Sometimes I like Norman Mailer and sometimes I don’t. His book The Naked and the Dead is amazing. Recently he said what’s been on a lot of people’s minds, enough with the flags all over everything. Normal Mailer expressed his disgust for ‘patriotic fever’:
“America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big powerful country that is as patriotic as America?” Mailer asked in an interview.
“You’d really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country.”
“The right wing benefited so much from Sept. 11 that, if I were still a conspiratorialist, I would believe they’d done it,” he said.
On the subject of patriotism, what is it really and why is it a good thing? Isn’t it more important to stand for real values like courage, love, tolerance, and justice? Patriotism is really an empty attitude. If you lived in Nazi Germany do you think it would be a positive thing to feel patriotic? I find it distasteful that other Americans feel it is more important to be patriotic than to stand up for what is right and against what is wrong.