Are you American enough? The website of character actor R. Lee Ermey (perhaps best known as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket). The flash intro alone is worth the price of admission.
posted by John of Michigan on Oct 1, 2006 - 38 comments

This is precisely the sort of inane mumbojumbo that will -- perhaps literally -- get us all killed. ...The importance of words is a conceit of wordsmiths, certainly. But they are important -- especially when they bleed through into thought and action, which happens more often than you'd think.,

TPM is becoming almost too widely-read to be postworthy, but Josh really puts things into perspective with this post. For an example of what all this jingoistic gibberish can result in, see the post below it.
posted by jpoulos on Apr 15, 2004 - 63 comments

"The people of Dogville are proud, hypocritical and never more dangerous than when they are convinced of the righteousness of their actions" (NYT link) "The movie is, of course, an attack on America—its innocence, its conformity, its savagery—though von Trier is interested not in the life of this country (he’s never been here) but in the ways he can exploit European disdain for it." (The New Yorker). Lars Von Trier's new movie, Dogville, is under attack from critics who consider it anti-American. Von Trier, of course, has never been to the US but he counters that he knows more about U.S. culture through modern media than, say, the makers of "Casablanca' knew about Morocco. Kafka hadn't been to Amerika either. Should non US-ian artists leave America alone if they've never been there? Von Trier says that "in my own country, I'm considered anti-Danish - again, that's more about politics than issues of nationality." (more inside)
posted by matteo on Mar 22, 2004 - 42 comments

Spineless Pinkos! - The VA Pledge of Allegiance bill (discussed at MeFi two weeks ago here) is withdrawn, after one last old-school McCarthyesque comment by its sponsor.
posted by kevincmurphy on Feb 14, 2001 - 17 comments