No. Not this year. Not this time. Hang that flag in shame if at all. Which United States does that flag represent anyway? Because there are most certainly two.

   Who do we think we are? Five percent of the world’s population and fifteen percent of its resources. Of course, we’re going to be the most powerful nation in the history of the world. It’s not rocket science. Slavery and genocide will create any empire you want.

    Yes, we enjoined our youth to defend us. We have no choice but to honor them today. We sent them off to die and be heroes to our memories. We even demanded that those we had enslaved and had committed genocide against aid in our defense. They did and after they proved essential to our survival as a nation, we relegated them back to the second class status we’d drafted them from. And this past week we again enjoined our very children to protect our sacred right to own a gun. How dare we even think this is a nation that should be defended or saved? Honor them, but not the country that sent them to die for the right of greed.

 And this past week we again enjoined our very children to protect our sacred right to own a gun

   Has there ever been a country that’s ever gotten it so completely and totally upside down wrong? We wrote a constitution to limit the government’s intrusion into individuals lives, but offered that protection to only white men of property. (As if sensing white men of property would not always be a majority to assert absolute power, the utterly irrational Electoral College was constructed as a tool to insure minority power would prevail. Make small states equal to big states, slaves without rights counting as fractional persons to ironically beef up representation of white supremacy, and the very worst of this country’s venality and ignorance would  eventually emerge with the levers of power firmly in their talons.)

   We have never paid much more than lipservice to “all men are created equal,” instead clearly opening the mother of all loopholes that favored money over justice or anything else for that matter. Why are we surprised that with the pure evil that founded this country that we would “evolve” to be a people that would value a gun over a book or an unborn fetus over a child living in a lifetime of poverty and reckless endangerment?

   The Greeks knew that the greatest threat to governance was what they termed hubris or overweening pride. Sample the rhetoric of our “leaders” today, and ask if we’re not now in the final act of Greek tragedy.

   The one age I don’t at all believe we’re in is a new Age of Reason. Tom Paine would erupt over what is perceived as his Rights of Man as applied to women and, Jesus H Christ! the idea of public education. Rousseau would redefine the chains of tyranny. Voltaire would simply vomit. George Washington would regret his entire fucking life.

   We have sat back and watched as -how many?- children have been murdered by a handful of mass killers who have more rights than any of those poor babies have had per the so-called pro-lifers.

  And we’re going to wave our flags, watch our parades and pat ourselves on the back for our patriotism and heroes, while two communities THIS WEEK FOR FUCK SAKES scramble to find enough coffins to bury their dead, because we value guns more than life.

   Shame on us.

   Jeremiah Wright was correct: “Goddamn America.”

   And so would be Cato, were he alive today: America Delenda Est. (America must be destroyed.) This America. Republican America. Fascist America. White America. (And, no,  Eminem, I’m not kidding.)

   Vote.