Patriotism

“Cogito ergo sum” “I Think, therefore I am”

Corollary

I don’t think, therefore I American.

I know it was a no brainer but sometimes the prospect of  pun becomes so irresistible that  concepts like sensibility and fairness  take an obligatory stroll-in-the-park 367 miles away from their homes. Fact is, if you can’t reason with your brain you can’t ever justify your impulses. Frankly, I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with reason off late and have decided that  brain really doesn’t matter as long as you’ve got "attitude". See, if you take attitude away from “a Granite”, you turn it into mere bitumen—good for waterproofing in third world, but third world is soggy anyway, who gives a dry rat's arse. Oh, it’s smelly too but third world*** is known to have a conditional nose, we grow our noses only when we are at our nationalistic, patriotic best. We learned to live with rotten fruits, vegetables and fish guts hoarded outside our doors (by ourselves, if not the ever malevolent neighbor; and “neighbor” is a reciprocal reality, right!), toilets, cleaned once in a century,  humans enjoying the morning sun and using therapeutic doses of UV on where the sun normally doesn’t shine and creating plant food—outside our windows, happily ignoring anything olfactory. But when it comes to winning an Olympic medal after 3-4 centuries, or  a game of ” I beat-Da-shit out of your leather balls and Den you beat-Da-shit out of my leather balls”, or a word of casual praise by famous/semi-famous Foreign “stateheads” or movie stars from another realm (who remotely use anything subcontinental, and prefer a pair of long sterile and ever suspicious forceps to get a feel of India), we grow our noses, mainly to use them as flagposts. I am not saying  that this complex belongs to the third world only; I’ve seen Koreans who never read “Tagore's works”, but literally adored him because he once supposedly wrote a four-liner of a poem for a group of patriotic Korean youths during the Japanese occupation of Korea (1929)—The poem (retranslated from Korean; evidently by someone else; not me in anyway) is

“In the golden age of Asia

Korea was one of its lamp-bearers

And that lamp is waiting to be lighted again

For the illumination of the East”

In fact, they built a four-foot Tagore bust in Seoul recently and our Loksabha spekar Meira Kumar unveiled it, to reciprocate the honor bestowed upon the Koreans by a four-line poem (which could in fact be written by anybody). Now, I distinctly remember, whenever I played a Tagore song in my shared dormitory room, the same group of Tagore preachers would cover their ears in disgust—stating-- “what kind of eerie music is that?” Music there was fine as long as it was Korean or anything western (America has a military base in Korea). That’s your average “patriotism” basically. The Korean people are hard-working, disciplined, law abiding and take immense pride in being Korean and thus jumps headlong into any national need, and they really did great in reshaping a country in such a small time, but even then they need someone else, preferably a Nobel winner, to reiterate that Korea indeed is great.

So it seems that the aforementioned patriotism essentially starts from insecurity and then plunges into a vat of superiority complex and when it comes up from that vat, it’s shining with loads of intolerance.  Be extremely careful and don’t put a foot wrong when you talk about another culture’s “foot long”. Our “butter chicken” was an OK food until it was made a 3000 watt level divine by a passing comment from say a Dick celeb Gere or a certain Mr. ForeignCeleb Whatever, and now a Kim hemiceleb Kardashian has termed it disgusting-- hang the unbeliever, lynch her; the national bloody pride is at stake; long live butter chicken (at this point the butter chicken started moving, pity it didn’t know what AWK to say, because its head was in the cat’s gut and the neck was in someone else’s plate, it couldn’t even describe how proud it was in its decapitated, battered and buttered form). Got my point!

Intolerance is a dragon basically, everyone has a pet one, it’s in vogue after all. So what if we get scorched by the flame, important part is nonbelievers should burn. Whatever Dr. Frankenstein feared to make, we‘ve made them.

Coming back to America (in the meantime I looked for my logics and reasons but failed to locate them), well, if you can’t really really understand anything, it must be America. It’s historical. A land mass that was discovered by the Inuit and who knows who before them (Olmecs ? Aztecs? Toltecs ? Mayans?), and rediscovered (by the European standards) by a certain Chris Columbus, is named after some Amerigo Vespucci, just because good old Chris thought it was really a part of Asia (That raises the question if it was the Chinese who should actually be credited for its discovery).

Average dress: Crisp white/black/brown/blue/pin stripe suit with a pair of red and white snickers, accompanied sometimes with a Fedora or a Panama.

Average foreign policy: Are you sure? I didn’t know there are other countries in this world, except prob’ly Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. And they have presidents? Like president presidents? Do they have nukes ? We gotta have bigger nukes then.

Average historical aptitude:  This is where good old Georgie threw his dollar across the Potomac!

Sceptic: How could a dollar travel so far?

Reponse: Those days a dollar went a long way.

Average food & drink:

I didn’t know you could actually drink water.

I’ll take a diet Soda with my extra double cheese burger.

I thought, green sugary jellies are perfect substitutes for green vegetables.

I live in a basement with no windows and my favorite food is baked-beans.

In a country, where obesity is as prevalent as trees in Amazonian rain forest:

One of the staple foods is a deep fried chocolate & Nut bar battered in corn-flour.

Soda companies give the greatest health tips.

You will get a 20% discount in any fast-food joint if you are a member of our Gym.

Well, it can be a bit exhaustive and admittedly although it’s a gross stereotyping (on my part) but reality is pretty close to the above.  Although your average John Smith regularly bungles his maths, he is a genius when it comes to business, that’s acquiring capital and making the best brains work for him. Now, except for the first generation bright & skilled imports in academics, medicine, engineering etc, the average Hispanic is living his/her dream as a domestic help, blacks live theirs in slaughterhouses, Chinese live theirs in sweatshops, Indians/Pakistanis/Bangladeshis in restaurants, small motels. World is quite fair there, a small percentage of these people get second/third generation opportunities to excel in sports, academics etc etc… provided they are not wasted first by depression and drugs (which is pretty fair when you compare their chances in their native lands). Now, the question is how come these patriots work for a boss who can pronounce Arnold Schwarzenegger quite accurately but turns a certain poor “Seema Bhat” into “See-my-Butt” or a hapless “Sheikh Mehboob” into “shake-my-boob”.

Is patriotism a product of  mob (not the Italian one) psychology then? In isolation, it just goes poof with an extra “f”? Well, that’s for the patriots to figure out. As for me everything truly begins at home, if you can’t love your family you can’t love any entity called a “country”.

***Well, I guess, patriots will be at their decapitating best in disagreeing with me in terms of India being mentioned as a "Third world" country here. Well, we've made progress, a load of it, but so have the rest of the world, most at a faster pace. Most progress here has happened at personal levels , a mere 0.00000125% of the population progressed a huge lot and are bristling with your cash and they don't essentially give a shit about what it's called as long as they can be at their boorish best and rest of the world kneel in front and admires them.

First, second or third,  It's your world, it's my world.