Letters to the Editor
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Worse than Joementum
Seriously, it's a ridiculous term. Next, please.
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I like the concept, not necessarilly the word
There's too much blind patriotism going on. I'm not crazy about the word matriot, mostly because it's exclusionary in its context. But there needs to be a dialog on what patriotism is in our country. One of our strengths in my mind has always been our freedom to express our dissent. After 9/11, our government and the religious right tried to take that right away. If you criticized the actions of our government, you were labelled as unpatriotic. To me it is unpatriotic not to be critical of our government.
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drop the gender-talk, Ms. Sheehan
I've got no problem with the basic tenets of matriotism (don't kill people in unjust wars, etc.). But gender rhetoric is very dangerous in politics -- it leads quickly to ad hominem attacks like Arnold Schwarzenegger's "girly-men" allegations. I wouldn't want to be told that I only feel a certain way because I'm a woman or because I'm in touch with my femininity. That's just a step away from saying it's the PMS talking.
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We already have a word for this
and it's called patriotism. Why not just take the word back instead of having to overexplain a new one?
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Stop butchering the English language.
Matriotism is just patriotism as practiced by liberals. Big deal. Cindy Sheehan didn't discover anything.
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heh.
Color me unimpressed. Do we need a new word that begs to be mocked and take s too long to be explained? But maybe it's just me. Despite my sympathies for Cindy Sheehan's pain, I've never found her to be a compelling spokesperson.
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I Like it, But...
I rather like the term 'Matriot', and really think it deserves to be taken up, but as a mostly-trained linguist I know how rare it is for deliberately coined words to survive the initial backlash. My own view is that patriotism, like all forms of nationalism, is a toxic force in our society. Sport is about the only arena where it can be safely expressed without causing harm, and even then there have been people killed and wars fought over national sporting pride. I know this isn't a perspective that'll sit well in the US, where jingoism is instilled into mother's milk. I'm glad most of my education was overseas!
Perhaps if we accompanied the campaign for the use of 'matriotism' with Samuel Johnson's observation "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Or Albert Einstein's “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!” Or Oscar Wilde's "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious." Or Bertrand Russel's "Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." If you insist on an american, try Mark Twain's "The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice — and always has been." Give me matriotism!
On a parallel issue of language, I'm proposing the use of the term 'Anti-choice' to replace 'pro-life' in the abortion debate, since it more accurately reflects the position of the christianist extremists, and doesn't allow them to imply that we are somehow 'anti-life'. I've just posted a letter to that effect, with a more detailed argument, in the War Room letters page for the article "Facing the truth about Alito and Roe", http://letters.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/01/23/roe/view/?order=asc
[I hope that links through to it!]
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Please stop, Cindy
Your loss was incalculable. But please stop ... you are becoming a bad stereotype with legs.
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She wasn't advocating for everyday usage
If you actually read the piece, it seems fairly clear that she was just meditating on the concept of patriotism and attempting to deconstruct it rather than ... carpet bomb it. So I agree (and I don't think Sheehan would disagree) that "matriot" isn't viable household terminology - just an interesting idea to contemplate for a few minutes.
And, despite the "Dissent Is Patriotic" button I sometimes wear, I don't think it's possible to truly reclaim the word 'patriotism' to suggest that we shouldn't kill foreigners. That's almost as ridiculous as trying to reclaim Jesus to suggest that women are just as human as men (ahem, Naomi?). The institutions that mass-package Jesus and patriotism always attempt to preserve themselves in favor any abstract ethical Good. (cf. Party, Democratic)
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I like it.
I think it reflects a different kind of thinking, one that would perhaps make us think twice before going to a foreign country to kill its inhabitants.
Sheehan does not expect the word to come into common usage. In order to know that, one would have to actually read the article.
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*shrug*
I've been using the word "matriot" for twenty years. It's not a new term; it's just not been an aboveground one. But the sense in which I use it (and how I've heard it used in the past) is someone who owes her/his allegiance to the land, the country in the physical sense, not the political one. In that sense, it certainly isn't "patriot" in drag, which would indeed be gutless and ridiculous. Instead, it's a new idea - that of people thinking of the world as a whole, rather than putting their allegiance behind whatever is between this imaginary line drawn in the sand and that one.
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Great word. Limited context.
As someone who cares deeply about the health and welfare of the entire word, I use the term "matriot" in a slightly different context. Since patriotism describes a love of one's country (within borders), matriotism should be used to describe a love of one's world... our mother Earth. While this may sound ridiculous to much of the jaded American public, I feel it is an important term to embrace in the coming decades as we deal with issues of global warming and environmental decay, religious extremism in all of its forms, and the inevitable conflict that declining oil production will foist upon us ALL. It's important to realize that we are all living on the same world. Borders are becoming more and more meaningless, and as a result, so is the term "patriot". America is now stocked by China, fueled by the middle East, serviced by India, and experienced through the windows of air-conditioned Japanese SUV's. What is left of our country to be proud of? I am a strong matriot, because I realize the extent to which human beings- PARTICULARLY Americans and our wasteful consumerist lifestyles- lean on the shoulders of others for support.