I’ve been thinking about patriotism in the US for a long time, long enough to have written this for the College Dems’ newspaper back at Georgetown. There’s something about how everybody wants to be a patriot without ever considering what the term might really mean; something about the way it is, for us, tied up with the State and the Military (it was no accident that we broke out Patriot missiles and the Patriot Act in the wake of 9/11); and something about how the Right in the US today has latched rabidly onto the term that all make me pretty uncomfortable.
These are, undoubtedly, self-described American patriots. And especially when I wrote this episode, over the weekend of the Charlottesville White Right march and murder, it seemed as though my discomfort was getting more and more relevant.
All of these guys would call themselves patriots. And the word ‘patriot’ itself seems to give them an excuse to ignore any self-analysis, like the way the 82nd Airborne were a not insignificant part of the Allied war effort against the Axis powers. It’s telling that the minutemen are the only part of the Revolution they remember and the only iconography they include in their self-image when in fact the real firepower of the Founding Fathers, the stuff that made our little uprising stick where a thousand others didn’t, happened not in the field but in scenes like this:
And finally, for reasons that probably won’t become clear until the end of the episode, here’s this the Ballet Amalia Hernandez doing what’s popularly known as the Mexican Hat Dance, to the “Jarabe Tapatío:”
I’ve got that video start to set when the Jarabe does, but if you want to lay eyes on some of the dances you might see to “Guadalajara” or to the “Son de la Negra,” which ends the episode, go ahead and rewind it and you will. Here are the three kids who played “Maria Chuchena,” the huapango music from where I used to live in the Sierra Gorda, in Querétaro.
I couldn’t tell you who Camila Cabello is from Eve, but apparently she’s popular in Mexico along with the US. I’ve got her in here because I think it’s a pretty apt example of how “Mexico Lindo y Querido” is always welcome, even at some teeny-bop pop concert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKNBU_BMCkg
But here’s Vicente Fernandez, Chente, doing it right: