patriocy

[the following is my response to a friend of mine telling me that since the election
he is ashamed of being an American for the first time in his life.]
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if i believed in artificial, enforced borders,
and accepted the ridiculous conceit that i was
something called an "American",
then i'd have been embarrassed by that fact,
at least since i was nine years old,
and watched the cops shoot at my friends' daddies during the Detroit riots.
by the time i'd become a teenager and learned about the
massacres committed in the nineteenth century,
in detail no functioning heart and stomach could handle,
while i observed the millions of Southeast Asians
being torn to burning bits on my television set,
i already had no illusions about what the society i lived in was all about,
and how its status quo was maintained.

but fortunately, i'm a citizen of the world,
a human being, and an earthling.
and i don't have a smidgen of my sense of self,
of respect, or what people call pride,
invested in a gang of incorporated, arrogant,
myth-spewing, weapon-spreading, misery-profiting,
fear-toting, idiocy-breeding, imperial racists
and bullying gangsters, masquerading as
'the land of the free and the home of the brave'
while excluding almost everyone in my family
from their exceptional un-hyphenated ranks.

it didn't take the election of the Great STrumpet,
the mascot of capitalism,
the next natural step in
Manifest Destiny's retrogression
bleating Ayn Rand's bible,
to open my eyes.