Last year, eleven Muslim students at U.C.-Irvine protested the speech by the Israeli Ambassador to the United States by shouting, "It's a shame this university has sponsored a mass murderer like yourself." They weren't asked to leave like most everyone else who disrupts a speech. No, they were criminally prosecuted of "conspiracy" and "disturbing an assembly" and today they were convicted. They are each facing a sentence of up to one year in prison.
About a year ago, a DI reader named Mike Baker offered me his collection of quotes, including these quotes on patriotism. Thanks, Mike.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
~ Edward Abbey
Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.
~ John Adams (1735 - 1826)
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
~ James A. Baldwin
"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
~ G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
"True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else."
~ Clarence S. Darrow
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world. ~Diogenes
"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."
~ Albert Einstein
When a whole nation is roaring patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
~ Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784), quoted in Boswell's Life of Johnson
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
~ Guy de Maupassant
Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?
~ Blaise Pascal
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Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph:
~ Haile Selassie
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
~ George Bernard Shaw
"My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders."
~Mark Twain
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
~ Voltaire
I am extremely fortunate to be in a city (St. Louis) where a group of dedicated civic leaders arranged for the opening of a new public charter school for the arts opened last year. It is called Grand Center Arts Academy; it has three grade levels this year--sixth through eighth grades--and it will add one grade level each year, eventually including grades six through twelve. How unusual and wonderful that one can find such a publicly-funded arts oasis at a time when so many schools are cutting their arts classes in order to concentrate on "essentials."
In the September/October 2011 edition of Orion Magazine, Jay Griffiths is tired of defending the arts. Why defend them any longer, when you can use the topic of public funding of the arts to slash at the deep rotten core of the belief that money is the measure of all things? Here's an excerpt from what Griffiths has to say in his excellent short article, titled "The Exile of the Arts" (This article does not appear to be available online at this time).
Disregarding art's transcendent value, modern states ask the arts to justify themselves in commercial terms, money the only measure to calculate a simile, to price the melody of a violin, and to calibrate the value of transformation. A phoenix must write its own cost-benefit analysis. While art tells multiple stories, knows the plural values of beauty, dream, and meaning, money tells a monstrosity. Money should never be the judge of art, but its servant: funding it, supporting it, aiding it. Perhaps one of the reasons for the hostility against the arts today is precisely that they are implacable witnesses against this terrible lie of our times: that money is the measure of all. Art refutes this lie, disentangles "money" from "values," and argues with its deepest authority that there is another sky, intimate and boundless, open to all, where the poet can tow a star across the liquid river of night, like a child with a toy boat on a string.
This has been a long time coming in a candidate. Elizabeth Warren has a long track record for being hard-working, smart and incorruptible. Is there some way to clone her? Just listen to her eloquent rebuff to the Tea Party and her diagnosis of what ails us financially. Does anyone really disagree with any of this?
The current political climate is one fraught with conflict and controversy promulgated and continuously created by the most extreme elements of the lunatic fringes of the right and the Republican Party. The Republican Party cares “solely and exclusively about its rich contributors” in America and the Middle Class and the working poor be damned. Republicans will say anything, do anything, lie, cheat and steal about everything to protect the so-called “job creators.” I’ve accused Republicans of puerile partisan political chicanery before but, the proof is in the charge made by a senior GOP Budget Committee staffer who quit Capitol Hill because of Republican “lunacy.” This article is the first in a series of three analyzing the evidence of Mr. Mike Lofgren who spent 28 years on the GOP staff of the US House and Senate Budget Committees, and had much, including this, to say about the Republican love affair with only the corporations, millionaires and billionaires. Mr. Lofgren says:
The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public.
I wrote of the current tactics of the Republicans, especially in the US House of Representatives on the debt ceiling “crisis.” Mr. Lofgren continues:Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?
Mr. Lofgren poses the best question to for Democrats to ask of his former Republican colleagues. Where are the jobs from the “job creators” among the corporations, millionaires and billionaires, Mr. US House Speaker Boehner? Eight years of George W. Bush and Republican “leadership” of the US economy led the nation into the Great Recession and the Lost Decade. The “Lost Decade” because there were only losses of private sector jobs under Bush and his tax giveaways to corporations, millionaires and billionaires. Mr. Lofgren goes on to point out additional Republican rhetorical scams. [More . . . ]