple of exaggerations in there, but no more than in the average political speech.  More importantly, this isn’t an indictment of America, simply a warning about allowing patriotism to morph into jingoism and what might now be called hallucinatory rhetoric.  

The other thing to point out is that the sign is both an insistence on truth and a symbol of hope.  “But it can be” is a rallying cry, a call to arms (in the metaphorical sense, at least).  

At the risk of sounding like a Monty Python routine, Curmie adds a third point: in the opening moments of a left-leaning series that aired during the Obama administration, the central character yearns for the days when “We sure used to be” the greatest country in the world.  True, the litany of attributes—“We waged wars on poverty, not poor people,” for example—bespeaks a liberal mindset.  But the desire to return to the glories of the past sure sounds a lot like a desire to “Make America Great Again.”

How sadly ironic, then, that the slogan is most associated with an octogenarian toddler with no impulse control, a pathological inability to accept responsibility for his own actions, and a track record that includes stealing from a charity, sexual assault, and wholesale financial shenanigans ranging from garden variety grift to de facto selling pardons to people who really are “the worst of the worst.”  All the things that any normal President from either party would have orchestrated for the country’s 250th anniversary celebration are gone, replaced by ultra-partisan posturing and a level of ego-centrism that would make Narcissus himself blush. 

Plus, of course, there’s the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving over of the Rose Garden, the vulgar and frankly embarrassing UFC extravaganza that destroyed even more of the White House lawn, the totally botched reflecting pool project, that ridiculous “state fair” farce… Curmie would go on, but he’s trying to keep this essay shorter than the Mahābhārata.

None of what Curmie is discussing here comes under the heading of actual policy decisions.  Curmie has disagreed with virtually everything this POTUS has done, but he had plenty of reservations about the policies of a lot of 47’s predecessors, too.  Curmie grants, however, that all of those guys were at least trying to do the best thing for the country, however much he would have preferred a different approach.  Not so, Dear Leader.  He has never cared about anyone or anything but himself and perhaps a small circle of sycophantic admirers or fellow billionaire hucksters.  If saying any of this makes Curmie “deranged,” then so fucking be it. 

Curmie is angry that a celebration he’d been looking forward to—let’s face it, I’m not going to be around for #300—has been derailed by the hubristic and incompetent machinations of the worst President in the history of the country.  Yes, angry.  Curmie is not a nationalist, but he does think he qualifies as a patriot.  Having spent at least three months in each of three other countries, he’s still going to consider himself lucky to be from the US.  That would be, of course the real US, the one that countless World Cup fans have encountered to their amazement: the place where foreigners are welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the locals; where neighbors help each other out; where the question isn’t whether to give to charities, but to which ones. 

This is not the America inhabited by Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or Mike Johnson.  But it’s where most of us live, irrespective of where (or if) we worship, who our favorite basketball team is, or even who we voted for last time out.  There are those who want to take that America away from us, and they think they have defeated us, or soon will.  Curmie responds (with a tip of the hat to Johnny Carson): Not so fast, Semiquincentennial-Breath.  We are not our government.  The real America is out there, embodied in people like Major Jason Watson, like Leen Hijaz, like the citizens of Curmie’s much-beloved former hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, whose embrace of the Algerian World Cup team using their city as a home base made international headlines.

But that takes us to another point.  Curmie is proud of Lawrence, not because of the notoriety, but because they, my former neighbors, did something right.  Curmie was legitimately sad that Algerian team lost their elimination round game on the west coast Thursday night.  He may not be in Lawrence anymore, but Les Fennecs were his team, too (after the US). 

That notion of pride is intriguing, however.  Another video clip came across Curmie’s path this week.  It was of the late, great, George Carlin talking about, among other things, his problem with the slogan “proud to be an American.”  He suggests that “pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth…. You wouldn’t say I’m proud to be 5’11”.  I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer…. If you’re happy with it, that’s fine: put that on your car.”

Speaking of pride: the first Pride events happened in the early 1970s, but Curmie wasn’t aware of them, or especially of their designation as “Pride” until later: after, in fact, the release of the Tom Robinson Band’s “Power in the Darkness” LP, which featured a song called “Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay.”  Chances are, you’ve never heard it, Gentle Reader, because the TRB never had much influence west of the Atlantic; Curmie was working on his Master’s in England when the song came out in 1978.  Whether the TRB consciously rejected the notion of “pride,” or whether they’d never heard it (as Curmie hadn’t at the time), the result was to center on being “glad” or “happy” rather than “proud” of one’s sexual orientation, which of course is another of those accidents of birth that Carlin was talking about.

Pride in one’s own accomplishments is perfectly reasonable, of course, at least in moderation.  That extends, in Curmie’s world, to pride in the achievements of his former students, because in some small way he helped prepare them for that success.  And there is the crux.  George Carlin notwithstanding, pride in the good things that one’s nation has done makes some sense.  (So too, of course, is embarrassment at its transgressions.)  Indeed, taking pride in literally anyone’s honest attainments makes some sense; we’re all fellow travelers here, after all.  But that emotion is usually only a variation on happiness.  Curmie is happy the Knicks won the NBA title this year, but he’s not proud of them except to the extent that they manifested admirable qualities along the way: teamwork, refusal to give up, etc.  A player who simply has a good jump shot: cause for celebration, but not for pride.

For pride to truly manifest, however, there needs to be a personal connection.  Curmie is proud of the two former students who are off to grad school in the fall, but their perhaps equally qualified friends who never took my classes, not so much.  It would be nice to actually be proud to be an American.  The solution is obvious, and it isn’t capitulation.  We, all of us, need to become personally invested in creating a nation worthy of our pride.  That will take resolve, work, perhaps even sacrifice.  But we must, we can, we will, do this.  Roll up your sleeves, Gentle Reader.  We’ve got work to do.

"Lola" and the Week's Headlines

Curmie was 14 when the Kinks released their classic song, “Lola.”  It was the perfect age at which to revel in the delicious naughtiness, certainly for the time, of a title character who “walked like a woman and talked like a man.”  The most quoted lyric from the song, no doubt, is “Well, I’m not the world's most masculine man / But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man / And so is Lola.”  There’s a hint of ambiguity there: is Lola a man, or is Lola also glad that the narrator is a man?  Not that those ideas are mutually exclusive, of course.  Any way you look at it, that sequence had a considerable impact on a rather sheltered lad in the throes of puberty.

The sequence that sticks in Curmie’s mind the most, though, comes a little earlier in the song: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”  That word “except” has continued to intrigue for well over a half century.  Lola, whatever terms of sexual identity might be used to describe her, becomes the narrator’s bulwark against the confusions of the world.  There’s a lot to unpack there.

Curmie has always liked the song, and he’s pretty sure he owned it on 45 back in the day, but it has seldom crossed his mind for decades except when it comes around on Spotify or the local classic rock radio station.  But it has risen to the top of his consciousness of late when encountering two Facebook posts.

The first was this one, by Aaron Terr, the Director of Public Advocacy at FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression.  His excoriation of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s boast that “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”  is impressive:

The Attorney General is just flat wrong here…. She’s not the first politician to say that hate speech isn’t free speech, but this is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.  She really should know better, and this is the type of thing that’s going to chill public debate.  It’s going to make people afraid to say things that the current administration might consider hateful, lest they actually be prosecuted for it.

Curmie notes that a representative of FIRE (accurately) calls Bondi a politician rather than a lawyer and makes the obvious point that the Attorney General, of all people, ought to know the freaking laws she’s supposedly upholding.  Bondi is either profoundly ignorant or too big of a political hack to care that she’s advocating the evisceration of Constitutional protections.  Or both, of course.

But it’s what Terr says next that intrigues Curmie:

What’s also incredible about this video is that usually the argument that hate speech isn’t protected speech is something that you would hear from the left side of the political aisle.  But now we hear a top Republican official saying it.  And I think that just goes to show that censorship rationales, once they’re on the table, they’re a loaded gun just waiting to be used by any political party that takes power.

Terr is right about this, too.  Curmie has made the point repeatedly (most explicitly here and to a lesser extent here) that neither of the two principal political parties in this country are much interested in upholding First Amendment protections.  But whereas the right was more likely to engage in political censorship (books in libraries or in school curricula, for example), it was generally the left that sought to deny constitutional protections to hate speech.

Now, we’re living in a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, with the GOP, and especially the MAGA wing thereof, bellowing from the proverbial rooftops about how hate speech should be prosecuted.  Bondi is worse than most—hardly surprising, that—but even she isn’t the most insane right-winger out there.  Remember this guy, an actual Congresscritter Curmie mentioned a few days ago?

Right now, the same people who cheerfully described moderate Democrats as “communists” for arguing that someone who works a 40-hour week ought to be able to afford to pay for essentials, or that programs that help the general population (FEMA, Medicaid, the CDC, the FAA, etc.) ought not to be sacrificed so those poor destitute billionaires can get a tax cut that balloons the national debt—these people are getting righteously indignant that anyone would dare call a racist, sexist, jackass like Charlie Kirk, well, a racist, sexist, jackass.  And they want people fired or even arrested for speaking their truth.  Most of what they’re objecting to isn’t even hate speech by any reasonable definition, but we’ll antiphrastically let that pass for now.

The other Facebook post Curmie wants to mention was this one, which Curmie reposted on his page a couple days ago.  It reads, “Reminder: Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said homeless people should be put to death by lethal injection and they didn’t even take away his morning donut.”  The obvious context was the propinquity of Kilmeade’s comment and the firing of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC for his on-air comments about the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What Kimmel actually said, of course, wouldn’t as much as raise an eyebrow on a reasonable observer.  There were some jabs at both President Trump and Vice President Vance, but the killer, apparently was this: “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”  That, Gentle Reader, is simply a statement of fact.  Trump blamed “radical left political violence” long before there was any evidence either way, and there remains little if any evidence from a credible source that Tyler Robinson was indeed influenced by leftist politics.

Was Robinson a leftie ideologue?  We still don’t know, and for these purposes it doesn’t matter.  There was, at the time Kimmel was on the air, some evidence emerging that perhaps Robinson was a Groyper, and the fact that his grandmother says his politics were shifting to the left could simply be deflection (“we’re a Trump-loving family, so the assassin in our midst obviously wasn’t like us”).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!), he might even suggest the possibility that Robinson was pretty much a Nancy Reagan Republican: dismissing the concerns of others until, in his case, he entered into a same-sex relationship, and Kirk’s homophobia was placed in a different perspective.

The point is that for these purposes, none of this matters.  (Nor does it matter that Curmie has never found Kimmel even moderately amusing.)  Did the MAGA world make a concerted effort to place the blame on someone other than themselves?  Of course, they did!  It doesn’t matter if they were “right” about Robinson’s motivations; they just didn’t want him to be one of theirs.  (To be fair, the left was spinning just as hard in the other direction, but that doesn’t change the fact that Kimmel was absolutely accurate.)

It’s also worth mentioning that Kimmel, like a host of leading Democrats, expressed shock and horror at the news of Kirk’s death, calling it a “senseless murder” and condemning those who seemed to be celebrating it.  Contrast that with the deafening silence (well, there was that one bit of sneering from Mike Lee) of every Republican you can name about the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband by a right-wing nut job.

Note: the key words here are “nut job,” not “right-wing.”  What MAGA in general is attempting to do is to define the entire group—liberals—as guilty in Kirk’s murder because Robinson might have been a leftist with respect to one particular aspect of his politics.  This is the scam JD Vance is trying to pull off, with outright lies about the relative frequency of political violence perpetrated by the left and the right.  C’mon, JD, only the stupidest MAGA believes that “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the Far Left.”  Even the report of the hard-right Cato Institute calls that claim bullshit.  Well, that’s not exactly a direct quote, but you see the point, Gentle Reader.

But Curmie reverts to his inner Confucian.  Even if there is some correlation between affiliation X and action Y, we can’t assume that one implies the other.  Curmie quotes himself from a post in 2013 about that gunman in Aurora, Co, at the opening of the new Batman movie.  Just substitute “Robinson” for “Holmes” in the following:

The fact is, Gentle Reader, this guy Holmes doesn’t represent me even if we’d vote for the same person or worship at the same church. If he turns out to be an atheist, that doesn’t mean that atheists are the problem, any more (or less) than Baptists are the problem if that’s what he is. His politics can be from the left, right, or center, and he doesn’t represent any of the good people some of whose views he shares. Even if he had help, he’s a lone wolf. Our society lives on, saddened but intrepid.

OK, one more point, since Curmie knows there are people out there ready to rant about how corporations have a right to hire and fire whomever they choose.  Yes, that’s true, even when Nexstar and Sinclair, the two distributors who refused to air Kimmel’s show in the future, are notoriously and rather proudly right-wing.  It’s the intervention of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr that’s the real problem.  Carr, appointed in the first Trump administration, has apparently now gone full sycophant, as anyone who wants to stay employed in that administration is likely to do.  Oh, and an administration so openly venal is going to be a lot more amenable to proposed mergers and such-like if you, ABC, suck up appropriately.  Not all bribes are monetary; some just censor alternative voices.  As the singer in “Lola” says, “I got down on my knees…”

Anyway, Bobby Schroeder, a valued longtime reader of Curmie’s page (and a conservative, by the way), responded to Curmie’s post of the meme about Kilmeade, with this: “ABC comedy is more conservative than Fox News?  What in the hell is happening in this world?”

And that prompted Curmie to respond with the line about the “mixed up, muddled up,  shook up world.”  And here we are, Gentle Reader.