Patriotism by the book
Commentary by Chitown Kev
As a rule, I have had two very distinct reactions to the online taunting and abuse being thrown at US Olympic gold medalist Gabby Douglas for insufficient “patriotism” at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
One reaction is simply a blinding rage at the keyboard yahoos and racists who haven’t accomplished even a millionth of what Ms. Douglas has achieved in her brief lifetime.
The other reaction is related to the blinding rage but is a bit more...introspective.
What does “patriotism” even mean? What does it mean to be a “patriot?”
(I do this because I adamantly refuse to surrender the English language, in all of its denotative and connotative meanings, to a bunch of yahoos.)
Well...here is the definition of “patriot” and “patriotic” in Merriam-Webster online...which doesn’t tell me what I don’t already know.
It’s easy enough to see the Indo-European root word pater (for “father”) so I know that we are talking about quite a manly and authoritative subject (at least once upon a time).
Which brings us to the etymology of the word.
And now this gets interesting.
Meaning "loyal and disinterested supporter of one's country" is attested from c. 1600, but became an ironic term of ridicule or abuse from mid-18c. in England, so that Johnson, who at first defined it as "one whose ruling passion is the love of his country," in his fourth edition added, "It is sometimes used for a factious disturber of the government."
The name of patriot had become [c. 1744] a by-word of derision. Horace Walpole scarcely exaggerated when he said that ... the most popular declaration which a candidate could make on the hustings was that he had never been and never would be a patriot. [Macaulay, "Horace Walpole," 1833]
Somewhat revived in reference to resistance movements in overrun countries in World War II, it has usually had a positive sense in American English, where the phony and rascally variety has been consigned to the word patrioteer (1928). Oriana Fallaci ["The Rage and the Pride," 2002] marvels that Americans, so fond of patriotic, patriot, and patriotism, lack the root noun and are content to express the idea of patria by cumbersome compounds such as homeland...
The Online Etymology Dictionary’s explanation is basically a summation of what is in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The following is one of the definitions of “patriot” in the OED:
2. a. One who disinterestedly or self-sacrificingly exerts himself to promote the wellbeing of his country; ‘one whose ruling passion is the love of his country’ (J.) one who maintains and defends his country’s freedom and rights.
Gabby Douglas has unflinchingly represented the United States at two Olympic Games. As far as whether Douglas may or may not be someone whose “ruling passion is the love of his country”...well...
"I don't think respecting your country or your flag boils down to whether you put your hand over your heart or not," Hawkins said.
"It's in your actions towards your country, how well are you abiding by its laws, how well are you helping your fellow citizens?
"We grew up in the military community. My mum spent almost 30 years in the military, my dad's a two-time Vietnam vet. Because of that it was so insulting that they would accuse my daughter of being unpatriotic when we are so tied to the military family.
"When the Star Spangled Banner is played, most military members either salute or stand to attention."
Ms. Douglas’ mother’s (Natalie Hawkins) definition sounds pretty textbook to me.
(And...sure I can allow for the fact that she may have been disappointed in not making the all-around final because of the Olympic rules that only the top two competitors from each country can make the all-around final. Disappointment is human.)
As far as Ms. Douglas detractors on social media...well, there is a word for that in the OED as well…
patrioteer- One who makes a public display of patriotism; one whose patriotism is spurious and insincere.
Ah, that “phony and rascally variety” of “patriotism” that I usually hear from people that “want their country back.”
Actually, according to one of the OED citation, Time magazine may have provided an even more appropriate definition of “patrioteer” back in 1939.
“By patrioteer Time means to describe the professional patriot, the kind of refuge-seeking scoundrel who waves a red-white-&-blue handkerchief when he should be wiping his own nose.”
And if anyone feels offended by that statement, don’t take it up with me, take it up with Time magazine and the Oxford English Dictionary.
And wipe your damn nose while you’re at it! (tossing a dollar in the cuss jar!)
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Donald Trump is doubling down with the “rigged election” claims. Rather than walk back his past statement, or claim he was being sarcastic, the Republican presidential candidate straight out told supporters on Friday that there’s only one possible explanation if he ends up losing the crucial state of Pennsylvania: through cheating. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion—I really mean this, Pennsylvania—is if cheating goes on,” he said late Friday. Nevermind that the Real Clear Politics polling average notes Hillary Clinton has a 9.2-point advantage over Trump in recent surveys. “We’re going to have unbelievable turnout, but we don’t want to see people voting five times, folks,” the Republican presidential nominee said.
Particularly concerning about his warnings was how he noted that he’d “heard some stories about certain parts of the state, and we have to be very careful.” Trump added that there would be a lot of people watching on Election Day. “We have to call up law enforcement, and we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching,” he said.
But law enforcement won’t be enough, he warned, and called on supporters to help detect any voting irregularities, expressing shock at the lack of voter ID requirements. “I hope you people can sort of not just vote on the eighth, go around and look and watch other polling places and make sure that it’s 100 percent fine, because without voter identification—which is shocking, shocking that you don’t have it,” he said. Civil rights groups have long said that efforts to institute voter ID laws are really just thinly veiled efforts to prevent minority voters from casting a ballot.
The line was hardly off-the-cuff. In what appeared to be a new section of his website, Trump’s campaign is now seeking to sign up volunteers to be “Trump election observers,” noting he needs help to “stop crooked Hillary from rigging this election!”
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Earlier this week, the Republican National Committee hired three new staffers to assist with African American outreach. They will have their work cut out for them. Donald Trump’s average level of black support from four recent national polls is 2 percent, and a July NBC/Wall Street Journal battleground poll showedTrump getting exactly 0 percent support among African American voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And the candidate is not helping his own cause. He has demonstrated a steady penchant for resurrecting racially divisive campaign tactics of the past, tactics that simultaneously ignored black voters and used race as a wedge to attract disgruntled white voters in the South.
These cynical methods are precisely what the leaders of the Party of Lincoln have spent the last decade trying to bury. Speaking before the NAACP national convention in July 2005, Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ken Mehlman acknowledged the party’s “Southern Strategy” and directly apologized: “I am here as Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” In 2010, Michael Steele—the first black head of the RNC—admitted in a talk with students at DePaul University that Republicans had given minorities little reason to vote for them: “For the last 40-plus years we had a Southern Strategy that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.” Following Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat, RNC chair Reince Priebus presided over what came to be known as “the autopsy report,” which laid out a roadmap for Republican candidates, emphasizing that future electoral success depended on reaching out to ethnic minorities and young people.
Trump seems to have missed the memo. His anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim stances, along with his waffling denunciation of white supremacists like David Duke and insensitivity to concerns about the police killings of unarmed black Americans, are the antithesis of the big-tent recommendations of the Republican establishment. Trump has developed a reputation for being un-strategic, and it’s certainly true that he tends to be pulled forward by his own off-the-cuff reactions to slights or his late-night Twitter impulses. But, particularly over the past two months, Trump’s campaign seems less like a haphazard effort, and more like a deliberate and conscious attempt to resurrect these discarded GOP tactics, recasting them for the current moment.
One glaring, underreported clue about the method behind the post-primary Trump madness is his selection of Paul Manafort as chair of his national campaign. Manafort’s appointment, followed by the ousting of Corey Lewandowski in June, was widely seen as a move to professionalize Trump’s disorganized campaign staff just ahead of the convention. But along with credentials earned from working with top GOP politicians (and a raft of international dictators from the Philippines to Somalia), Manafort also brought decades of experience as an overseer of the Southern Strategy. Since the 1980s, Manafort’s business partners have included Charles Black, who helped launch the Senate career of outspoken segregationist Jessie Helms, and Lee Atwater, who was behind the infamously racist Willie Horton ads run by the George H. W. Bush campaign.
And it was Manafort who arranged for Ronald Reagan to kick off his post-convention presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair just outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers were brutally murdered in 1964. In his relatively short speech, Reagan declared, “I believe in state’s rights…And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
To the all-white audience at the Neshoba County Fair, still simmering about a host of federal civil rights interventions, the location of the speech and the language of “states’ rights” sent an unmistakable message about restoring an imbalance of power in their favor.
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Forces now mirror a largely black population, but are seen by many as not focused on keeping it safe as killings of and by officers occur at higher rates than in the United States. New York Times: Police in South Africa Struggle to Gain Trust After Apartheid.
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During apartheid, the government wielded the police like a club, using them to keep black South Africans in check and brutally extinguish any dissent.
In impoverished black townships like Alexandra, the enmity between the police and black South Africans was so bad in the mid-1980s that residents chased away black police officers who lived in the township by burning down their family homes.
But with the end of apartheid in 1994, change came quickly. The local police force here got its first black commander. Now, all but a handful of the Alexandra police station’s officers are black, and many live in the community. Police stations are no longer redoubts with gates and guards who restrict entry.
“Now when people want to come in, they just come in anytime,” said Col. Nhluvuko Zondi, who became a police officer in 1987 and the station’s first black female commander last year.
It took her five years after the end of apartheid to start feeling comfortable with the public. “Now I can go anywhere with my uniform,” she added.
But the story does not end there. The transformation of South Africa’s police force, from the enforcer of white-minority rule to an institution controlled by the black majority, has been painful and increasingly violent.
In the United States, the killings of black Americans by white police officers— and the killings of police officers by black men in Dallas and Baton Rouge, La. — have convulsed the country, revealing a deep racial chasm around policing in America.
Perhaps no other country understands that discord as well as South Africa, or has done as much to overcome it. But as South Africa has learned, race is hardly the only obstacle to good relations between the police and the people.
Corruption, poverty and the continued use of deadly force, especially in the nation’s townships, are fueling distrust and division, too.
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In New York right now the talk is all about The Get Down. Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix visual extravaganza charting the birth of hip-hop was the most eagerly awaited new show of the summer, a hugely expensive (it’s reported to have cost $120m) and vividly conceived take on a time when a few blocks in the South Bronx were at the centre of a musical revolution.
Yet while the rest of the city gives in to nostalgia for New York’s heyday as the dirty, dangerous creative capital of the world, in the South Bronx itself a less welcome revolution is under way. The area that was once shorthand for urban decline, a no-go zone of burned-out buildings, addiction and despair, is in the developers’ crosshairs.
There’s talk of gentrification, of rebranding the area as the Piano District, of big-budget projects and of how the South Bronx could become the new Williamsburg,a hotspot for bars, restaurants and hipsters, if those involved just play it the right way. Silvercup Studios, the production facility behind TV shows such as Girls andElementary, plans to open a new site in Port Morris, while real-estate firms Somerset Partners and the Chetrit Group hope to develop a luxury apartment complex, complete with boutique hotels, nightclubs and a waterfront esplanade set to open in 2020.
Meanwhile, Robert De Niro is reported to be bringing the latest version ofacclaimed Italian chef Massimo Bottura’s Refettorio Ambrosiano project to the area. The initiative tackles food waste while feeding the homeless.
Not everyone is convinced by these grand plans. “We’re fighting hyper-speculation where we see all this mass development coming into our community because the land is cheaper,” says Mychal Johnson, who works for community group South Bronx Unite. “People are coming in and trying to build so many different types of buildings – almost 46% of all development in the Bronx is happening here in the South Bronx – which has the potential to displace those who have been here struggling through the hard times. If you can’t live in the South Bronx, then where can you live?”
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