The country I live in--America--keeps pissing me off.
However, I love it and find it to be a wonderful place too. These 2 emotional states are hard to hang onto at the same time, but it turns out that loyalism to something (like your home country) often makes you a stronger and more principled critic of that very thing. Make um say "interplay of social injustice, righteous anger and group allegiance"!
"In the wake of the Iraq invasion, many U.S. citizens who disagreed with the Bush Administration's decision detached themselves from politics. On the other hand, a surprising number of people became more patriotic in spite of their objections. Why would disappointment in one's country inspire increased loyalty? Doesn't it seem more natural to disavow the country as a protest?
Psychologists have been studying the interplay of social injustice, righteous anger and group allegiance, and it appears that loyalists are not simply apologists for anything and everything the group stands for. In fact, loyalty may be a predictable step toward taking a firm and principled stand.
(However), if confronted with continued evidence of unfairness and injustice, people will stop compensating for the group's shortcomings and leave. What is unclear is how long this will take or how unjust a group must be before it squanders its members' loyalty."
Insert "Big Brother" by Stevie Wonder, or something by Dead Prez or The Coup or Immortal Technique or CoFlow or PE. Or "Fortunate Son," that'd be a hot one for this post too.
But in the end, it's the Mighty Mos's wordplay in his description of the American zeitgeist (circa '99), coupled with some Premier production (chopped up Ghostface, chopped up Badu, chopped up Fat Joe) and that "Booka booka booka booka booka BOOKA" at the beginning, that made this one the winner.
Killin fields need blood to graze the cash cow
It's a numbers game, but shit don't add up somehow
Like I got, sixteen to thirty-two bars to rock it
but only 15% of profits ever see my pockets, like
sixty-nine billion in the last twenty years
spent on national defense but folks still livin in fear
"Mathematics"
mp3.
In a related story,
The US Navy's motto is Non sibi sed patriae:
"Not self but country."
That sailor (August Provost III) who was killed at Camp Pendleton on June 30 for the inexcusable crime of being gay? Yeah, see what happened was his alleged murderer, a fellow upstanding member of the United States Armed Forces, went on an epic fucking rampage in which he got completely 'faced on a variety of chemicals, broke into a fellow officer's house and stole a bunch of shit, set a watercraft on fire, got a DUI, and tried to convince someone else (a civilian) to kill another fellow sailor. He also allegedly shot August Provost, then set him on fire to dispose of the body. The No Fucking Way police have informed me that there is some mental illness at play with the accused sailor, but it would seem that the supposedly selective U.S. Navy would have had some indication that your man was slightly imbalanced in the head during the selection process for becoming a member of their ranks. Oh, and they're also NOT investigating this as a hate crime.
Aaaand America goes and upsets me again. The end.
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