For the record, I don’t buy the “Muslim” bit. It’s that simple. As someone who is opposed to socialism it’s not difficult for me to find reasons not to like our up and coming commander-in-chief. I don’t need to turn him into some imaginary boogieman. His policies are antithetical to mine, but then again so were John McCain’s. Furthermore, Obama’s true “character” was revealed in all of its bought-and-paid-for glory in two votes: FISA and the bailout. Underneath all the rhetoric of hope and change, it’s simply the same as it ever was. Except for one little thing: Barack Obama is black. Well, kind of.

Race has been a huge part of this election. Say what you like, but Obama gained and lost a huge a number of votes based purely on the color of his skin. I can’t blame him for that though, it’s not like he forced Americans to think racially but the fact of the matter is that they do. The blight of racism, as demonstrated by this election, is alive and well on the streets of America. What’s more interesting though isn’t that all the southern hate mongers and conservative cranks came out of the woodwork with their slurs and their rumors. We tend to expect that from those people.

What is interesting is that Barack Obama is half black. Or, as a close friend of mine puts it, he’s a “Halfrican.”

Why is that interesting? Am I implying that he’s not “really black” or that if he was “all black” he couldn’t have won? No. Barack Obama is as much white as he is black though, yet the only half that gets any media recognition and the only half that seems to matter in the political minefield is the black half. He’ll be the 1st “black president” just as much as he’ll be the 44th “white president.” What this demonstrates, from top to bottom, is how stupid the concept of race is in the first place and how ancestry matters far less to people than obvious things like skin tone. In the minds of America, and much further I’m sure, Obama is black because he looks it, plain and simple. He’s a “role model” to other people who think he looks similar. It’s ridiculous. Any way you slice it, it’s moronic—just as moronic as the labels “black” and “white” are to start with.

Regardless of whether you love, hate, agree or disgree with our new President-elect make sure you do so based on his views, policies and actions and not because of the amount of melanin in his skin.

Barack Obama doesn’t represent change. He represents the same old, same old with a different coat of paint. All too many people though are fooled by simple window dressing. As I said before, it’s the same as it ever was. (Although, I’m cautiously optimistic about the future not leading to a full scale invasion of Iran and the fact that I don’t think my skin will crawl from sheer humiliation as an American when he gives a State of the Union like it did with the last clown we had. There are a few upsides to this… I hope.)

In the world or politics and government, quotes by famous people run rampant in debates and speeches. The reason for this is quite simple: quoting someone who is more well respected than you are adds perceived power and authority to the rest of your statement. In America, people from all across the political spectrum—although, so-called conservatives use the tactic more than anyone else—like to quote the founding fathers in an effort to demonstrate that anyone from Madison to Washington agrees with them and their particular positions. In debates this is used thusly, “Well, if you disagree with me on this position then you also disagree with Thomas Jefferson!” While this tactic can be valid and effective, it’s often played poorly and cheaply as nothing more than an arbitrary appeal to authority.

One of the foremost problems of this method of persuasion is the mindset of many of its worst abusers which can be summed up in the following statement: “John Adams agrees with me.” Most people hunting for quotes from authority figures aren’t generally interested in what those figures actually had to say but only in finding statements that strengthen their own position. While this sort of thing seems legitimate at first glance, beneath the obvious surface of what many of us have been guilty of at one time or another is a vast problem—the sort of problem that, if left unchecked, tends to pollute the thinking the philosophy of anyone.

America’s founders came before us and if we’re to learn from what they’ve said it’s best that we find ourselves agreeing with them, not them agreeing with us. It’s subtle, but it changes the playing field significantly in the way we think from the bottom up. Do you engage in debate and study merely to prove your own ideas and hypotheses or do you do so to test your ideas, refine your hypotheses and put yourself on a path of discovery? If you truly prescribe to the ideas of a particular person, shouldn’t you concern yourself with falling in line with that person rather than contorting that person’s words to match your own? What would happen if most Christians were less interested in following the words of Christ and more interested in using the words of Christ to grant license to their actions and ideas? (Oh wait, that is what has happened.)

Authority figures, including the Founding Fathers, are not perfect nor are they always correct. Just because Patrick Henry made statements that appear to be in harmony with your position doesn’t mean that your position is anymore correct than his was capable of being. That being said, it’s perfectly acceptable to disagree with Hancock or Monroe or anyone else for that matter. Many of the Founding Fathers certainly disagreed with one another and they couldn’t all be right, could they?

At the end of the day, what’s important is that you either develop your own political identity and philosophy, looking to the ideas of others for understanding and support or you adopt someone else’s and follow it. (The former is preferred by those who want to be “thinkers.”)

With that rant out of the way, let’s move on to what is perhaps an even greater gripe about the use of quotations in political speeches, discussion and debate: misquoting people and doing it so much that it becomes a reality. This phenomenon happens because at some point somewhere someone has what they believe to be a brilliant little quip but since this someone is no more than a John Q. Nobody they attribute it to someone famous person out there. The quip, on its own, is good enough that other people think, “Man, that’s great. I’m going to use that in my next essay!” The more it gets used, the more it becomes a “real” quote and the more it continues to get misquoted. The internet has turned this into a full blown epidemic.

Here are some examples:

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.

This was supposedly stated by Thomas Jefferson. This quote is used on hundreds of “tax truth” sites and has been included in books and movies on the subject. Unfortunately, no one who passes this quote around seems to be able to give a legitimate source for it. What’s more troubling is that the use of “inflation” and “deflation” as economic terms weren’t used during Jefferson’s lifetime.

There is an insidious campaign of false propaganda being waged today, to the effect that our country is not a Christian country but a religious one—that it was not founded on Christianity but on freedom of religion. It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by “religionists”, but by Christians—not on religion, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.

This one, attributed to Patrick Henry, is very popular among fanatical Christian political organizations. The problem is that this quote, despite the fact that it’s quite consistent with Henry’s beliefs, didn’t appear until the mid-1950s. It has been attributed to a speech given to the House of Burgesses in May 1765, but there’s no record of this. If we use that citation it poses another problem. It would mean Henry uses the term “nation” in 1765 which is quite unlikely.

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

This time it’s James Madison supposedly saying something. This also appears to be a product of the 1950s. If he did, it’s not recorded anywhere. However, it’s not just the Christians that take artistic license with Madison:

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.

It looks like they got to John Adams too:

God is an essence we know nothing of. Until this awful blasphemy is gotten rid of there will never be any liberal science in the world.

Finally, my personal favorite:

I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet.

George Washington did not chop down his father’s cherry tree for no apparent reason and thus had no reason to tell the truth about his arbor bloodlust.

Worthy of special recognition is a quote attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America:

In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors and her ample rivers, and it was not there. In the fertile fields and boundless prairies, and it was not there. In her rich mines and her vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits, aflame with righteousness, did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.

It’s not in the book. It’s not in any of de Tocqueville’s writings. Someone just made it up.

Before concluding, a few things should be noted:

1. Just because a quote is misattributed doesn’t mean the content is wrong, it just means that somewhere along the line someone attached a famous name to their own statement.
2. Source your quotes and do a little bit of research before regurgitating it. Just because some guy put it up on his quotes page and has an animated American flag on the page doesn’t mean it’s legitimate.
3. If you cannot find a source but also cannot find valid disputation, at least state that the quote was “attributed” to the person. Just because there is no source, doesn’t mean it wasn’t said. (Also, see #1.)
4. There is nothing wrong with making a statement on your own. Do it enough and someday perhaps someone will find you to be such an authority that they can misattribute their own words to you!

Once we’d discovered that I was right—as usual—I noted that I’d been winning a lot on this trip. K.L. asked when I had won before and I realized that it wasn’t this trip, but recently. She pressed for when and I couldn’t and still can’t remember. But it was some time recently. I then asked her if she wanted to start keeping score. She agreed, but said scoring starts tomorrow so I don’t get to start on a win. You should see me zoom ahead now that her revisionist (and biased version) of history can’t stand up to a scoreboard.

In response to the idea of me writing about our scoreboard K.L. said, “You know, you’re going to make both of us sound really pedantic and competitive.” So I said, “We are competitive.” She responded, “No we’re not, because you always lose, so there’s no competition.” So yeah, I guess we’re not competitive.

Oh, and let me add this: my mom drove both of us to the airport yesterday and on the drive I was trying to make the point that K.L. is weird. I figured my own mom would side with me if I told her a story. So I did. The story goes that the other night K.L. was in my room, wrapped up in my brown blanket. As she tends to, she made a ridiculous—she would say “imaginative”—statement, “I feel like a sausage.” Okay, so that’s not that bad. However, she followed it up, in her tone that she has and says, “I’d rather be a sausage patty.” This is the part where my mother should have said, “Yeah, you’re weird. No one really considers what kind of sausage they’d prefer to be.” Unfortunately, this is not what happened.

I say, “See, she’s weird,” and I thought my mom agreed. I even misheard something she had said and began a premature celebration. My mom, however, corrected me and noted, “No, that’s not what I said. It makes perfect sense. If you’re going to be a sausage you should know what kind. I’d be a chicken apple sausage.” My celebration was cancelled. There was no victory—only defeat. K.L. noted later that my face looked “pathetic.”

My own mother sold me out. Heart-breaking really.

Incidentally, ventriloquize is a real word. It’s what ventriloquists do. (For the curious among you, this came up because K.L. constantly blames me for any odd bodily sounds that are made. Even if she makes them, she merely insists that I was ventriloquizing.)

Finally, Michigan lost its season opener to Utah today. I’m happy because I inherited my father’s hatred of the Big 10 and cheer for the Mountain West in most cases. Also, it’s Tacita’s alma mater. Go Utah!

I’ve been dreading this trip for the last two weeks, to be perfectly honest. For reasons I won’t bother documenting until after this trip—as, by then, I believe there will be some sort of conclusion to it all—I’ve actually lost sleep. Meeting parents has always been a problem for me and I seem unlikable. I’m not sure precisely what it is or if I give off some kind of odd pheromone but that’s just the way things have panned out historically. Even the few that have liked me have always done so begrudgingly. Like I said though, I’ll cover this specifically from start to finish later. (Or, I might. Those that read know it’s sporadic.)

Seattle Brother picked us up at the airport and the meeting seemed pleasant enough. Thus far I would say that I like him and he didn’t seem to react negatively to me. I don’t know how much that means though, since I have some feeling Laine’s entire family plays their hands close to their chests. In many ways, they’re quite the opposite of what I’ve grown up amongst and reading them is difficult, further complicated by the fact that without a long history to analyze, I’m not great at reading people in the first place.

Thus far, in the little I have seen, Seattle fits many of the stereotypes I’ve associated with it. I forget the name of the establishments, but one of the first buildings I noticed as I was entering the city was some sort of coffee company that lauded themselves as “green.” This is quintessentially Seattle.

K.L.’s brother took us to a Mexican restaurant that wasn’t bad and then on a tour of Theo Chocolates, another place that typified Seattle’s sort of green, hippie, laid back culture. The chocolate is all organic and they pride themselves on it. I thought this was a weird selection for an outing, but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The tour was fun, I learned more about the chocolate making process, from plant to bar, than I ever thought I’d care to (but hey, I’m rarely one to turn down useless knowledge) and I tasted the finest chocolate I have ever tried. It’s a coconut curry chocolate bar and while I’m sure many out there find that sounding unappealing, it’s right up my alley. On top of being a flavor seemingly tailor-made for me, the chocolate is worth the expense. This is good, good stuff. (A few lucky people back home might get to try one of these bars.)

As a side note the girl giving the tour said that many people who are allergic to chocolate aren’t actually allergic to chocolate but the cocoa butter substitutes a lot of modern chocolates use. My dad and sister are both allergic and I’m curious if they could handle this stuff.

This place is full of bikers and there’s a lot of recycling going on too. I see a lot of Obama support here and there and not much in the way of McCain. Superficially, it meets the stereotypes and that’s kind of amusing. For the record, I’m not really knocking the stereotype. I had previously characterized Seattle as a sort of pretentious place but in my tiny sampling thus far it hasn’t felt very pushy or preachy about what it is and I do like that. Strangely, I’ve enjoyed my little sliver here and am looking forward to seeing more of it. I wonder if I could pick up and live here one day? It’s smaller than I thought it was, that’s for sure. It actually feels a lot like Reno for reasons I can’t seem to put my finger on.

Anyway, I’ll write more about this trip later. I should be vacationing, not writing!

It began with Boas and me discussing nothing of importance, as we tend to do after a few rounds of Dawn of War. I was talking about The Dark Knight and then wondered if Iron Man was still showing at any theater around here. It wasn’t, but over the course of looking over movies I started reading reviews of the latest work by the man responsible for retroactively raping my childhood. I saw a few gave it an “F” and as such, I had to read those.

I found this gem by Roger Ebert while reading. This quote, in particular is the stuff legends are made of:

You know you’re in trouble when the most interesting new character is Jabba the Hutt’s uncle. The big revelation is that Jabba has an infant to be kidnapped. The big discovery is that Hutts look like that when born, only smaller. The question is, who is Jabba’s wife? The puzzle is, how do Hutts copulate? Like snails, I speculate. If you don’t know how snails do it, let’s not even go there. The last thing this movie needs is a Jabba the Hutt sex scene.

Unfortunately, Boas decided that I really needed to know precisely how snails copulated, so he sent me a link to some really weird dramatic interpretation on the subject, Green Porno. Click “now showing” and watch. It’s office safe too, as long as the people around you won’t die if they hear the word “anus.” Don’t worry, while it will burn an image in your mind, it’s no Goatse. It’s more weird than anything else.

So, now I know how snails do it. Earthworms too. What has been seen, cannot be unseen.

When I first heard that Christian Bale was playing Batman in Batman Begins, I was really excited. When I saw the infamous business card scene from American Psycho I was totally impressed with him as an actor and in subsequent films I’ve found that I really like him. There was some added icing too. Gary Oldman is another favorite of mine and he was an excellent Jim Gordon. Michael Cane was also a wonderful addition as Alfred. I could have done without Katie Holmes but, frankly, if she’s wearing clothing and talking I can always do without Katie Holmes.

My prior jubilation at the casting for Batman Begins is quite the contrast to how I felt when I heard that Heath Ledger had been cast as The Joker in the sequel. It’s not that I don’t like Heath Ledger—on the contrary, I’ve liked him in every movie I’ve seen him in since seeing him in The Patriot—it’s just that he didn’t seem like the right guy to play The Joker, one of my absolute favorite comic villains. His last headlining role had been that of a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain. That was not the image I wanted superimposed onto The Joker. I began to worry even more about this role as a result of Ledger’s death and all the talk about an Oscar. Death immortalizes celebrities and, somehow, makes everything they did better. James Dean is an excellent example of what death will do for a celebrity. With Ledger’s death, the Hollywood whores ramped up the hype machine to ridiculous proportions.

That aside, Aaron Eckhart has been another personal favorite of mine since I saw Thank You For Smoking and Suspect Zero. As such, I was excited about his role as Harvey Dent and Two-Face—my other favorite Batman villain.

While I approached Batman Begins with nothing but high hopes and total excitement, I was far more skeptical about The Dark Knight. Could it live up the first? Could it live up to the hype? Could Ledger pull off The Joker and was his performance truly iconic or merely whitewashed by the actor’s untimely death?

The Dark Knight was a solid movie and I enjoyed most of it. If you haven’t seen it, I’d most certainly recommend it. (Of course, if you haven’t seen it, you shouldn’t be reading this.) With that said, however, I think in many respects this movie was a victim of its own hype and in general, I thought Batman Begins was a superior film overall. This is not to say that The Dark Knight was not a worthy successor, but it had some problems that were really hard to look past and turned a movie and cast with the potential to be a perfect 10 into something more like a 7.5 or an 8. That’s nothing to fret about, but the worst part about The Dark Knight is what it could have been.

Let’s begin with the bad.

I doubt I’m the first to say it, so I’ll simply repeat: the last quarter of the movie was the weakest and the ending was mostly contrived, at least on The Joker’s part. It was far too much of a leap for me and, even worse, felt like it was trying entirely too hard to force the general theme of the movie down our collective throats. Two-Face is a walking theme. The good and evil nature inside everything had already been covered. Seriously, we got it. However, instead of leaving it at that, the writers had to end the movie with what I felt was silly and unrealistic. Yes, I get that it’s a comic book based movie and as such was not exactly going for perfect realism. However, the themes about morality and humanity are exaggerated by super heroes and villains. The people around these characters are usually pretty real and mundane.

The plot arc involving the two ferries, one filled with criminals and the other filled with regular citizens was ridiculous. While this was a perfect social experiment for The Joker, it had no place in a Batman movie. Why? It couldn’t end realistically in a Batman movie, that’s why. Even in a movie as dark as this one, Batman will win in the end and while the villains have to rack up a bit of a body count, you’re not going to see an entire ferry full of innocent people die. It’s just not going to happen. Villains can kill as many rival criminals as they like and opposing cops, half of whom are corrupt, as well. However, there’s a pretty strict limitation on innocents.

The ferry filled with criminals was particularly annoying. Here is a ship full of the most brutal and dangerous criminals in the city—murders, sociopaths, the whole nine yards. There was no riot. There was no fight for the detonator. In fact, the criminals seemed to have more humanity than the “innocents.” It was totally contrived. I realize the scene where the big guy comes forward and says, “I’m doing something you should have done a long time ago,” was supposed to inspire us or make us think, “Wow, there really is humanity in everyone,” but it was just silly. This is the same city full of people who were trying to kill Coleman Reese the day before in order to save a hospital.

Did I mention this portion of the plot was contrived? It was contrived. It should have been a nail biter, but anyone with half a brain knew what as going to happen. For something in a super hero movie to work like that you have to be willing to do one of three things: break from the comic and kill some major character that still lives in the comic (and this was executed very poorly in the third X-Men movie), have a major character in the movie that’s not in the comics that could live or die or put the super hero in some kind of position that isn’t so catastrophic that he can still fail and the movie will be a winner for the good guys anyway.

Since we already know how things are going to turn out, the movie didn’t need to go overboard on making an unrealistic statement about the inherent goodness of the people on the boats. I didn’t care for it at all and, frankly, would have been all too happy to see the “innocents” blow the criminals up. It would have made for a better movie in my opinion and would have worked with the rest of the dark themes. It also would have been very unexpected. At the very end you are left with the idea that a vengeful city needs someone to blame and Batman is left with that blame. So are these people good or bad or what? Basically, they’re made saints at one point and in the end, it felt far more realistic. So who is the real Gotham? It felt very mixed.

And I hinted at it before, but “killing off” Jim Gordon was silly. We knew he wasn’t dead. Thanks for playing.

Then there was the scene where the cops were escorting Harvey Dent and there was a flaming bus blocking their path. With no cars on the street at all do you:

1. Simply head over to the opposite side of the street since you have sirens to divert any oncoming traffic if there was some.
2. Just stop there and wait for the obstruction to be cleared.
3. Head down into the vicious underground where there is an obvious trap.

I guess in Gotham, the dumbest idea is usually the best idea since it is essential for more contrived plot. Ugh. Again, this is base on a comic book, but it’s really annoying when something is so bad that it gets you to stop suspending disbelief.

Batman struck me as a bit of a wuss in this movie. Maybe it was just me, but I was so enthralled by The Joker and by Harvey Dent that Batman started to feel kind of like an accessory halfway through the movie and I really didn’t much care either way what happened to him. He was simply the least interesting of the main characters. And that turned out to be my main problem with the movie, it didn’t know if it wanted to be a psychological thriller—focusing on interesting and intelligent villains and constantly feeling unsure about what was going to happen next—or a cookie-cutter action film where the hero conjures a magical cellphone sonar device to find the villain at the end just in time. (Obviously, I didn’t care for that either.)

Finally, what the hell was up the mayor in that movie? Was it just me or was he wearing a ridiculous amount of eye liner through the whole film?

Well, sounds like I hated it, eh? I didn’t though, so let’s move on to the good.

Health Ledger was truly iconic as The Joker. His particular interpretation was gripping and interesting. The way he handled his voice, the way he moved and even little details, like the way he kept licking his lips and around his mouth has he talked. Mind you, it’s unfair to give Ledger all the credit for a character that I couldn’t get enough of over the course of the movie. The makeup and concept design were fantastic, his costumes were gritty and the writing was very good. I cannot say enough about how much I liked this character and, strangely, it was my liking of this character that hurt the rest of the movie. I wanted The Joker to win. I thought his completely amoral manifesto of sorts was interesting and that, in the real world, his social experiment would have been successful. In the end, the shortcomings of this movie all bothered me in that they seemed to partially “waste” an excellent character with an equally excellent performance.

I have read a few negative reviews about Ledger’s performance here and there and I have to say that the people who didn’t like his performance fit into one of three groups:

1. Film snobs of the worst kind who hate everything.
2. People reacting in a knee-jerk fashion to all the hype surrounding this movie.
3. Anti-trend jackasses who want to hate the character and performance because everyone else loves him.

Clearly, none of these people are to be taken seriously.

Aaron Eckhart did not disappoint as Harvey Dent or as Two-Face. I think that, unfortunately, as a result of Health Ledger’s performance that Eckhart’s will most certainly be overshadowed, but I can’t give him enough credit for carrying this role and carrying it well. Let me also emphasize Harvey Dent—this character was plenty interesting long before half of his face looked like a fried drumstick.

Maggie Gyllenhaal was so much better as Rachel Dawes than Katie Holmes. Sorry Katie, but you married Tom Cruise and as such no one can ever or will ever take you seriously in a role where you play an intelligent character. It’s not our fault you drink proverbial Kool-Aid. Gyllenhaal was much more believable and simply seemed to have much more depth than her predecessor. The only point in the entire movie where I missed Holmes was the point at which Ms. Dawes was being blown to smithereens. I was thinking, “That would have been a much better scene with Katie Holmes. An explosion and then… silence.”

Overall the plot was pretty good for a comic book movie, despite all my nitpicking above. I enjoyed it and would see it again. I’ll get it when it’s released on DVD. What more could a movie really want? The downside is that I felt this movie could have been more and it even had the right ingredients. It just… didn’t. It had an identity crisis that wasn’t as interesting as Harvey Dent’s, that’s all.

The self-proclaimed “most downloaded Music Video on the internet.”

I’m sure, if you wasted the 5 minutes necessary to ingest this monstrosity, you’re thinking something similar to what I though: “What the hell?” This was followed by, “I should kill Boas for sending me this, but… misery loves company.” I would have done the same, as I’m doing right now by sharing this with you, so I guess I can’t actually strangle him.

(For the record, if I know you and you found yourself inspired in any way aside from thinking, “Well, see, this video proves retards can follow their dreams,” or something similar, I don’t think that we can be friends anymore.)

Before I jump into my rant about modern American patriotism I want to point something out concerning what being “most downloaded” means. There is this phenomenon known as an Internet meme. Those of us who have been junkies of the world wide web for a while are painfully aware of what these are. We know that these memes are never a good thing. I mean, they’re often weird and hilarious, but they’re never anything that the creator should announce in public, “Yeah, that was me.” Is it really a honor to be in the same category as the Hamster Dance or Rickrolling?

The Internet was simply not designed for items of substance to get wide coverage. It was designed for things like All Your Base Are Belong To Us. So, even if Mr. Madalone’s claim is true, is this even a good thing? No. Not even a little bit.

With all of that said, let’s move on the actual reason I started writing.

America is a fascist state. There, I said it. I realize that since the end of World War II, those of us on the winning side deluded ourselves into believing the following:

1. We defeated fascism.
2. We’re not fascists.
3. Fascism is obvious.

None of these statements are true. It’s hard for many to grasp but, yes Virginia, there really is fascism after Hitler. America is testament to that. All one must do to see it is drive around and see the endless waves of “God Bless America” and “The Power of Pride” bumper stickers along with the myriad yellow ribbons that say, “Support Our Troops.” Or worse, the fact that the term “hero” has become entirely synonymous with four different groups in the US: soldiers, police officers, fire fighters and athletes. Actual heroes—like voices of descent and reason—are merely vilified as cowards and unpatriotic.

One could say the following is an appropriate mantra for America these days: “Heroes do their duty! They don’t ask questions!”

Since 9/11, Americans have largely become gluttons for nationalist behavior. I’d also say we’ve become warmongers, but you can’t become something you already are. Videos like this typify one the biggest problems with America, the idea among many that America itself is synonymous with the virtues most us actually believe are good and proper. Despite what Superman may tell you, truth, justice and the American way don’t really go together at all. Blindly equating good ideas and the country as an entity creates a serious dilemma.

“America is a free country.” It’s just accepted in the minds and homes of people in every city and every state in the USA. No matter what our government does, we’re a free country and thus any action taken by our government is a reflection of a what a free country is and should be. This, of course, isn’t true and people possessing a modicum of reason know this. Unfortunately, people possessing reason do not make up more than a small minority of the voting population.

This delusion is further compounded by the following “thinking”: “When they start carrying people away to concentration camps, then you can tell me we’re fascists and we’re not free.” Lemme tell you what folks, if you’re waiting for A photo copy of Nazi Germany before you decide you’ve had enough and it’s time to do something, it’s too late. Either that, or you’re not paying attention. Where’s the line where we become the Nazis? Is when the government has secret police? Is it when the government starts spying on regular citizens in the name of hunting down foreign boogymen? Is when our rights are suspended or outright traded for the government’s promise of protection? Hasn’t all of this happened? Exactly what aspect of the Nazi state has to happen before people realize, “Oh no, we’re them!”?

Do you think the average German citizen at the time of World War II hated Hitler or that they were opposed to the policies? They were a country whipped up into a nationalistic frenzy, just like most fascist and imperial states. They could do no wrong, their soldiers were worshipped in propaganda and abused in reality and they were the good guys who were simply protecting and expanding their way of life. I seem to forget if I’m talking about Germany 1942 or America 2008 all of a sudden.

The religious veneration of troops and fire fighters in this video is downright disturbing, as is Mr. Madalone’s hair and lyrical skills. It’s filled with the personal and national narcissism that blights this country at every turn. This is the first song that’s come close (not quite, but close) to displacing my supreme hatred for Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA. I don’t think there will ever be a song written that instills me with more contempt, but America We Stand As One comes pretty close.

Here’s a quote from the video:

America We Stand As One, is a dedication to our brave heros [sic] and all our Loved-Ones who have passed away. This new American Rock-Anthem fills you full of hope and comforts you with a spiritual message from our Loved-Ones, that they’re still with us, but in a different way. Have faith and believe and they will always be with us.

This is very American in the sense that Madalone is telling me how I feel as if there is no option for feeling anything else but his particular vision of what the song should do. The song does not comfort me. I don’t find that it’s full of hope. In fact, I feel ill watching it but, like a train wreck, I have to share it with others.

At least the Nazis got really cool uniforms. I mean, they’ve become the poster children for the tyrannical regime. There are few, regardless of how they feel about Hitler and Nazi Germany in general, that can argue that these guys didn’t have a sense of style in their oppression. The uniforms were cool and the symbols inspired dread. What do we get here in America? George W. Bush, Lee Greenwood and Dennis Madalone. How humiliating. Fascism in Germany wore black and skulls, here it wears cheap Wal-Mart clothing and bad hair.

If you ask me, the worst thing Hitler did was convince the world he was the be all end all of political monsters and the face of true evil in the world, so much so that no one else will ever compare and thus will be ignored, despite their own evils.