And that's why you don't teach lessons.

Morrissey Blvd. sounds like a miserable place to live.

ha! not sure what makes me smile harder, colin whoever reacting to your article on stage (insecure is yous?) or the fact that this quincy vigilante turned out to be rather witty.

quincy vs. fat overly literate dude wot sings about ships:

winner = quincy!

a surprising turn of events.

Always bet on Quincy. Unless it's a hygiene or sobriety contest.

Wow. Jonny Blister really pegged Kingston, huh? Let's hope he starts a blog, soon.

killed it

I believe in civic pride. God put me here to root for the Patriots.

Ironically, though, I have very little pride in my car, a '95 Civic.

Isn't caring about anything on the list? Especially, where you happened to be born or live or whatever?

Also, can we hear more about Colin Decemberists reacting on-stage to your article?

Yeah, caring about things is OTL, but so is not caring about anything, so I dunno. Math is hard.

I wasn't there, bunch of my friends tweeted me* to tell me he referenced the Phoenix and said sorry for ruining indie rock. Not sure how it was said, I'm assuming tongue in cheek.

"The fundamental spiritual advantage of patriotism and such sentiments is this: that by means of it all things are loved adequately, because all things are loved individually. Cosmopolitanism gives us one country, and it is good; nationalism gives us a hundred countries, and every one of them is the best. Cosmopolitanism offers a positive, patriotism a chorus of superlatives. Patriotism begins the praise of the world at the nearest thing, instead of beginning it at the most distant, and thus it insures what is, perhaps, the most essential of all earthly considerations, that nothing upon earth shall go without its due appreciation. Wherever there is a strangely-shaped mountain upon some lonely island, wherever there is a nameless kind of fruit growing in some obscure forest, patriotism insures that this shall not go into darkness without being remembered in a song...

To the cosmopolitan, therefore, who professes to love humanity and hate local preference, we shall reply: “How can you love humanity and hate anything so human?” If he replies that in his eyes local preference is a positive sin, is only human in the sense that wife-beating is human, we shall reply that in that case he has a code of morality so different from ours that the very use of the word “sin” is almost useless between us. If he says that the thing is not positive sin, but is foolish and narrow, we shall reply that this is a matter of impression, and that to us it is his atmosphere which is narrow to the point of suffocation. And we shall pray for him, hoping that some day he will break out of the little stifling cell of the cosmopolitan world, and find himself in the open fields and infinite sky of England. Lastly, if he says, as he certainly will, that it is unreasonable to draw the limit at one place rather than another, and that he does not know what is a nation and what is not, we shall say: “By this sign you are conquered; your weakness lies precisely in the fact that you do not know a nation when you see it. There are many kinds of love affairs, there are many kinds of song, but all ordinary people know a love affair or a song when they see it. They know that a concubinage is not necessarily a love affair, that a work in rhyme is not necessarily a song. If you do not understand vague words, go and sit among the pedants, and let the work of the world be done by people who do.” It is better occasionally to call some mountains hills, and some hills mountains, than to be in that mental state in which one thinks, because there is no fixed height for a mountain, that there are no mountains in the world."

That's obviously very beautifully said, and has a lot of good points -- who is it Chesterton? -- but the idea that you can only appreciate the qualities of a specific place by elevating them to a superlative is silly. Did he write that on the internet? BEST MOUNTAIN EVAR.

It's Chesty, yeah.

His point is not that every place *must* be elevated to a superlative to be appreciated. It's that within the natural order each place is loved best by someone, and that a world where every place is considered superlative by someone will (obviously and incontestably) be a better place than a world where no place is considered superlative by anyone. And in the make-believe world you want to replace the real one with, nobody loves anywhere, or anyone. The fact is that one’s place of birth is no more arbitrary than one’s family, and yet we don't view either relationship *only* on a rational basis, for the obvious reason that we are not robots, or lunatics. It doesn't really matter whether we think a man should feel a special attachment to his people or place - what matters is that all men *do* feel that attachment, including yourself. It is a basic and fundamental human quality, and as such your outlook seems to be essentially misanthropic. Like Jerry Falwell condemning homosexuality, you are objecting to human nature itself as evolution has shaped it. Your position is, essentially, that people need to stop being humans, and to stop caring about things humans care about by definition.

Think about it this way: you believe people should NOT feel a special affection for their own people, or their own place. Let’s follow that logic to its dystopian end: Lukeworld is a place where no one has special affection for his home, and no one has a special love for his people. Yet these poor, sad beings who cannot even care for their own places or peoples (and remember that these things are *real* and concrete to a man, and all men are hardwired to care about them), these people are to somehow care instead about comparatively meaningless abstractions like "humanity" or "the environment"? Don’t you see how flawed that thinking is? How can anyone care about the world, or humanity, if no one cares for their own corner of the world, or for their own quarter of humanity?

BTW, the Chestnut excerpt wasn't something I'd read before, or a case of me trying to dig up a refutation or anything. By coincidence I stumbled across one of the greatest minds of the modern age addressing the subject of one of your list posts just after I read the list post.

Which reminds me (and I may have mentioned this before) that Chesterton elucidated for me what I believe is the primary problem with modern man, with his thinking, and it's this: modern man has forgotten how essential the imagination is to understanding the world, and has let it atrophy. Many of the most important things in life cannot be fully appreciated, or even understood, unless they are understood in a poetic sense imo. The problem here, I think, is that you are using reason where you should be using imagination.

Oh - here's the whole GKC essay:

http://songlight-for-dawn.blogspot.com/2009/06/gk-chesterton-patriotic-idea.html

I don't necessarily love my family more than I love my close friends, in fact there are many members of my family who I don't particularly care about.

You're conflating caring about where you're from with thinking it's the best. I don't want Massachusetts to be neglected and fall to ruin. That's different than thinking it's the best place int he world just because I live here.

Sure, but then you're conflating civic pride and patriotism with thinking something is the best, instead of the best loved. Or, to clarify (because I'm using "best" differently than Chesterton) one believes his country, or family, or friends are "the best" because they are his, not because they are "the best" at things. Someone who loves America because it is the biggest, strongest and richest is not a patriot, and does not actually love America, because if America was not the biggest, strongest and richest (see: two years from now) then what?

We are still left with the problem of human nature. It doesn't accord with your philosophy, so instead of changing the philosophy you wish to change humanity. Chesterton said something similar of George Bernard Shaw:

"After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby."

Incidentally, his "Heretics" and his "Orthodoxy" are cheap on paperback, and about a half-inch thick (the Shaw quote is from Heretics). You will disagree with everything in both (and will enjoy them immensely, I guarantee), but you should read them as well, because they are absolute works of genius, because you will never find the conservative or religious inclination better expressed (or made more understandable), and because you cannot find, today, any criticism of the progressive philosophy, or any legitimate alternative to it, in contemporary political discourse.

I'll lend you my copies, after my Ma is done with them, if you want.

Sure, please do lend them. Believe it or not I like to have my ideals challenged, but, as you say, no one is trying that hard. Except you I guess.

I don't have a problem with loving my mom the mostest because she is my mom. She is not the best mom in the world, I think I can safely say.

Boston and Mass and the USA are my mother and grandmother and so on. I love them because they suckled me at their teet. They do not have the best tits in the world.

The patriotism that bothers me is the kind that thinks your given country can do no wrong, no matter what. You may have noticed there is an awful lot of that gong on on the right now.

Correction, I'm trying too hard.