Real patriotism is asking question

I have made a few resolutions to kick off the new year. My ultimate goal is to be a better American!

1. Attend class. Use an alarm clock to procure awake status by 6 a.m. sharp, so that I can meditate and receive my morning blessing from the universe at large.

2. Stop staying up until 4 a.m. the preceding evening to watch Eugene Weber's lectures on PBS entitled, "An Introduction to Western civilization."

3. Cease and desist engaging myself in interrogative conversations with classmates regarding academic concepts from class that prolong my appetite for dull academic programming that I find too exciting to resist.

4. Stop registering for classes that challenge me intellectually (oh, marketing here I come!) to meet classmates with which I may converse.

5. Lose IQ points; settle me down back to where I was circa 1993. That puts me back in 5th grade, which is the reading level most Americans never excel past. (Or so I hear, remembering election statistic that 52% of those re-elected Bush.) I continue to devolve.

6. Write a column that defends Joe McCarthy and blanketly refers to all liberals as Marx/Communist. Sidenote: Column reads like Cliff's Notes for Fox News Channel.

As you can see New Year's resolutions kind of work like poorly formed logic, it may lead you to a conclusion that no one else believes. Like I would be stupid for attending class or that liberals aren't patriots; by citing a string of loosely woven, over-simplified, unexamined, pseudo-historical fragments that resemble a Rush Limbaugh radio show circa 1993, and weaving them into a pissing contest that you might hear back country folk arguing, "I'm a better American than you are!"

In fact, that is what McCarthy was determined to do, conduct a pissing contest of who was the best "American" according to a flat criteria without any evidentiary support whatsoever. McCarthy used his investigative duties to condemn his own critics and propagate his own private agenda by composing lists of supposed "communist sympathizers" which destroyed many people's lives and created years of witch-hunts that dominated the private and public sectors. Ah, yes...McCarthy was a shining example of a good American himself, a notorious alcoholic who routinely swallowed bottles of vegetable oil before a night out on the town; on one such night he assaulted a journalist for being critical of his brutal, smear tactics. What a model of temperance, virtue and valor.

It's curious that a conservative columnist would defend Joe McCarthy, whose primary occupation was spreading irrational fear and ruining anyone who didn't submit to him.

Peruse Rush Limbaugh's website for propaganda titled books like, "Women Who Make the World Worse and How Their Radical Feminst Assault is Ruining Our Schools, Our familes, Our Military and Sports" or "Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America." And see that McCarthyism is alive and well within an ideology that surmounts public policy decisions to 5th grade Sunday school Bible verses that you were forced to memorize and regurgitate all the contents of one's spiritual stomach, like one of McCarthy's benders.

I'd have to say that the biggest fraud to have been perpetuated onto the American public is not that communists are lurking about, but instead upwardly mobile middle class people believe that the poor are 'out to get them' or that the only reason anyone is poor is laziness. The wealthy one percent of this country most likely don't give a rat's ass about their aspirations to work in middle management for a company whose top executive (part of the one percent) may cut his job, in hopes that his stock might go up a quarter of a point.

Where does greed end and decency begin? For many conservatives, the issue is only confined within the ink of a credit card receipt in a hand-stitched, alligator-leather wallet. For me it begins and ends on my keyboard, and I abide by no single criteria and baulk at the idea that I would be considered un-patriotic for questioning the authority of a partisan system, which has effectively lost relevance with real issues and the people whose lives hang in the balance.