Not Just Words

It’s the day after the second “No King” protest. I’m at a dog show in Salem, Virginia. We stood for the anthem. I stared at the flag, sang the words with feeling and belief—the same words friends would drunkly sing at parties in our 20s.

“Land of the Free, Home of the Brave” aren’t just words. It isn’t a slogan or a meme. When some asshole like JD Vance says America isn’t a set of ideas but a people, all I can say is bullshit. Outside the dog show is a statue of Revolutionary War General Andrew Lewis. He’s about to fire a canon. He was an Irishman fighting for the idea of Freedom not some collective culture of… what??? English colonists? Virginians?

No, he literally was being brave, risking his life, all to stick hid middle finger in the King’s face. That’s what America is—a giant middle finger to anyone who would make humans subjects. All the Americans pouring into the streets, waving the Stars & Stripes, holding signs with slogans, dancing in frog costumes, were carrying on the American tradition of putting a big middle finger in the face of power and saying “fuck you, won’t do what you tell me.”