Patriotism, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, is the conviction that one’s country is superior to all others because one was born in it.
Ambrose Bierce, in his “Devil’s Dictionary,” defined patriotism as “combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name. In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit it is the first.”
Both those men wrote well over a century ago, so the idea that MAGAts are the ones who gave flag-waving a bad name is greatly overstating the case. It has always been the province of hucksters and mountebanks, never more so than in 1976, the year of the bicentennial.
Rock music was still part of the counterculture at the time, so this swipe at American cultural hegemony by the Tubes was a common critique. Not to be confused with the similarly named Lee Greenwood song, the Bay Area art-rockers included it on their second album, “Young and Rich,” released in 1976. “Proud to Be an American” served as the B-side to the LP’s lead single, “Don’t Touch Me There.”
