Trump's 4th of July weekend isn't going the way it was supposed to go. He was supposed to headline a patriotic event in Mobile tomorrow at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park and the park's commissioners cancelled it when they realized that Trump was planning a partisan event rather than a patriotic one. Even in the heart of Trumpism, people had second thoughts about a day of Trumpist hatred and divisiveness at the time we should be looking towards national unity.
Today, he'll be doing one of his rallies in at the Sarasota, Florida fairgrounds, although Governor DeSantis asked him to stay away in light of the tragedy in Surfside. Trump demurred and DeSantis announced he isn't going to be there. His company being indicted in NY on tax charges will nom doubt be listed to the long list of grievances his now thoroughly boring shows are about.
In his column yesterday, Born on the Farce of July: The Lie of MAGA Patriotism, John Pavloviz defined Trump's bizarro-world version of patriotism, something Republicans package and sell for a hefty profit to their constituents-- "a quick and easy red, white, and blue daydream for people whose daily lives often feel empty and devoid of meaning: an inexpensive label to slap on their bumpers or their behinds in order to make them feel a sudden rush of faux significance."
Pavlovitz dubbed it a "Christmas for white Nationalists; a time when their superiority and territorialism and fear of outsiders are more exploitable than ever by someone willing to leverage it. Unfortunately, someone is. Republicans understand the power of weaponized patriotism. (Saying that 'we' love America, while 'they' clearly despise it.) It’s the go-to GOP trope. They know the way the Stars and Stripes are a cheap intoxicant to those who imagine America to be their sole property, those who feel slighted by a world while enjoying all of its perks, those continually needing an enemy to rail against and puff out their chests toward and give them purpose."
Republicans have learned from the Evangelical Right how expressions of devotion to America are simultaneously coded war rhetoric: battle cries for white soldiers in the Army of the Lord, fighting an ever-encroaching foreign adversary who is breaching their borders and coming for their jobs and their children. They can say they love this nation, while betraying almost everything central to its beauty: diversity, plurality, equality-- and the indoctrinated cult will lap it up because they need the story to be true.
And so, the anthems play and the flags wave and the bottle rockets ascend and the M-80’s go off-- and Fascism quietly enters in the side door while everyone is distracted by the spectacle.
This is the paradox Americans find ourselves in. Our essential liberties have never been more at risk, our electoral process never more assailed, our national sovereignty never more tenuous, our elemental freedoms never more in doubt-- and yet the patriotic fervor by the GOP and in its flag-waving rank-and-file has never been greater. This is by design.
Yes, the ship is going down quickly but the music is still playing to convince their rank-and-file that all we’re still the Land of the Free-- and they are dancing wildly into the abyss while waving flags of lost civil wars around monuments to slavery.
The reality is, this Republican party is fully antithetical to America.
They have planned, participated in, supported, and now fiercely defend a deadly terrorist attack on our Capitol designed to overturn a free and fair election, all to protect a traitorous, wannabe despot.
They are relentlessly assaulting the opportunity for all Americans to participate in the electoral process by wielding a stacked court to erode voting rights of those they seek to literally cancel.
They are legislatively attacking women and LGBTQ people and people of color, in order to deny them full access to human and civil rights as citizens here.
They are doing everything in the power to withhold life, liberty, and happiness to all but the whitest and wealthiest among us.
...[T]hose of us who love this country realize how far we are from the aspirations of the songs and ideals they point to-- and how tenuous a hold we have on it.
We will be grieving, not because this country deserves better than this party and the amoral monster they idolize-- but because right now it does deserve them; because we wish it to be something far greater than their ceremonial dog and pony patriotism and the phony pro-life Christianity they wear when it benefits them.
We see what a farce this all is:
to claim on a land our ancestors stole that any of it belongs to us,
that we should be closing borders our first forbears crossed without permission,
that a man and a party so lacking in goodness should be defining our greatness.
So yes, we’ll be loving our country fiercely this July 4th and beyond, by not letting it remain what it currently is and by opposing the fraudulence of their performative patriotism.
We will be working and protesting and loving and building and caring and voting and pushing it to become a place deserving of the songs and the fireworks and the fervor.
When freedom rings for all of us, then we’ll really sing.
Until then, we see the joke here-- and we don’t think it’s funny.
other oxymorons:
democrap patriotism or activism or courage or accomplishments
which is worse: nazis who do evil or democraps who are elected to undo evil and ALWAYS refuse?
A: They're both horrible and democracies exist with the presumption that they both are so horrid that neither could ever achieve power.
why is it that every single most hated politician has been re-elected multiple times and holds outsized amounts of power to act as despots? in a democracy? designed as such to prevent such perfidy from gaining absolute power?
A: the biggest oxymoron of them all: sentient american voter.
when voters are dumber than house plants and/or pure evil, it absolutely negates all the potential good of democracy and makes it…