A Matriotic Tribe's topics - tribe.net

What is to be lost by failure/refusal to be nationalistic?

khrysso — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 21:27:28 GMT

What is to be lost by failure/refusal to be nationalistic? What are they so afraid of if, say, I don't fly my flag in the days following an attack on the land that happens to fall within the political boundaries that also bound the place where I was born? How do the terrorists win?

It seems to me that it would be more important for me to fly my nation's flag if I were on "foreign" soil than here, in a-hundred-miles-from-any-border central Ohio...

Am I missing something?

I dunno. In England they fly the flag over Buckingham Palace only when the Queen is present. Is it important that the hoi polloi fly flags then as well? How many people must display a symbol before it has meaning?

posted in A Matriotic Tribe - 5 replies

Matriotic reminds me of....

ammanaga — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:28:09 GMT

Amniotic.

It makes me think of fetal fibers and body fluids.

I can't help it!

Amma

posted in A Matriotic Tribe - 0 replies

"Patriot Day," September 11

khrysso — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:35:40 GMT

My calendar has September 11 marked as "Patriot Day."

It's been six years since the Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, and I still fail to see how the events of that day were challenges to my loyalty to the land of my birth. I'm not convinced at all that the bombings were not more of an economic statement than a cultural statement.

I still fail to see how it was any more patriotic to be a dead file clerk after the collapse of the Towers than it had been, 24 hours earlier, to be a live file clerk getting the kids off to school so as to punch the time clock on time.

I still fail to see why, because of luck of the draw, I was obligated to grieve the deaths of the 3000 or so victims of the bombings, none of whom I knew, more than I was to grieve the 11,000 or so victims of the earthquake in India earlier that year, none of whom I knew. Why am I more of a patriot to grieve the death of certain Children of Gaia more acutely than of others just because of accidents of birth and location within the confines of lines on a map?

Does anybody really think that the events and the victims of 9/11 will ever be forgotten? Must its remembrance be tied to nationalistic loyalty?

posted in A Matriotic Tribe - 9 replies

Evolution and the Loci of Power

khrysso — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:49:33 GMT

Back in the late '80s I read a book by Warren Farrell called _Why Men Are the Way They Are_.

The basic premise was that men are the way they are because women are the way they are, which was circular in addition to being simplistic and heterocentrist, let alone... well, to get on with it:

He said that the power of men lies in their money and the power of women lies in their beauty.

I don't know about the absolute breakdown along sex/gender lines, but I will entertain the case that the two central motivators of politics are lust and greed.

I've often said that *the* central question of humankind is "Who's [boffing] whom?" Everybody wants to know it, which is why gossip will never die: on that question hangs all of politics and economics and the turning of the world in general.

If evolutionary theory is to be taken for granted, then the ability to collect material resources is the prime motivator for choosing one progenitor over another. And why shouldn't it be?

It definitely leaves non-reproducing folk [such as queer little I] in the margins, evolutionarily speaking. We're pretty much irrelevant to the picture: our beauty and/or money are incidental to the grand scheme.

posted in A Matriotic Tribe - 6 replies

"Citizenship Day"

khrysso — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:12:41 GMT

I grew up in Louisville (you pronounce the "S"), Ohio, which Pres. Dwight Eisenhower designated, "Constitution Town, USA" after Louisville resident Mrs. Olga Weber wrote to him asking, "We have a day set aside to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence; why not one to celebrate the ratifying of the Constitution?" So September 17 (the anniversary of the ratification) became Constitution Day in the US, and Louisville became Constitution Town. There is a parade and the crowing of a Constitution Queen every year. I marched in it when I was a Cub Scout. (Never competed for Queen, though, even though I had long, pretty hair.)

My 2007 calendar has a little flag in the corner of the square for September 17, but it calls the day "Citizenship Day," which I think draws attention away from the significance of the day as one of remembrance of the ratification of the Constitution, which was one of the most self-directed and collectively courageous political moves in history. (It also, incidentally, obliquely discounts the contribution of the Iroquois Confederation to the US's Constitutional principles, thereby neatly invisibilizing the First Peoples once again.)

Yeah, September 17 is a neat day on which to gain US citizenship, but it's really so much more than that. Why shrink the importance of the day by making it more specific in scope, instead of expanding it by using it as a jumping-off point for championing democratic/republican principles?

As I've often said when Bush & Co. talk about an Iraqi constitution: "A constitution! Why don't we try that??"

(Who needs habeas corpus anyway, right?)

posted in A Matriotic Tribe - 0 replies